Debut

After over four years of running a Blogger blog, I decided finally to move on. This WordPress blog you see now is the work-in-progress result.



I made this decision for a couple of reasons, including but not limited to: a dissatisfaction with the functionality of Blogger; a desire to, as much as possible, ensure that I would own whatever content I would produce from here on; a motivation to learn WordPress and then be able to add that to my résumé.

I had worked with WordPress before, but never for my own stuff. I had helped out with a few acquaintances' company websites, just inputting and editing text through the WordPress interface. I knew nothing whatsoever of how to code. Even so, I looked at those WordPress-based websites and couldn't help thinking that some of them were really quite crude and shabby-looking, not to mention functionally broken in many places. These were small startups or nonprofit organizations, of course, with little to no money to spend on building professional-quality websites. One would imagine the fact that they were coming to me for help of any kind said enough about their budgets. When I inquired in one case, however, I was informed that that website was designed by an outside freelancer, who would have to be paid again any time they wanted even just to add a new menu to the site. This seemed ridiculous to me because, as it was, many of the pull-downs on the site didn't even display properly. I figured, if a guy could get by as a professional based on work of this quality, then how hard could it be?

Well, after a week spent studying tutorials and trying to build my own blog, I've come to realize that it's not that easy. I tried to create my own theme to my personal specifications, but, as I've learned, that's really not something for a beginner to be pulling off in only a week. Not even close. Don't get me wrong—I still think that freelancer-designed website was of a low standard. Rather than coming to appreciate his skills, I've come to appreciate the guts (or peace with one's own limitations) that it must have taken him to publish something so substandard, which he could not possibly have been proud of. In my case, I've settled for now on using the "Magazine Basic" theme by Themes by bavotasan.com. I'm not especially fond of it, and I consider this only temporary, pending the completion of my own theme (or at least child theme). In other words, this is most likely how it will be for a good long while (unless I hate it so much that I switch to a different theme just for the change). For now, I'd rather concentrate on the content, and we'll see how it goes.