When I started to dabble in web development for a friends band, I of course went to what everyone I think started with, Microsoft FrontPage, it was easy to use and it’s WYSIWYG format made it seem like you were building the best website anyone is going to see! Of course, as time went by, I found myself not liking FrontPage and wanting to do more, I started to look into other options. Dreamweaver from Adobe came to mind, so I downloaded a trial copy and then ended up buying a copy because the trial was not long enough for me to learn the full power available in it.
After a few months of working with Dreamweaver, I liked the look and feel of the application, but I found that I was barely scratching the service of what it could do and at that time I was not sure I would want to do full time web development, at this time it was just a hobby and something else to do in with technology.
Well, as time went on I started to help other people out with some basic websites, nothing fancy and surely not anything I felt would be used to help promote a business/product or service. As I thought about what I wanted to do in the long term to earn a little extra money and since I currently was working from home, I realized that if I could get really good at web development then just MAYBE, I could run my own small business of creating websites for small businesses.
With this new idea in mind, I decided that I wanted to do some additional research and see what was being used on other websites and was I surprised to find out that many people had decided to leave the standard applications like Dreamweaver for something called WordPress.
I then think “What is WordPress and why is it becoming so popular?, I had heard of blogging software and my initial thoughts was “Great, another temporary Must-Use software package!”.
Well, as I started to do my research on WordPress, I was surprised to hear it had been around for a number of years by that point, I think it was at least 5 or 6 years. I then started to look for training materials which would help me learn it, I went to YouTube and found a lot of videos on WordPress but the people assumed you knew as much as they did so it got frustrating!
So, I kept plugging away my Dreamweaver work and then getting frustrated with that software with regards to it was so powerful but I could not keep up with their changes on the interface and it started to make things more difficult for me to use. I then decided to pursue learning WordPress yet again, this time I was determined to learn it and understand it as my knowledge would grow.
But, that information will be available in the next post 🙂