My first ever WordPress post–should I consider this a major milestone in my life, a rite of passage? I’ve known about WordPress for a long time, but never seriously worked with it until now. As a web developer, I have created and maintained websites from scratch using html, css, and JavaScript, but that was back in the day when websites were pretty straightforward. Most interactions with the internet were through desktop or laptop computers, with lots of available screen space.
The Friends of Foothills Park
Back around 2004, I developed a site for The Friends of Foothills Park, coding it from scratch. I also took photographs of the park as directed, and used them on the website. They were happy with the results, and the site was up for many years. A few years ago, they decided it was no longer needed, so asked me to take it down.
Just recently, the Friends called me back and asked to again get a website up for them. I could resurrect the old site, but it was designed at a time which, in internet time, might as well be ancient history. Depending on your point of view, you could call it either charmingly simple, or hopelessly outdated.
Responsive Design
When smaller screens arrived, in tablets and smartphones, the difficulties of viewing traditional websites designed for normal-sized screens quickly became apparent. Small text which could be read on a desktop monitor became hard to read on a small screen. While text could be enlarged by zooming in, navigation on a zoomed in screen was awkward.
Websites gradually adapted to smaller screens. Along came the concept of responsive design, where websites dynamically changed–images contracted and expanded, text was displayed in either multiple columns or a single column, and layouts rearranged–all as appropriate to the screen space provided by the viewing device, whether desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
This was a welcome change, but planning responsive designs, writing the code to implement them, along with the usual testing and debugging, took much more effort than before. The challenge is to create a single website which effectively morphs into multiple, different appearing websites depending on the screen size of the viewing device–requiring new and often complicated code, with many things that can and do go wrong.
WordPress to the Rescue
It’s been years since responsive designs appeared, and during that time WordPress and other content management systems have evolved to automatically include responsive behavior. With all the hard development work already taken care of, why code a responsive website from scratch? And with a wide choice of existing themes to choose from, it was worth trying WordPress to create a site for The Friends.
The current default theme is called Twenty Twenty, named after the current year. I’ll build a prototype website using that theme and the customizations it offers. Later I can investigate other themes for a different look or layout, or consider modifying a theme, if need be. See the final website.
Is there a downside to WordPress? The convenience offered by a content management system comes with a tradeoff in performance–pages will take longer to load, though usually within acceptable limits. Themes vary in their performance, with some loading faster than others. Plugins also have an effect.
Blog?
My primary motivation for using WordPress is to build a website, but it’s also a blogging platform–why not try that out as well? Accordingly, this is my first post, for the sake of writing a blog post.
My next post, also from scrounging for something to blog about, is about a recent project to trim a tree in my backyard, a ginkgo. The ginkgo tree dates back to prehistoric times–well before computers, the internet, responsive websites, and the contemporary neuroses that come along with our expectation of instant gratification. Quite a different time frame and perspective.