Week seven: Reflections on WordPress

This week I am reflecting on using WordPress, with a focus on what is easy to use, what the challenges are, and how suitable I think it is for developing a website.

My time using WordPress for this class has been a mix of positive and negative experiences. This has made building this blog and my library website an interesting challenge to find the balance between creating my vision and the limitations of WordPress when it’s free.

I personally quite enjoy the creative process of building a website. I’m a very visual person and so having the challenge of building something where the visual appearance is such a crucial part of the whole project has been really exciting for me. I like that what I can build with WordPress is effortlessly visually appealing, especially if you use one of the prebuilt layouts the website offers. Those same layouts give you a starting point to bounce off from in building a page, and I have both used them with my own personal alterations as well as taken elements from them to build a page from scratch. I like that I have the opportunity to go in either direction.

Where I find WordPress has its limitations is that it’s limited by what I assume is types of websites the company thinks its users are likely to make. WordPress began primarily as a blog platform (Haefele and Kroski, 2015), and while that is still offered to users as a website to build, when looking at the pre-built page layouts offered to free users it feels more like they’re catering more towards business websites, and probably small businesses in particular, offering multiple contact pages, about pages, service and portfolio pages, and only one blog page. When I was building my blog I actually found it more difficult to update and alter the visual aspects of the blog than it was altering the visual aspects of my library website, and so it feels like blogs are more of a second thought or more of an addition to websites.

While I obviously cannot comment on if the paid version of WordPress would change my opinion of using the website, what I can say is that I see its appeal from the perspective of someone wanting to build a website with little to no knowledge of HTML coding. I don’t think it makes the best blogging platform, and while I think libraries can and will be able to use it effectively, to what extent will probably depend on how much said library is willing to pay for their website.

References

Haefele, C., & Kroski, E (2015). WordPress for Libraries. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com