Well, my blog has been up for a week or so, and so far eight friends have registered, and a couple have left comments. Not a lot, but all I did to tell people about it was send out a couple group text messages and a single announcement on Facebook. It’s at least encouraging enough to keep posting for a while and see if it catches on.  And besides, it doesn’t work well on phones, so you can’t browse it easily when you’re most likely to have time.  I need to fix that.  Just tweak some settings, right?

I suspect WordPress can be reasonably easy, if you don’t have any unusual needs (e.g. memberships), and you’re content to find a theme that is “close enough” that you don’t have to build anything or mess with the settings.   Unfortunately, for (slightly) ASD+ADD+OCD me, an existing theme will never be “close enough”; I often want things normal people don’t even think of; and settings are there to be “messed with”. The more the better!!!

So, my (very first attempt at a WordPress) site is built with the Astra theme (one of the most customizable), enhanced with the Astra Pro plug-in (even more customizable), with pages built with Elementor Pro, a page builder whose top features include “pixel perfect design” and “extendable & developer-friendly”.  With these tools, I can do just about anything website related, if I can figure out how.

I guess that means I’m doing the equivalent of learning to drive using a car with a manual transmission, touchy clutch, and a jumpy, high revving engine, and having to juggle a lot more than  “how fast” and “what direction”.   It’s a lot harder than if I’d used something less complex, maybe more equivalent to my Mazda 3 than my old Miata. 😊

But at least I don’t need to learn a whole new tool set now that I (at least sort of!) know what I’m doing and am ready to do it over.  My next step is to understand headers, sidebars and menus better, so I can easily create a UI similar to G-Mail’s.  Specifically, I want a collapsible sidebar on the left with the menu (Home, About, lists of Categories and Month/year archives, etc), that is hidden by default on phones.

That, plus making the font sizes depend on screen sizes, is most of what they mean by “responsive design”.  You get three values for lots of these settings, for phones, tablets (held vertically) and PCs (wider rather than taller).  I’m hoping to find you can set them more or less “globally” so I don’t need to “fine tune” every page.

The other thing I’m going to do is turn on something called “WordPress Multi-Site”.  It will allow me to manage the three sites I have so far (this one and my “testing” site, plus Patti’s “Relating LLC” site) with one WordPress installation instead of three, so I have one set of plug-ins and settings to maintain.  It’s not a lot of work yet, but might become a lot more if this catches on.

Anyway, here goes.  Hopefully it won’t all crash and burn and require a restore to get it running again! (They keep warning me about making backups before updating things…)