WordPress: Stories and tips from the experts

Here we present short snippets from WordPress contributing developers and our very own members of the Web Designer team.

Andy Skelton, WordPress contributing developer
“ Starting a blog improved my life a little bit, mostly in the social realm. When I started playing with the WordPress code as a hobbyist in 2005, I didn’t expect my life to change that much at all. The repercussions were actually quite dramatic. Your results will vary, but within a few months I was in a new life, both professionally and socially. Two years passed before I looked up and realised that my hobby had become my life. I needed a new hobby so I grew a handlebar moustache and bought a motorcycle. Beyond myself, the success of WordPress means the birth of a small global service industry. I feel proud whenever I meet someone who makes a living dealing with software I help to produce – and that happens more and more.”

Dougal Campbell, WordPress contributing developer
“ Over the past several years, WordPress has evolved from an upstart weblog system into a CMS that has shaken up the online publishing industry. It started with a handful of developers who had never met each other in person, and has since spawned numerous businesses doing custom programming, hosting, design and such. My involvement with the WordPress project provided me with a wider reach into the web development community, and has presented me with opportunities to do the kind of work that I enjoy the most. Whether I’m working on some personal project that I end up sharing just for fun or working on a project for a paying client, I always enjoy seeing somebody say “That’s cool”, and being able to think to myself, “I did that!” Without my work on WordPress, those moments would probably be much fewer and far between. I’m really looking forward to seeing where WordPress will go in the future, and finding new ways to bend it into doing things that people don’t expect.”

Steven Jenkins, Features editor, Web Designer
“ WordPress is a great tool for blogging full stop, but it is even better for those who have very little knowledge of CSS, PHP and MySQL. In its simplest form, getting online with WordPress is a breeze. It does all the hard work with the coding, and selecting a theme adds the finishing touches to a great-looking site. However, although there are thousands of great-looking themes available for free, it is difficult to find one that exactly suits your needs. This is where WordPress gets interesting. It is fully customisable and with a reasonable knowledge of CSS, it shouldn’t take long to get a theme looking how you want it. Modifying the style sheet is the key to the process, but the hard work is identifying what tags and classes need to be changed. My suggestion is to find a theme that matches what you want and design the visuals for it, and it will get easier every time you try it. “

Mark Billen, Editor, Web Designer
“ I can’t profess to having used WordPress to any real extent, but certainly I’ve been impressed by some of the sites out there that do. Luckily, I’m in a position where I can order my features editor to do the tough work and write tutorials on how this stuff is done – and it wasn’t as easy as he first thought. To get the most out of it takes some ingenuity, and certainly CSS/PHP knowledge would be recommended. So is WordPress guilty of ‘dumbing down’ web design in a purist sense? Possibly, but I’d doubt that it’s worth worrying about to any extent as most of its users are keen to push the platform’s abilities as far as they go. If the result is a more accessible system for producing professionallooking and performing sites, then it can’t be bad. By all means, get involved and tell us what you think!”