I’m so glad that I’ve found Wordpress; not only for my hobby of blogging but it really has been such an educational experience over the last few years for my development.
As far as personal web development; I’m not even close to what I want to know about web development or web programming, I’ll probably never get there, but developing for Wordpress or around Wordpress has led my progression of web development. Only 5 years ago I was using using Dreamweaver for everything, now it’s TextMate. That’s not a measurement of know-how, to me it shows that I’m comfortable.
For project development it’s what I use to development almost any site. It’s just too good of a platform not to develop around. The plugin system allows for such great extensibility and the community of great developers gives you almost everything you’ll need a a project or allow for you to extend another’s work.
The 2-3 plugins I use for the majority of freelance projects are to manage what the client sees on the backend or what s/he can do. I advise anyone using Wordpress to develop websites for clients for it hide the fact Wordpress was built initially for blogging. There are ways to get around with some of the terminology with plugins or localization, never ever edit the core system unless you don’t care about upgrades and eventually security. My favorite plugins and strategy will have to wait for another post, maybe part 2.
Current development: A few weeks ago I took took the task of getting Ventura DUI site online with the goal of it being at the top of Google for the search term “Ventura DUI” or “Ventura DUI Lawyer“. The development was easy, the design took a while and is still not complete but easy to implement because of Wordpress themes system. As expected getting the site to the top of Google will be tough but with plugins like WPSEO and WPsitemaps made/make the standard SEO tasks easy. It’s now just a waiting game for Google to rank the site above the others who have PRs of 0.
My other projects waiting in the wings will also get the Wordpress makeover and I can’t see myself ever using anything else for a client, even basic splash pages.
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