Comments on: Is WordPress Good for Beginners? Yes, But Not Always

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 02:29:40 +0000

That sounds great – I hope it goes well for you. Customizing WP can be really fun if you have some good skills. If you’re good with CSS, that will take you a long way, and PHP skills, even further.

There are some themes out there that are deliberately set up for easy customization – Constructor and Atahualpa come to mind.

If those don’t offer enough possibilities, I’d suggest you investigate WordPress theme frameworks. There are a bunch of them, and each offers something different.

Good luck with your online book!

By: fvgfvg

fvgfvg — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:47:53 +0000

You’ve convinced me to have another go at WP. (Did a bit of playing around in the sandbox some while back here:
http://amsterdam-adorno.net/ND/ but wasn’t very confident about my ability to customize it to my needs.) The idea was to see if it’s possible to write a book online; I was curious about the responses that one would get.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 03:19:10 +0000

Hi,
Those are some good points. It is very true, when someone is intelligent, but doesn’t understand computers, they can get quite annoyed – they’re embarrassed, after all, and are used to sounding intelligent.

And there’s another special kind of goofball – the one that asks you the question, and when you answer, they tell you, no, you’re wrong, even when they have no clue.

By: fvgfvg

fvgfvg — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 22:19:51 +0000

Thanks for those thoughtful lines. I did a lot of semi-professional IT support some years back, and your comments about the *psychology* of people that one encounters really ring true. Absolute beginners can be terribly tricky, since – compared to more experienced PC users – they have no way of judging what’s involved in the answering of a question. (‘Why doesn’t it do what I want?’) That’s tough if you’ve got a user who doesn’t have basic knowledge about programs, operating systems, hardware, HD organization, internet. It didn’t happen often (maybe one in a hundred) but it happened often enough for me to try to stay clear of one type: people who get really *angry* because they don’t understand what you’re trying to explain.