As discussed before, I’ve greatly enjoyed the challenge of learning to code. The learning curve will forever be challenging and while the journey has not exactly taken over my life, it has consumed much of my time during the last year.
Going back to a year ago when I started my course at General Assembly, I focused on learning the basics of HTML5 and CSS3, before tackling JavaScript. It was really only after the course, that I started to discover all the tools and resources on the web which can make your life a whole lot easier for a budding web developer.
So I started off creating my HTML and CSS pages from scratch. I guess it’s a workflow which I’ll never return to. There are so many ways now to automate your set up and to save so much time. I’m always on the look out to extend and deepen my knowledge of all things web related. So far, I’ve taken little interest in WordPress. I know how popular it was but naively, I always viewed WordPress as a pure blogging platform which imposed restrictions on website layout and design.
I decided to take this blog into a WordPress platform and it’s fair to say I’ve become a huge fan. It’s so easy to install and get up and running in such a short period of time. The fantastic themes out there give you a great starting point to the layout of your site. The plugins are revelatory in the robust tools they give you and the time they can save. But that has really pleased me is the possibility to customise your site and give you the opportunity to make your mark to create a bespoke design. My fairly advanced knowledge of HTML and CSS has really helped me to efficiently tweak the code of my chosen theme.
This site is fully responsive and the ease in which my readers can easily send feedback to me is going to be such a strong motivating factor to increase the number (and quality?) of my posts. The distraction free writing mode makes compiling my posts far less cumbersome
Working with WordPress has also elevated my knowledge of the mysterious world of SEO. The plugins available to assist you in all your SEO needs are a joy to work with. The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is absolutely phenomenal. I really look forward to boosting my Google search rankings.
This is my first WordPress site and there is so much to learn. I look forward to engaging with the WordPress community. I’ll always love losing myself into my coding, but my growing knowledge of WordPress will I’m sure appeal to many new potential clients.