Six months ago, I decided to learn WordPress. I had used it for blogging, but never tried designing with it. About the same time, I also changed my employment. The intention was to really provide space for my hobbies to flourish. One of those hobbies being technology.
Yesterday I sat in my pajamas all day in front of the computer and redesigned this site. When I first started the site six months ago, I used the free WP theme AutoFocus. It’s gorgeous, but it just didn’t work for me. Then I found the free WP Sight, and I really loved it at first. It has a wonderfully creative layout that you don’t find in other free themes. Problem was that I was too new at the game and needed more support than it offered.
Beyond the technical features of my site, what I found was that the entire concept of the site was too narrow. I love to write, and I was limiting my writing to only focusing on philanthropy. I do love the topic, but I tend to think about a lot of other things. The goal then became to start a process of blending my professional and my personal. What you see today is a reflection of this.
Between launching the Sight theme and today, I joined Elegant Themes. They’ve got the right level of creativity in their themes and the level of support that I need. I piloted their Chameleon template at Ordering Cupcakes. This site was created with their Aggregate theme. I’ve also been practicing building WordPress sites for projects and organizations. Each time I think through a site, I learn something new – whether it be in design, knowledge management, or technology.
Yesterday, I learned the value of assigning parent categories. It’s something that has been there all along, but I just noticed it. It allows me to scoop up all the little threads of my thoughts and bucket them under a bigger umbrella. My” Recent Articles” are an example of the Philanthropy parent category – within it you’ll find my writing on social enterprise, Canadian philanthropy, US philanthropy, and others. The beauty of the parent category is that you can still use the children categories on their own. Take the featured slider for instance – that is only displaying my travel category even though the parent which is called Gallery houses both travel and iphoneography.
With the creation of this blog post, I’ve not created a Technology parent with a WordPress child. The new site allows me to share my thoughts beyond the scope of philanthropy.