Pardon the mess as I move to WordPress and Theme Hybrid / Skeleton

Over the next few days, I’ll have the new blog coming together, built on Theme Hybrid, a WordPress theme framework. I’ll be using the “Skeleton” child theme which is really just the raw output of WordPress with all the HTML tags in place, together with a complete bucket load of empty CSS styles ready for me to fill in. This will be an experiment! I’m used to coding from scratch, but the classes and reasonably semantic names of the HTML tags of Theme Hybrid should make this a relatively easy endeavor. I couldn’t bare to look at the temporary theme with no header up there on top of the new blog, so I tossed my new header (which is wraping because it was too short). So, yeah, the site looks befuddled as of 9/03/2009. Don’t let that fool you!

WordPress vs ExpressionEngine

Going to WordPress from (rather, in addition to) Expression Engine feels a bit like giving up my chisel, hammer and leather apron for a lathe, band saw, and lab coat. However there is so much packed into WordPress, and Theme Hybrid in general, I’m looking at it quite differently. Different solutions for different problems indeed, but in wanting ever to be the craftsman, it feels strange and liberating to hand over the custom functionality I’m used to creating in ExpressionEngine to the WordPress backend. It is very, very powerful stuff! As a freelance graphic designer, time is limited, and time is money. When it comes to publishing on the web, the key is speed and ease, since spending time on a fully-customized blog or web tool is simply counter productive, when at the end of the day, it would take months of work to equal what WordPress with Theme Hybrid (or any of the other popular frameworks) provide practically right out of the box.