When you’ve been in the design business for as long as I have I’m sure you’ve noticed how much technology has changed. Back when Myspace was the popular site to visit, I was plugging away in college learning how to code websites using tables. I actually remember learning a lot of my ninja CSS skills on Myspace. I would see something cool, like falling animated glitter gifs, and decided to teach myself how to make that happen on my Myspace page. My Myspace page was defiantly at “VIP code status” and before you know it my friends were asking me to set up their pages too.
I can honestly say I’ve come pretty far in my design and coding skills throughout the years. I still use the old school way of coding, with tables, when I code emails for Constant Contact or Exact Target but I have also stepped up my game by learning to code WITHOUT tables. It’s a little different at first but it totally makes sense and I’m grateful there are still things to learn in my field. If I had to describe coding without tables to someone who didn’t know, I would say it’s like the barrel of monkeys… small containers of code inside bigger containers… inside the main container of doom….
During the past couple of years several of my programmer friends kept talking about a this amazing website platform, WordPress. They would give raving reviews on how powerful and easy to use it was. So, being the amazing skill hungry designer I am I watched a few video tutorials and taught myself how to make an entire website using only WordPress. After the first website I made in WordPress, smilesnaplove.com, I felt pretty confident with the platform and decided I was going to revamp my entire design portfolio website into WordPress website.
I can proudly say both of my websites are now WordPress websites and I’ve never been happier! I love being able to write articles on my iPhone and update them to my website instantly with a click of a button. There’s been times when I’ve taken a video with my phone, edited it with my phone, uploaded the video to YouTube.com on my phone, and then posted the video on my website using the WordPress iPhone app. Is this real life? How much better can it get when you have the power to do that within minutes on your phone?