In high school, we were required to make a WordPress site that acted as our online journalism portfolio. There were no requirements regarding the look of the page, so it was a simple click and post experience as most of us used preexisting themes. This time around, I dug much deeper into the Dashboard of my WordPress website and found a lot of good, and a lot of bad.
Installing a new theme was fairly straightforward which was beneficial because the formatting of the original theme I chose eventually became too complicated and I had to backtrack and pick a new one. Once I got past the initial installation, however, things started to complicate. I knew what I wanted my page to look like, but I soon found myself battling the pre-programmed set-up of WordPress; I either couldn’t find the right widget to alter, or the theme was overriding the code I was putting in (either that or I’m still learning how to use code successfully).
My biggest problem came at the end of the night, and admittedly it was most definitely my fault, but I didn’t think that at the time, obviously. I had uploaded a few pictures to my website early on, but they turned out very grainy. I looked around for help online and people suggested different methods and codes to input that didn’t work. One person, however, suggested a plugin that had great reviews. So, naturally, I downloaded the plugin and next thing I know my whole website was broken. Here I was, sitting in bed while my roommates were sleeping, thinking that hours of work had just disappeared. Fortunately, I found a post online that walked me through finding the ftp on Reclaim Hosting. I’m still not quite sure what I did or, or what ftp really is, but I was able to delete the plugin from the back-end and my website came back! At the end of the day, I decided to temporarily accept my grainy photos.
That being said, in the future I’d like to use this website to post pictures and videos. I’m a CAMS major and am just starting to get really involved in the production side of the field, so it would be nice if I had a place where I could share some of my work. I think a benefit of “rolling my own” website is that, theoretically, I can use the back-end of the platform to structure it just the way I want, however, I am not technically skilled enough (yet) for this to happen. At the moment, it would probably be simpler for me to use a hosted platform, but I do think that building your own website is something to be proud of, so I’m looking to continue learning about WordPress – this time (hopefully) before downloading unknown things!
One reply on “WordPress Stress”
Thanks for the warning about some plugins being potentially really harmful! I’m new to WordPress and I had figured that most were in some way vetted, but its good to know that I should look into them and see exactly what they do before installing them.