Those of you who have been following me for some time know that the look and feel of the site has changed over time. If your recently joined the adventure that is JDRockel.com, you may have had to see my lollipop eating, hat holding, smiling face. That will change; my face won’t change but the landing page will change.

WordPress is a powerful platform that allows inexperienced users to get an online presence fairly easily. The problem I have with WordPress is my zero experience start with and lack of desire to invest time into leaning the WordPress platform. I will just list a few of the challenges (not problems) I have encountered.

• I am paying for basic service. This limits my options and the Themes (templates) I can choose from. I must clarify to WordPress’s defense that the options provided for embedding content is vast. I have only scratched the surface.
• You can preview Themes and even test run them with existing content, but you can’t play with all your content in a sandbox. For you non-programmers, a sandbox is a place where you can test software, or web pages, as though they are really being published. Again to WordPress’s defense, I have not tried all my options to see what is possible.
• WordPress provides a ton of teaching videos but the ones I have seen have focused on marketing and online selling. This is the way most websites are used and I don’t blame anyone for this. But finding a video that shows the type of blog I am attempting to provide has not surfaced
• I use Categories to sort my posts among the different Menu selections. This is working fine except for the Daily Life page. I am using Daily Life as the place ALL posts go when the are, well, posted. When a post goes live it goes on the Daily Life page AND any other Category page I assigned to that post.
  • So what? If I remove the Daily Life category from a post, or don’t select it at all, the post still goes there. Well duh, that’s what it’s supposed to do. Agreed, but they stay there for a VERY long time. I would like to keep maybe 10-15 posts at the most. But there seems to be a time limit that lets them disappear.
• Back to my lollipop eating, … , smiling face. That is currently designated the Landing Page. When you surf to JDRockel.com you end up on the Landing Page.
• The three dots on the next line is an example of what I call a work around. In order to get the image next to my text about the acoustic modem, I needed to break the list into two. I suspect I could have added a new list and moved the items below to that new list, but I chose to take the same amount of time to vent my frustration.

…

• What I had before, and will return to, is having the Home Page and the Landing Page the same.
• Adding to all my frustration is my history of writing HTML code (AKA web page code) from scratch in a word processor. Back in the early days of the internet, in the days of dial up and acoustic modems, I wrote my first web page code. Back then, having a picture on the page meant slow downloads. And forget video! So it was quite easy to write a web page. I advanced to where I could put pictures on the page, I was a photographer trying to promote my work at the time, but I was very careful to keep everything small and compact.
  • Because I had that skill, I know what should be possible. I am absolutely convinced that I could eventually create the look and feel I want with WordPress Premium and an investment of time.

Those of you who are still reading, I applaud your persistence and curiosity. I appreciate you allowing me to vent a bit. While my dog listens intently and appears to care, I believe y’all really do.

Thanks!

Next chapter of Mirror Mirror is coming up. Watch for new navigation buttons that will allow newcomers to easily find the first chapter and will help you go back a chapter if you desire.