Adventures with WordPress

The blogging portion of this site is based on WordPress. I originally didn’t plan to blog on the site and then changed my mind. The theme I bought included a blog but, once I took a hard look at it I found the blog was extremely manual: there was no interface for managing posts, categories, tags, publishing, etc.

Enter WordPress and the exercise to retrofit this site to use it. My wounds were basically self inflicted: if I’d made an up-front decision to blog, I’d have bought one of the many WordPress themes.

Still, retrofitting WordPress into this site has been an adventure and a good learning experience. I’ve come away with a great admiration for WordPress and the WordPress community. I’m not a true coder (more of a cut, paste, and tweaker), but WordPress does everything I’d expect it a good blogging solution to do and so far I’ve been able to get it to do what I want. The basic documentation is good and, what I can’t figure out from the documentation I can find via Google.

Would I recommend WordPress to my friends? Sure would.

Should you use responsive design? It depends.

Responsive design allows you modify the layout, navigation, content, and appearance of a website or application based on the width of the user’s browser.

Example: This website uses responsive design — if you’re viewing it on a resizable browser (laptop/desktop), see what happens when you narrow the width of your browser. If you’re using a tablet browser or smartphone, try changing its orientation, e.g., from landscape to portrait. At the smallest screen sizes, the top navigation turns into a dropdown and multicolumn layouts become one column, all done through the magic of media queries and flexible layouts.

Some people think responsive design is the one-and-only answer to sites and applications for mobile users. Others believe it’s best to have separate websites or apps for different devices, e.g., iPad, smartphones, and laptops/desktops.

I’ll go with the classic usability answer: it depends.

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Why carolmccue.com

This site came about because:

  • I’m job hunting and need a portfolio site to show my experience and skills.
  • I want a place of my own to write about UX, best practices, and any UX goodies I find.
  • It’s nice to have a playground to sharpen my skills and a chance to do a site my way.

Colophon

  • I selected Go Daddy for site hosting because they offer a lot of features and reasonable pricing, plus they likely won’t go out of business any time soon.
  • The blogging platform is WordPress and I’m also using Twitter.
  • The site is based on the Lemon Responsive Portfolio template available from Theme Forest.
  • The site uses the Droid font family designed by Ascender’s Steve Matteson. For more about the fonts, visit droidfonts.com.