Design has always been my weak point. I could judge a design on its quality, usability, ease of use, etc., but I don’t possess the creative spark to make my own design for a website. This had been a crippling point for me in my quest to remake my website. I didn’t want simple, childish colors I had in the past (red and blue were dominant on my old websites), and I like my school colors (Black and Gold!), but they, too, wouldn’t make too great of a design, at least in my mind. When I attempted to make a stylesheet on a basic website skeleton, I was getting the technical stuff right, but the colors never worked for me. I tabled the project so many times until now, when I sucked in my pride and went with a WordPress blog.

The result is surprisingly smooth. Any holes on the backend user experience I can fill in with my own technical knowledge, so I don’t feel too frustrated, but I don’t feel like I have more “stuff” than I need. I didn’t need a bloated CMS that had 800 plugins built in, with forums (that nobody would use), wikis, member blogs, complex organizational schemes, etc. I had Drupal before, but upgrading it to the latest version was so complicated, it made installing an OS look much simpler in comparison. WordPress even lets me publish articles at a later date, which will come useful as I plan to release articles weekly, on different days depending on the category.

Being able to focus on content, rather than the layout, control, and inner workings, I can focus on the real purpose behind this website: to share information.  I no longer have to worry about reinventing the wheel, I can now use the wheel to carry the information out to the world.