Before this activity, I had never used WordPress, so pretty much everything I was doing was new to me. Most of the changes I made surrounded the flow of my website and how each post could feel like an extension of a bigger picture rather than its own separate thing. I wanted the website to be user friendly and satisfying to move through, but I also wanted it to feel like a zine. I didn’t want each post to feel isolated from the rest of the site. I wanted everything to contribute to the same identity and overall feeling.
The easiest part for me was finding content to input. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to put on the site and what I wanted it to feel like. Actually making WordPress reflect that idea was much harder. The most frustrating part was the extent I had to go to just to understand how to do things that I assumed would take little to no time. Since I had never used WordPress before, there were a lot of moments where I knew what I wanted to change but had no idea how to actually change it.
I also started to notice how much the templates affected what I could create. I could alter the content within the template, but I honestly felt limited by the elements that were already given to me. I wasn’t necessarily designing something completely from scratch. Instead, I was trying to mold something that already existed into what I imagined. This became especially noticeable because I wanted the website to have the feeling of a zine, where things can be a little less structured and more expressive. The structure of the templates sometimes worked against that.
This experience helped me understand Tham’s discussion of ease more than the reading did on its own. Nothing specific from the reading immediately stood out to me, but after working with WordPress, I could see the problem with assuming that a platform being “easy” automatically gives the person using it more freedom. WordPress made certain things easier because I didn’t have to build a website from nothing, but that ease came with limitations. The templates gave me a starting point while also deciding some of the boundaries I had to work within. For me, the challenge became figuring out how to make something ready-made still feel like an extension of myself.
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