Reflections on Wordpress

This is my first time using WordPress, so before I got started I read several of the tutorials provided by Dr. Oguz. To be honest, I felt a little more confused after reading the tutorials, so I decided to just register and explore the dashboard a little.

After class on Monday, I had a better understanding of what was expected out of this assignment and I felt more comfortable with just diving into WordPress to see what all it could do. When I logged in, I noticed that Micah had already made some changes to our page. I liked the theme that he chose, so I decided to leave it how it was. I cleaned up the “About” page by removing the default text and adding a brief description.

Next, I created the basic outline to my personal profile page. I ended up adding an image to my profile page, but for some reason I couldn’t get WordPress to center the image. I spent at least thirty minutes searching for a fix, and was able to find a fix here. Apparently I just needed to add some html code around the image code.

I browsed for some plug-ins, but was unable to add them to our page, so I decided to work with what we already had. I was able to create a contact page using the “Fast and Secure Contact Form” plug-in. However, it did take me a while to figure out that I just needed to add [si-contact-form form='1'] in the text box to have the contact form show up.

I also played around with the widgets. I added a blogroll with some blog links that Dr. Oguz provided in Module 1 along with our group’s individual blogs. I also added a tag cloud along with tags for our blog posts. I also added the Meta and Pages widgets.

I also played with the themes. I found them very easy to use and was impressed with how easy it was to change the formatting across our different pages. I did notice that when I switched themes, some of the widgets would disappear.

Although I found WordPress a little confusing at first, I ended up feeling fairly comfortable using it. I think that if I had a better understanding of HTML/CSS, I would have been able to personalize our site a little more. I wish that we had more time to use WordPress because it seems like there is a lot more to learn. I can definitely see the value in Content Management Systems, especially free ones like WordPress.

If interested, please check out our WordPress blog here.