Lessons from WordPress Land

I made it. No idea how I made it. But I did. My old, outdated site that I built in FrontPage (blasphemy!) back when I was a wee sprite getting my feet wet in the online business world is history. Sniff. It was a charming little website, for a newbie. Maintaining it was also akin to overhauling the engine of an old farm truck. Clunky, time consuming and downright messy.

So here I am. My family missed me while I was putting together my new WordPress site. I missed me too. The normally sane me. WordPress (.com) is not for Dummies. You need only peruse the WP Support Forum to realize this.

Yet if you’re brave enough, you can make the leap from a static HTML website to a dynamic, WordPress Content Management System (CMS) in all its widgetized, plugginable glory. You’ll need lots of coffee in the mornings (from staying up ’til dawn trolling through help forums). You’ll need an alcoholic beverage (or 10) now and then as well (so you don’t purposely delete your entire site and force yourself out of business).

I’ll state the (hopefully) obvious here and say that I know my way around the web, a computer, HTML and then some. Technology doesn’t scare me. I’ve been known to press Big Red Buttons many times in my business career. I’m not afraid to blow things up. Though the fallout tends to make those who know me run away, fast. WordPress is truly divine for the Internet marketer. With it, non-developers can create professional websites that not only look great but work great, for both the creator and the end user. This doesn’t happen often on the web.

A WordPress CMS fully and properly accommodates the fundamentals: content, search, usability and aesthetics (branding). However, if you tend to be lofty in your web development aspirations, be prepared for some rugged terrain. Things are never exactly as they seem in WordPress Land.

So, staying true to my "learning is good, learning is for life" philosophy, over the next week or two I’m going to post the lessons I’ve learned during my foray into the land where code meets content meets what should be online marketing nirvana.

But I’ll let you decide if that’s true or not.