I had previously posted about the process I was using to redo my Website.
Upon further investigation, a little nudge from friends, and some tech advice, I decided to give WordPress a shot. I have to say I’m liking it so far.
At the date of writing this, I’m using a free template from Tiny Forge. So far it fits my needs. We’ll see what happens as my business develops.
What I’m finding useful right now:
- I have it set up through my hosting account so I don’t have to worry about storage.
- Fairly easy, straight forward CMS (content management system) from the start.
- I can create galleries with proportional and large-ish thumbnails instead of the goofy little cropped ones I used to have.
- There are easy to create contact forms.
- I can move pages around on the fly and change colors all at once.
- I can do some monkeying around with the code in the edit panel (helpful hint, Firebug used through Firefox is a great tool to figure out what code does what).
- Each image gets its own unique page which is great for Art Directors or other visitors that want to bookmark or share a specific picture.
- The template is set designed to work well and look great on multiple browsers and mobile devices. This is something I would have had to test myself, and recruit friends to test which would have taken a LOT of time. Time that I’d prefer to use making pictures.
What I’m finding a little tricky:
- I have minimal control over what appear where in the galleries. I think that’s probably due to me needing to learn a bit more about this set-up (and maybe a bit more CSS or something).
- There’s a huge amount of padding below images in blog posts (probably room for descriptions) so I need to either figure out what I’m going to use that space for or figure out how to delete it.
- I would like more flexibility with the layout but the way it is now is pleasing and consistent across ALL pages. That would be tricky to keep track of with a WYSIWYG builder because I would have had to keep track of a specific file for each image. This way each page is created on the fly, instead of multiple files to organize.For even more on Websites using WordPress, Aaron B. Miller has an informative post you might find useful.