WordPress: A Strong Foundation for Your Blog or Web Site

Edward F. Gumnick — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:30:08 +0000

WordPress is an open-source web application that was initially built for creating blogs. Through seven years of updates and the addition of static pages and loads of customization options, it’s grown into a small-scale content management system (CMS). It’s now the foundation for 200 million web sites.

You can use WordPress either of two ways: have your blog hosted for free at WordPress.com, subject to some limitations on storage space, bandwidth, and the amount of customization that you’re allowed, or you can download the free, open-source software and install it on your own web server. (You can also pay for premium features at WordPress.com.) I’m going to speak specifically about custom installations, because I haven’t experimented much with WordPress-hosted sites.

Installation requires PHP Hypertext Preprocessor and MySQL, as well as administrative access to your MySQL database, but these apps are included in most web hosting packages.

The power of WordPress comes from its huge community of developers. WordPress is open-source software, and it’s been designed to be extensible. Developers are constantly working to design themes and plugins. (“Themes” are packaged site designs; plugins add more functions to WordPress.) A huge community of users regularly beta-tests the software and suggests improvements. In recent versions, WordPress is even designed to update itself, as well as any properly designed plugins you’ve installed. The administrative interface offers prompts to let you know that an upgrade is available, and you only have to click a button to install it.

Once you’ve installed WordPress, you can download and install any of thousands of free themes that are available, or if you have some expertise in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and PHP, you can design your own. There are also a few themes that have been programmed to contain their own suites of customization options. (I’ve been very pleased with one called “Atahualpa,” which offers a panel of about 30 menus from which you can customize hundreds of details of your site’s design.) You can download many themes for free and install them manually, or use the “Add New Themes” tool within recent versions of WordPress to find and add themes to your site with a one‑click installation. There are also sites that sell themes, and lots of designers you can hire to create custom themes.

Here are some sites that I’ve designed and constructed (or assisted with) on the WordPress platform:

Contact me at 713-562-1813 or by e-mail if you’d like help setting up or using a WordPress blog or web site.

Just @#$%ing do it.

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:11:36 +0000

I’m working on business development with a client who has a new blog. It’s been a long time coming. She dragged her feet for more than six months before publishing her first post last month. Back in November, over coffee one afternoon with a mutual friend, I listened to her rattling off excuses and objections. I found myself thinking, Just @#$%ing do it already!

Then I felt like a hypocrite. I thought about all my own half-baked writing projects. I kept my mouth shut.

Last Friday, at our weekly consultation, she still seemed to be struggling to find the time, the motivation, the inspiration—or maybe just the confidence—to write. She’s received kindly feedback on the articles she’s posted. But she didn’t have anything new ready to publish, so we talked about some other projects she’s contemplating. When we’d worked our way through the meeting agenda, she had some time left before her next appointment. I asked her if she’d like to try to write something.

I guess I caught her off guard, because she couldn’t come up with any excuses not to write. I set a timer, and she clacked away on her laptop keyboard for 20 minutes.

If you have something to say, why wait to get your message out there?

At the end of the timed-writing period, we were both delighted to find that she’d written something pretty good. Pretty darned good, in fact. While she browsed her photo collection for an image to decorate the post, I made a handful of very minor edits—punctuation tweaks, a word change here and there for emphasis. We plugged in the photo she’d picked out, gave the piece some tags for the search engines, and posted it to her blog.

As she headed out to her next appointment, I said, “You should think about what you just accomplished.”

I closed the door behind her and thought, YOU should think about what she just accomplished.

Why do I make this so hard? I write thousands of words a day. I speak hundreds of thousands of words per week. People seem to enjoy hearing what I have to say. Why is it so hard to sit down and write a few hundred words that I’m willing to share with the reading public?

I should take my own advice once in a while. And if you have a great message, but you’re struggling to get it out there, so should you: Just @#$%ing do it already.

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WordPress: A Strong Foundation for Your Blog or Web Site

Just @#$%ing do it.