From my point of view, a geek is a computer enthusiast. At school he – or she – was good at mathematics. When going for a degree, it will usually be in one of the beta sciences like physics or more practical (information) technology.
My background is in business administration. My first computer was as IBM PS/2 which I was able to purchase with financial support of my employer at that time. By then I was 27 years of age already. Since I am curious by nature and always eager to explore new territories. Of course, I played a bit with the BASIC programming language. However, that was not my kind of fun. So, I guess I do not qualify for a geek. I am a non-geek.
However, I am very interested in the web and I enjoy building websites. In the mid ’90s, I started playing around with HTML. That was definitely more fun than programming. You can build a simple HTML page and display it in your browser within minutes.
About five years later, I was able to build a nice website for my own company. My mistake was using Microsoft FrontPage merely because it was part of my Microsoft Office suite, and hosts offered something called FrontPage Extensions. But that is a different story.
Creating websites the easy way
So yes, I enjoy creating websites.
However, using HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL to build your website is kind of a hard way. Fortunately, now there is WordPress. With WordPress you can focus on the important side of the website. That is not the technology behind it, but the content: your copy and the media files that you want to share.
When you use only ready-made themes with WordPress, you have less control over the logic and the presentation of the website. Definitely, when compared to building a site from scratch with HTML and PHP.
But I don’t think that is really a setback when balancing the lesser control with all the fun stuff. And in the end it is always the user browsing the web and visiting your website who decides how a site will appear on his or her screen.
WordPress started a as blog engine – a tool for setting up blogs. Blog is short for weblog, a kind of a web diary.
Since it origin, WordPress has evolved into a great Content Management System (CMS) giving you all the tools you need to build and maintain your website. And I expect that WordPress will become an even better tool. More powerful.
Throughout the world, thousands of geeks are building beautiful themes and powerful plug-ins. That is why creating a website that offers a great user experience will be easier tomorrow than it already is today.
What this blog will cover
With this blog, “A Non-Geek Making Websites”, I want to share a bit of the knowledge and experience I have gained from working with WordPress. Sure, there are more websites out there with a comparable mission.
And yes, a lot of information is already available on the net, but that is either scattered all over the web or written for peers with a more than average knowledge of web technology. This blog want to do things differently.
Next to building websites, I want to write about topics like maintaining a WordPress website and increasing the security of your WordPress site. Having a website is only the first step.
It’s lonely without visitors, so you will need to promote your website to get some traffic. So, search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA) will be addressed as well. And maybe you could earn some money by displaying AdSense ads on your website?
And I will be reviewing WordPress themes, of course. It is very important to understand that there are all kinds of WordPress templates: for a personal blog, a business website, an online magazine, a portfolio or a web shop. Just to mention the most important ones.
Most template sites do little more than repeating the information available on the vendor’s website. When you are in the process of choosing a theme, it is not only the design that matters. Equally important, or maybe even more important, is the logic behind the design.
How easy is it to setup the template and get your website up and running? Does the theme come with some kind of control panel, or do you have to modify the style.css and functions.php manually?
This kind of questions cannot be answered by merely looking at a photograph of a website where that theme is deployed. This blog wants to take reviews a little further.
Last but not least, I will write about plug-ins. A plug-in is an additional piece of software with a specific application that allows you to extend the core functionality of WordPress.
Suppose the template that meets your requirements best does not have all the features you are looking for. What plug-in(s) should you install to bridge the gap between what the theme has, and what you need?
Hence, I expect that “A Non-Geek Making Websites” has some added value to offer. Stay tuned!
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