A WordPress experience

My WordPress experience article first appeared on Linkedin. It was intended to tell the story of a website building experience to my professional colleagues and members at large. I have now a lot more information and a lot more experience with the subject. The following post is paraphrased from my original article. To build a website and manage it is an amazingly rewarding experience. I wanted to share my experience with those of you who may have a need to create a website and who perhaps want to personally manage one to maintain good control.

My first website experiences

For a while, I had my portfolio on a website built on and hosted by no less than three (3) of the “Big Boys” website platforms. At the time, my experience was limited. That of a beginner making his first steps into building a website. The platforms I worked with were basically OK for my needs at the time. But as I discovered, later on, each platform had serious limitations associated with things I wanted to design and things that I didn’t want to do. Unfortunately, it is impossible to foresee these limitations as you begin building your website.

When my needs were no longer met, I wanted to move my website elsewhere. But, I discovered that I had to rebuild my website from scratch. This is because the “Big Boys'” platforms are pretty much proprietary. The content of your website is nontransferable to another platform. And that may be just fine for many.

WordPress

For those who want to have full control and practically unlimited options and who want to host their own website and fully manage all the aspects, a different CMS is needed. As I researched alternative options I found the “magic” solution that now works for me.

I must admit that I hesitated quite a bit. The lack of coding knowledge, the fear of the unknown results and the time investment to learn a new program held me back. But, I wanted more control and I needed to self-manage my websites, so I decided to plunge in.

WordPress is a wonderful open source Content Management System (CMS). At the time of this writing, it powers about 27% of all the websites in the world (I do not own any shares of WordPress.com, I am just a user). There is a steep learning curve. But once you gain the knowledge and master it, WordPress can offer the greatest flexibility and limitless options. It is the ultimate platform created for people running a blog. To handle this software you need constant interaction with several players and with multiple “plugins” until you fine tune it. It is actually addictive and forcing you to learn more and to delve deeper!

But, with everything good in our world, there is also bad. The system can be vulnerable. It is subject to many attacks by hackers. Bad bots visit often. A whole industry of crawlers exist. Have faith in Google. Be cautious but do not fear!

Conclusion

To summarize my experience so far, after having invested resources and a lot of time to learn something new, it is definitely worth it. Working with WordPress isn’t for everyone. However, if I should find out I don’t like my hosting company anymore for whatever reason, my websites powered by WordPress are transferable. And finally, in conclusion, it is a great thing to be the master of your own destiny.

For those interested in further exploring, an excellent post making the case for building a website using WordPress can be found HERE