I´m Bill the Geek,
WordPress Teacher
If you have been through the maize of this website, you have read that sillybilly.com is one of the oldest, original web sites on the internet. I´ve been a Geek (notice the capital G) for a long time. Years ago I heard about “The World Wide Web.” It fascinated me and I bought all of the html books I could get my hands on and I wrote html in Simple Text (the same thing as note pad) on my Mac.
At that time I was writing and illustrating children´s books using the computer. I put up my web site so that kids around the world could read my stories. One day I got an email from the Department of Education of South Korea. They wanted permission to download my web site and use it in schools all over their country.
At that time, most of my friends and family didn´t even know what the internet was. Wamo! Things have really changed.
Since the mid nineties, if you´ve read some of my articles you know that I´ve learned, taught and created in html, css, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Actionscript and Adobe Premiere, as well as Final Cut Pro and Poser. Big change from Simple Text.
I loved Flash, and still do. I still animate in Flash for web animation videos. I may put up some more Flash on my site, but then I have to make alternative content for mobile devices and that is a tiny bit to time consuming at the time.
A client approached me 7 years and asked me to develop his site in Joomla, another Content Management System (CMS). We looked at WordPress, but at the time, Joomla had more bells and whistles so we went in that direction. I lived in Joomla for 2 years.
Through the Joomla years I was teaching WordPress. The concepts were very similar with the way you handle widgets, themes, pluggins, blog sections, universal site changes, manipulating CSS etc. But as in all products in our lives, WordPress has come to the front (as far as number of individuals and businesses using and publishing sites in it) over Joomla, Drupal and other CSS systems and Can you say, “Free.” Free most of time, if you get serious, you will end up spending money one themes and pluggins.
Why WordPress?
As a WordPress Teacher I have to stay on top of what are the newest themes, widgets, plugins and usage methodologies that are being used on the Planet. Being a Dreamweaver Teacher, I see the other side with clients that just want to go that way (or, they have massive sites and systems and have not made the conversion).
WordPress can be very simple and it can be very complex. As a Dreamweaver Teacher, a client called me for some advise. He is a retired gentleman, living on a Farm in Seattle, Washington. He was having problems uploading files to the server with his version of Dreamweaver. Ends up, his version of Dreamweaver must have been the first version that came out more than 10 years ago.
Ends up, all he wanted to do is put pictures of 10 trackers on one page, and change the tracker images and text once in a while. Now, I could have suggested the newest version of Adobe Dreamweaver CC, I think a single application from Adobe is like 19 dollars a month, but for what he wants to do I suggested he just download WordPress for Free. I truly believe he will get way more than what he needs.
Another client has 9 sites with about 900 pages. Keeping the menu changes is/was a nightmare. We moved all of his sites to WordPress in a Multi-site, all with different urls. He´s very happy with it. And, with his html and css knowledge, it was easy to share with him the functional process of manipulating themes to his unique purposes for each individual site.
As an Adobe Dreamweaver teacher and a WordPress Teacher also, I must say that WordPress is here to stay, and it´s going to grow (a lot). I still use Dreamweaver to edit my code, view and find code with Dreamweaver´s “Live View” and “Inspect Element” features (which both you can do for free in most modern browsers).
WordPress is Not Easy!
Ok, I said it! For you people that have used Photoshop for years, then you try to use Adobe Illustrator, you say to yourself with Illustrator,,,,,”What is this?” The applications kind of look the same with tool bars and layouts and stuff, but Illustrator is a real, not easy to understand song and dance.
Working with clients as a WordPress Teacher, I see the confusion with simple things like, “How do I make a page my main page, my home page?” “How do I create a Menu?” “How do I make the page name urls different than alehIOlhsdflñhñaño9789—ffffsuu.php.
Little things like that are easy to do in WordPress, but if you don´t know where the little room is that you go in to do that, it´s a real nightmare…… For hours……
I´d be happy to be your WordPress Teacher, or even WordPress Theme Editor. I´d be happy to guide you from Room to Room To Room so that you don´t have to go through the nightmare for hours on your own.
Give me a call or drop me a line. It´s free for you to call and just ask some questions about how can teach you, live, one on one, Anywhere, USA (this week I did Australia and England too).
