I’ve been in IT for a long time. I’ve used and managed all kinds of software and content managers (Drupal, PostNuke, Joomla, DotCMS, etc). What I’ve learned is that to figure out what you want in a website, you just need to spend the TIME to keep experimenting and making changes until something begins to capture your eye. I can’t emphasis experimentation enough. Just try different things and don’t be afraid of messing up.

With a mature product like WordPress, you don’t need to hire a professional to to do exactly what I’m doing today. It just takes a little bit of your time. Then if you decide to turn it over to a “web designer”, you understand the capabilities and limitations they may be telling you they are encountering.

This experimentation is about understanding some basic fundamentals to one of the key building blocks of my business – my website.

Today, I’ve been adding different blocks, looking at different themes until I found something that appeals to me. I wanted a design that looked “modern”, handled images well, and allowed me to put emphasis on the key “posts”.

Today is the first time this new journey has started to “feel” and “look” good.

Today’s Recap

• Themes – Over the previous few days, I’ve been building posts and pages – i.e. content. Today, the goal was to get that content to look good, and placed well. I tried out eight different themes before settling on a no-charge option. You can change themes as often as you’d like and it has a minimal impact on your “posts”.
• Posts – I also spent time figuring out the different image settings in the “image” block. The main keys to posts are add “categories” and “tags”. When you start designing pages these are very helpful in grouping your content in relevant manner.
• Featured Image – Always add a “featured image” to your “post” to get the most impact from theme changes. Some themes don’t use these images well, for some they are a key to the “theme”
• Blocks – I used a wide assortment of blocks to understand how they work. For instance, this is a test of the “List” block.