Keep it simple!

Recently, I was creating a simple services website in WordPress for a friend. I haven't touched WordPress in 5-6 years, but I still recall a few things about it. At that time, I was trying to get some freelance work on the side, and WordPress seemed like a good choice. 

I picked up some PHP along the way and worked for a few smaller clients via Upwork, one of the most exciting projects was one where I got to make a custom template for that client. Other gigs were mostly about configurational stuff, figuring out why certain plugins are causing issues, writing some customer CSS here and there, those sorts of things.

Image borrowed from WIP Fix It

I remembered that after figuring out how some of the more custom things in WordPress felt actually easier, like writing a bit of code to get something to work, than using stuff like visual page builder plugins. Each such plugin had its own way of doing things, and you had to learn how it does things, which, while not really too difficult, does take time. 

This time, after getting back to WordPress, I tried a theme my friend liked, but the free version of the theme proved a bit bloated and cumbersome. It came with a bunch of placeholder content that I had to remove. I think I also selected an option for recommended plugins and got a lot of unwanted ones along with it.

After having a problem with the posts page not applying the look of a new theme (the second theme I tried), I figured that maybe a simpler, more minimalistic approach would be better. I went with one of those bare-bones twenty-something memes that are available as soon as WordPress is installed, and it made things easier. 

Navigating around an ecosystem, like WordPress, is like second nature to people who work with it on a daily basis. But for someone who doesn't use it often anymore, figuring out how some things work might take a bit longer, so why not save yourself some time by keeping things simple?