I use WordPress, create plugins and customize themes for WordPress, operate a specialized WordPress site hosting service, and provide commercial support to small businesses and nonprofits. Here is why I focus on WordPress and specifically maximizing the use of “core WordPress” rather than an alternative like Wix or even one of the WordPress “page builders” like Wix or Divi.
If you’d like to work with me, my contact info is below, but first I’d like to explain my enthusiasm for and obsession with WordPress. Like any software I’ve ever worked with, it has features that drive me crazy. But I love it, warts and all.
Examples of my WordPress work include:
- The RSVPMaker events and email marketing plugin I’ve been supporting and enhancing since 2010.
- Support for the Swank Specialty Produce website and particularly the Swank Table gourmet dinner series, with event listings, RSVPs, and payments managed using RSVPMaker.
- Support for the Florida Bulldog, a nonprofit investigative news website, including email newsletter distribution of new stories using RSVPMaker and the Postmark service.
- Toastmost.org, a website hosting service for Toastmasters clubs and districts, using RSVPMaker for guest RSVPs and extensions for agenda and membership management. One recent addition is a Toastmost mobile app for iOS and Android (created with the React Native framework) that connects with club websites.
- Quick Playground, my most recent plugin, which works with the WordPress Playground virtual website creation tool and is intended for quick creation of demos and tutorials.
Originally built by bloggers for bloggers, WordPress is the world’s most popular website building software. Yet it faces increasing competition from Wix, Ghost, Substack, Medium, Canva’s web page builder, and many other alternatives.
Depending on what you want to do online, any one of those platforms might be right for you. Or you may want to pursue a multiplatform strategy, for example using WordPress for your blog and marketing but another platform for ecommerce.
Or you can put WordPress at the center, which is my bias. You can also add ecommerce or most any other functionality to your WordPress site, allowing you to manage everything in a more unified and consistent way.
Infinitely customizable
I stick with WordPress because it is almost infinitely customizable, with a plugin model that makes it possible to add specific features as you need them. You can choose from a wide variety of free plugins and premium plugins (often sold as an upgrade to a free version) or create custom plugins, either by yourself or by working with a web developer.
This is why WordPress is often recommended as the right choice for small businesses, even as the alternatives proliferate.
For example, the RSVPMaker plugin for event and email marketing that I’ve been supporting since 2010 started out as a custom event registration function for a candidate for mayor (he won), and I’ve been improving it ever since. While it competes with similar plugins from bigger companies, I use it for my own projects because I know exactly how it works and how to customize it. My knowledge of the WordPress programming interfaces also allows me to debug issues and create enhancements on top of other people’s plugins and with the core WordPress system.
Other WordPress plugins, such as WooCommerce for WordPress-based online stores, have spawned their own ecosystems of consultants and add-on plugins.
As with everything else these days, there is an AI story for WordPress, where you can dictate your requirements to a chatbot that produces additional functionality (or design tweaks or content) that may meet your needs.
Regardless, the point is WordPress provides a core platform you can customize and improve on many different ways.
Virtues and tradeoffs
The differentiator is that WordPress is an open system with open programming interfaces and and an open marketplace for plugins and themes (designs). If you buy into a commercial platform such as Wix, you can choose from features offered by them and their business partners but not the same limitless options you get with WordPress. That’s not to say there isn’t also value in the simplicity of a smaller number of commercially supported choices, but you must be willing to accept the tradeoffs and pay the price of admission if you choose something like Wix.
As for building a website in Canva, I can see why that would be attractive, particularly for those who have invested in learning the platform for other purposes like creating social media “poster” image promos. It might indeed allow you to create something simple that looks good very quickly. But your options for elaborating on that simple beginning will be relatively limited.
What it means for WordPress to be “open”
When I say WordPress is “open” I’m particularly thinking of the WordPress.org open source software supported by many different developers and web hosting services. There is room for debate about just how “open” it is, particularly in the wake of recent controversies over whether the main corporate backer of WordPress, Automattic, is dealing fairly with other creators of WordPress products and services.
WordPress.org (open source)
Automattic (company)
Independent web hosting (open source)
Automattic premium hosting
Automattic runs WordPress.com, one of many web hosting services based on WordPress, as well as the WPVIP premium hosting service for major customers like Time magazine. A recent legal dispute between Automattic and WP Engine, an independent WordPress host, alienated some open source community members who questioned whether Automattic’s exercised an improper degree of control over community assets such as the WordPress plugins repository. Do a search on “wordpress drama” if you want the gory details.
Much as I hated to see that drama, I tend to write it off as a factor of the natural tension between Automattic’s need to make money and its central role as a contributor to the open source project started by the company’s CEO more than 20 years ago.
As a practical matter, WordPress remains an open platform for my projects and my clients. As new features are added to the platform, the technical details are documented so that I can take advantage of them for my own projects and my client projects. Because it is used by so many professional developers all over the world, including people who actively contribute improvements, the core platform is always getting better at things like supporting responsive designs that work as well on mobile phones as on a desktop computer.
One other negative weighing on WordPress is that it is often in the news for security vulnerabilities — almost always as a result of flaws in plugins, rather than the core system. However, if you use plugins from reputable developers who will swiftly fix any vulnerabilities, you can avoid most of those problems by keeping your website up to date. The security issues are a symptom of the complexity of WordPress, which is the reason clients come to me for help.
In addition to advising them on strategy, I address the technical details of security patches, plugin implementation, and customization of designs and functionality.
WordPress isn’t for everyone, but it’s where I can be most helpful.
Plain vanilla WordPress
I embrace a specific style of WordPress development that emphasizes favoring core WordPress features over add-on programs, by which I particularly mean “page builders” such as Elementor and Divi.
Many WordPress consultants have built their businesses around these products and are passionately devoted to them. To my mind, they add unnecessary complexity. Maybe that’s partly because I never learned how to use them to their full potential, but I’m not motivated to do so now. On the occasions when I’ve taken over a website built with one of these tools, I get rid of them as quickly as possible. If I want to make it possible for a website owner to make their own changes and updates, there is enough I have to teach them about navigating the WordPress options without adding another layer of software on top.
Page builders gained traction because they filled a need the developers of the core WordPress system were slow to recognize, which was the demand for the ability to create entire website designs using visual tools and minimize the need for coding. The Block Editor (explained below) was created in response to competitive pressure from not only the page builder plugins but commercial website builder platforms like Wix.
When I first started using WordPress, it provided a basic web-based word processor for writing web page and blog copy, but changing the theme or design of the website required programming skills. Certain themes might provide options for limited tweaks, like changing the background color or adding a header image.
Over a period of years, the core WordPress editors phased in and improved support for “Block Themes” that allow you to change every element of a theme design — the headers, the footers, the imagery, the layout, the templates for different types of content — without coding. Website owners still typically choose a theme with a color scheme and layout that’s close to what they want for their site, but if a Block Theme that’s a starting point rather than the end of the story.
With a Block Theme, I sometimes mix in a little custom code using the CSS formatting language, but the circumstances where that is necessary are fewer with each release. There’s still plenty of room for pro web developers and designers to innovate — and there are even some new page builders that improve on the core block theme system rather than competing with it — but great websites are being built with nothing but core WordPress.
The Block Editor
The modern WordPress editor, known as the Block Editor (or Gutenberg) is built around the metaphor of content blocks that represent different types of web content — paragraphs, headings, images, videos, and interactive features — as well as layout and organizational blocks like columns, rows, and grids.
The Block Editor replaced what’s now known as the Classic Editor, a simpler text formatting editor with limited multimedia capabilities. Some WordPress users continue to cling to the Classic Editor, which can be re-enabled with plugins. I think they’re missing out.
If you are not familiar, here is what using the Block Editor looks like:
In the screenshot above, I’m showing a Document Overview sidebar on the left to make the nesting of the Image block inside the Group block easier to see.
For every block, there is also a right hand Block properties sidebar displayed that allows you to set formatting and styling options. The one shown here sets a grey background color and white text color for the Group block, as well as some padding to separate the border of the group from the image.
I’m not seeking to provide an in-depth tutorial in this post — my point is just to show the general structure that the block editor supports. Over the past several years, the block editor has evolved to also allow formatting of entire websites.
The Group block is a generic container block you “wrap” around other blocks so you can assign custom properties like margin, width, and background color to that region of the page.
If you are viewing this post on a desktop computer, you should be seeing this paragraph and the sidebar image displayed next to each other. For that, I used a Columns block set to allow 2/3 of the available space for the text on the left and 1/3 for the image on the right.
If you view the same content on a phone or other mobile device where there isn’t room for the two items to be displayed side-by-side, the formatting automatically adjusts to display first the paragraphs and then the text. The CSS coding to support this “responsive design” is baked into the core WordPress platform.
From content to design
The new generation of Block Themes builds on this foundation to define page layouts. For example, here is what the website of my client the Florida Bulldog looks like in the Site Editor (the version of the Block Editor for modifying page templates).
The home page design includes components for the page header and footer that appear on every page, plus a placeholder for the blog listings. Organizational blocks including groups and rows define the layout of the header, including the different background and text colors that surround the logo and the main menu. The menu, or Navigation component, contains links to important pages like the donations page for this public service website.
To my mind, using blocks for both themes and web page content is an elegant solution, a fractal design. Zoom in to focus on the specific page or blog post. Zoom out to work on the overall design. Apply the same basic principles at every level of detail.
Stuff I’ve learned
With WordPress and digital media development there is always more to learn, but here are some of the things I’ve become proficient with:
- Discovered WordPress internal functions, either through the documentation or by digging through the WordPress source code when documentation is missing or inadequate.
- Integrated external services including PayPal, Stripe, Mailchimp, and Postmark.
- Designed and styled websites and apps using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
- Transformed existing WordPress themes into more flexible Block Themes.
- Created dynamic forms and user experiences with using Javascript. Started with JQuery before progressing to React, a powerful but challenging framework WordPress uses for defining custom blocks.
- Made the jump from React to React Native for coding iOS and Android mobile apps.
Do it yourself or do it with help
Part of my motivation for sticking to core WordPress features is to make it easier for clients to update their own sites, if they wish to do so. Often, they are just as happy to let me futz with the block editor and the site editor and the choice of plugins, which is fine.
Or they may be comfortable with routine updates but want someone who knows their business to serve as an intermediary in a crisis such as a website outage.
For example, the editor of the Florida Bulldog normally posts all the articles himself, but calls on me for backup when the site isn’t working properly, or if he can’t figure out how to do something himself. Just this morning, he called on me to help promote a limited time matching contributions deal for the nonprofit news website and to make a couple of changes to the main menu.
More significantly, when he runs into a crisis like a website outage, I either solve the problem or act as an intermediary between him and the support staff at the web host and other service providers — who otherwise respond to requests for support with technical language he’s not equipped to deal with.
Like most website owners, he is more interested in his business and his mission than the technical details of how the website operates. And I’m happy to sweat the details on their behalf.
Another client, Geeks on Tour, is run by a couple of techies who teach technology for travelers and have a lot of WordPress knowledge find it useful to keep me on call to help with additional customizations.
Working with me
I do this work on a moonlighting basis, while working by day for the digital intelligence company Similarweb, so I have limited bandwidth for additional projects. But I’m looking to take on one or two in the coming months, and I love a challenge.
If you would like to talk to me about building a a WordPress website or improving and supporting an existing one, write to me at david@carrcommunications.com and include “WordPress project” in the subject line.
