WordPress

I really wanted to call this post “WordPress: the One Your Mother Warned You About”, but after this yesterday’s discussion regarding the need for brevity in titles, I removed the clarification.  However, it is what this blog post is all about.

Until this past weekend, my current blog lived at wordpress.com.  I created a few blogs on that platform in the last couple of years; it’s easy to set up, if you write a post about being “this close” to  Martha Stewart you might be featured on Freshly Pressed, and let’s face it, blogging should be about content not design so modifying one of the standard themes offered wasn’t a deal breaker.

As I began not only to blog regularly last fall but also consume a steady writing diet of numerous other blogs, I noticed there were other platforms available.  I explored and came to the conclusion that Tumblr is a teen crush more fun and better looking from afar, Blogger is the Keanu Reeves-stoner boyfriend who’s fun for the summer but blink and he’s just another suit and tie desperately still holding that surfboard, and Blogspot’s like Ryan Reynolds, everyone says he’s cute and smart but you can’t remember what he looks like and sometimes confuse him with Ryan Phillippe.

Attractive in his uniform of leather jacket, jeans, and white t-shirt, you can give WordPress.com a bit of style with say a red cloth windbreaker wrapped around your white t-shirt blog posts, a smoldering cigarette lending spice to his sidebar, or a pair of horned rim glasses on his head(er).  However, you won’t be able to add that James Franco plugin to update his style, or install that brooding Sean Penn photo widget that you read about on Mashable.

Much as you try to make him your own, one day you’ll get in your roadster, go racing off down designer lane, and crash headon into WordPress.com’s limitations.

So what’s a girl to do? Listen to her mother and find herself a real man … or hosting company that supports WordPress as it were.

I’ve had my own website since 2003 here at lauragesin.net and started voxpopnj.com about 18 months ago, but the majority of my effort over the last year definitely went to the blog.  The websites languished like Sybil’s lesser personalities until earlier this month when I gave in, joined Elegant Themes, installed WordPress on my Fatcow account, and migrated the entire shebang.

What a PITA that was – change your theme, reformat almost 100 blog posts.  My advice? Make sure you really love that new theme and don’t kill yourself making one from scratch.  As my Web Design class from Fall 2010 can tell you, so not worth the effort.  By the time you finish it, you’ll not only be sick of the design but hate WordPress, CSS, and Javascript with a passion, and who wants that?

If you’ve been paying attention, I said at the beginning of this post that blogging is about content not style.  Write well, take control of your blog’s functionality, and customize one of the thousands of inexpensive themes out there… in other words, find a WordPress theme that’s say, Marky Mark.  He may be young, silly, and questionably talented, but you see he has promise (remember those Calvin ads).  You swap out the artwork, change up the color scheme, use Elegant Theme’s handy little ePanel and page templates to configure the site, do some quick SEO, then write some wickedly witty and insightful prose, and all of a sudden, you have an Oscar nominee.

Now that I think about it, maybe the title of this post should be “WordPress: Say Hi to Your Mother For Me“.