Wordpress

I don’t think it was necessarily difficult to learn to use Wordpress, just time consuming.  This is, however, a familiar experience for me when I encounter new technology, not something unique to Wordpress itself.  Working on a site that already had content made me a little bit hesitant to try things that I normally would have.  My usual way of figuring new things out is to just jump right in without really looking at tutorials, just to see how much of it I can understand intuitively.  I think that going about things in this way gives me a better opportunity to get the feel of a website.  However, with this assignment, I was worried about messing up the content for the other group members.  Therefore, I created another Wordpress account to experiment with (though I did do a lot of the less risky experimenting with the one we were supposed to work with). 

It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Wordpress is fun, but it is less stressful than other, similar websites that I have checked out since beginning this assignment (Drupal comes to mind).  Whenever I ran into trouble that I couldn’t figure out on my own, I checked out the available guides.  They usually got me back on track fairly quickly.

I fiddled around as much as I dared with WP.  Sometimes, I had to get creative, like when I couldn't get the custom fields to do what I wanted without just editing the html, and sometimes I would see things that I thought were nifty and then forget where it was that I saw them!  I think that's what I have the worst time with, being able to remember where to find everything.  Oh well, that's something that would eventually work itself out (probably) with enough practice. The drag and drop we use for widgets is nice, and I really liked how easy changing themes was, but I do wish we had more available themes to play with.

My teammates and I got along fairly well, despite one or two accidental setbacks and the late addition of our fourth member.  I do think that with an extra week or two we could do a whole lot more, but for a crash course in WP, I feel we’ve done admirably.  As far as I can tell, everybody in our group is 'getting it' now.

I laugh when I look at how long it took me to figure out how to embed videos into our page though, I can’t believe how slow I am sometimes!