No. 1 in a series: My WordPress Odyssey
Warning: If you’re looking for a step-by-step how-to on WordPress, this isn’t it. This is a how-I-did-it with dashes of humor and perhaps a few pinches of insight you may or may not find useful.
I began this blog on my main website at www.elizabethenslin.com. As described in an earlier post, I moved it to this separate site for one selfish reason: I had run out of things to do on my home site and craved more.
That’s my biggest complaint about WordPress: it’s addictive.
- What I should be doing instead of designing websites and blogging.
A former academic and teacher retooling herself as a narrative nonfiction writer, an aspiring homesteader and farmer, a mother who had delayed her son’s exposure to television and computers until high school; I figured I was one of the least likely people to be bitten by the web design bug. I didn’t like spending hours on computers. I refused, and still refuse, to join computer games and guitar hero competitions. I don’t like blinky, beepy things. I like gardening, hiking, kayaking, baking bread. But to build my writing career and prepare myself to shop for a literary agent, I wanted to establish a web presence. How else would my future adoring fans find me?
Knowing my electrical engineering partner would scoff at paying for software, I resigned myself to open source materials. After reading reviews, I chose Bluehost as my server, registered a domain and began.
Bluehost made installation easy – too easy perhaps. I installed WordPress (wordpress.org not .com) and stared at it. At first glance, I couldn’t figure out how to navigate the dashboard. I didn’t know what themes or plugins were or where to find them. Impatient and confused, I uninstalled WordPress and installed Joomla. I could tell right away it was way over my head, so I tried Drupal — also out of my league. I installed WordPress again, played for a few minutes, but still didn’t get it. I wanted quick results. So I uninstalled WordPress and went on to sample other options, some with automatic installs and some not.
I had the greatest hope for Silverstripe and spent an entire day and evening trying to install it. Finally, at midnight I succeeded. I drifted into sleep confident I could begin building my website the next day.
Excited, I woke early the next morning. I brewed some tea, opened my laptop and tried to log into my Silverstripe account. I faced a red error message: username does not exist. “No!” I screamed. I tried again and received the same message. I tried every combination of username and password I might have conjured in the previous day’s techno-blur. I never did get back into Silverstripe.
Exhausted and discouraged, I almost called my partner at his engineering firm where he spends hours designing complicated circuit boards and more hours puzzling over bugs that derail them. “Can we just buy a program?” I wanted to ask. But I knew he would have little sympathy, and I also recognized my problem. All the advice I’d read pointed towards WordPress as one of the best options for people with limited computer skills; that was me. But rather than spending a few hours learning the basics, I wasted days flirting with all the other possibilities. It was time for a commitment.
Humbled, I crawled back to WordPress.
My advice to anyone who wants it: don’t play the field. Just go with WordPress.
Next Week: Finding Help
