A New Website / A New Committment

Anyone who has a personal website knows that keeping it updated is a difficult task. Finding time to post content, update bios, photos, not to mention dealing with issues when a page, link, or form break all make for a huge undertaking for someone especially if it’s just a hobby.

The web continues to evolve introducing new tools and technologies to make web design and development both easier and more engaging to visitors. So websites should be completely revamped every few years to keep up with these new trends and technologies to engage visitors.

Anther good thing about all the new web technologies is it is now easier than ever to set up a personal website without any experience at all. Companies like Weebly and Wix have solutions that provide all of this for you using their templates and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interfaces. Of course with this, you lose customizability but can get a site up and running relatively quickly, easily, and at minimal cost.

The next level up from these solutions is WordPress, open source software you can use to create a beautiful websites. WordPress is a web backend used by the vast majority of websites these days. The countless themes, templates, and plugins that are readily available make WordPress an awesome solution with nearly infinite customizability.

However, even with WordPress themes you are boxed into working within a framework created by someone else.

A few years ago, I decided that rather then sifting through thousands of WordPress themes, that I would learn how to build my own… from scratch. I wanted to build a site that had all the great flexibility that  WordPress offers but in a package that did not make the site look like a blog. After working hard on this for over a year, I produced my first custom theme and site built from scratch: www.stisidore.church which I launched in 2016. In future posts I’ll get into St. Isidore Church and my passion for ministry, but in order to stay on task, I will just say that the time spent developing this theme and site worked wonderfully.

The biggest advantage to building a site using the WordPress framework is the ability to update content from anywhere in the world using a browser. And by tagging content appropriately, it will show up in the right place on the site.

After letting my own site become outdated due to lack of updates (which required content creating and uploading via FTP software), I decided to build another theme from scratch and customize a web experience that was perfect for me using current web trends and technologies.

The other spark to launching this new site was that the scope of what I do professionally has changed. For my professional entire career I’ve been a musician (pianists, conductor, student, teacher, accompanist, composer, arranger). However, with my new passion for design and media, through a faith-based eye, I wanted to share this with the world and offer not only my skills but thoughts as well.

So here’s to a new commitment to keeping content coming through this medium and a new website! ?? ??