Here are some WordPress tips learned so far:
- Keep your blog design simple. Think whitespace.
- Use a high-quality template. Even better, use a template framework with a budding and buzzing support community. Don’t bother with one-off templates from one-shot Joe designer
- Discover, through astute observation and archive reading, what your favorite WordPress blogs are doing and emulate it. Chances are they have let the cat out the bag for you. There is no “secret” to blogging other than, apparently, reading a lot and doing what those with more experience tell you to do.
- Work hard at the basics and you will have more time later for what you really should be doing, like in my case, freelance graphic design.
- Don’t fiddle with things that take away from what is most important: content.
Hi, Douglas. I can guarantee that you won’t look back from this decision. And your days spent hand coding in HTML and CSS will come to great use when you start messing around with your WordPress theme or design websites for others using WordPress.
Hi Rob: I’m really astonished what I can accomplish with WordPress, compared to other CMS’s I’ve used over the years. Other systems have their strengths and weaknesses for sure, but WordPress for small websites (with or without a blog) and most certainly for blogs, is unequaled. I’m using the Skeleton child theme of the Theme Hybrid framework, which has all of the classes, albeit empty, ready to fill in. It’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time with web development!
Good point on wasting time in building a site by hand. No matter if you’re still an amateur or already a pro in the field of graphic design, WordPress is the way to go. Better use up all that time in making new posts or giving your site life through themes and colors because you can still use up all your knowledge in tinkering your WordPress site’s HTML interface. Keep it up Douglas.
Tony: I quickly scanned your comment and initially thought you were saying (before I fully read it) that it is better to “use up all that time giving yourself a life”. I thought “how true”! How much of my life have I spent twiddling and twaddling with inane bits of HTML and CSS that could have been spent elsewhere. Then as I proceeded to read the comment I realized that you weren’t saying that. However, my mistaken point is actually a really good point, built on top of your point. The more time we spend on what matters on a website (content) the more time we have for what matters (life)!