I’ve moved my portfolio website back to using WordPress. Way back, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I built my first websites by hand-coding HTML and CSS directly in text editors. Then came WYSWYG editors like Dreamweaver (by Macromedia, before they were bought by Adobe), which made design a little easier (although also occasionally played fast and loose with web standards). However, as the web grew (remember Web 2.0?), web browsers proliferated, and we all started looking at the web on smart phones, tablet computers, and televisions, keeping up with all the technical foibles of various browser/device combinations and keeping sites looking fresh through seperating style and structure became a headache.

WordPress, with its numerous configurable themes and plug-ins, open-source values, and growing community of developers, was then a breath of fresh air. But it wasn’t all good news and, as WordPress grew in popularity, so did attempts to hack into it to introduce malicious code. So, after one too many hacks and on the advice of software engineer colleagues, I moved over to the Hugo static site generator. Hugo was great, with multiple themes and configurations, and an active developer community supporting it. But the processes of installing and maintaining it, and of updating content were complicated. Fine if you are comfortable working with command line interface and using tools like Git and node. Not so good if most of your work isn’t on the command line and you only have a few minutes to type an update and publish it. I seemed to be forever climbing the same learning curve between site updates.

A change of web hosting provider got me to reconsider WordPress. This new company provides a much better managed WordPress service, where software and database updates are done for you, and a much more responsive and personal technical support team. Security concerns no more, I’m back with WordPress. Let’s see how it goes!