I began my first failure of learning WordPress by lending technical assistance to a lady in my area that created websites for local businesses. She had created some beautiful site, but most of her knowledge was on the front-end. I figured it was worth a go and who couldn’t use some extra money in their pockets, right?
My first (and only) assignment was to figure out why a slider plugin wasn’t showing all the slides. Seems simple enough and, heck, I know how to google things. But with my lack of knowledge of WordPress and PHP (remember I’m a .NET guy), I didn’t get very far. I took a stab at it and submitted my best solution to her… I didn’t hear back… Hopefully, it worked, but my best guess is that it didn’t.
My next failure was a project for my local church. I’m a parishioner and I have made websites before, so I was a natural candidate. Well, there were a couple of caveats. It had to be a served from Apache. Okay… maybe I could create a .NET site on Apache? Maybe I could, but something about that just makes my skin crawl. So, I immediately thought of WordPress!
I watched some YouTube videos, read numerous articles, and followed several tutorials. I found Local by Flywheel, which is a God-send 😊 (church-pun) and started making a site. But that darn lack-of-knowledge issue made it really hard for me to wrap my head around how things work in WordPress. Also, I’m a (recovering) perfectionist and kept getting bogged down by how things should appear and just couldn’t get it right.
So, I shelved the church project and decided to get serious. I shelled out some dough for the web book Digging into WordPress. It’s a great book and made me excited to learn. However, this led to my third failure. I started going through the book and read it as a tutorial. That might work for some people, but it didn’t work for me. The book is over 300 pages and that is an extremely long tutorial to try and trudge through.
Another problem I had was trying to learn WP, while trying to turn into a CMS (Content Management System). My experience with building websites where other people are in charge of the content was with Umbraco. I love Umbraco. It is very intuitive (for me) to be able to define all of the editable areas of a webpage and then build the page based on the provided content. I tried using Custom Post Types and some plugins, but things were still not clicking for me.
Several months later…
My company acquired another company and their website was built with WordPress. Being the “web guy”, I was pulled into meetings where we needed to make changes to the existing site and I found that I was more knowledgeable and helpful than I thought I would be. Working in WP wasn’t so bad anymore…
So I decided to take a new approach, I read the Digging into WordPress book in its entirety (including the bonus book that you get with it) and made notes and highlighted important sections. All without touching a WP site! This was a great refresher and gave me the confidence to start again.
That’s where I am now. I have confidence that there will not be a fourth failure…