My love for websites started back in the year 2000 when every new building that opened had the word ‘Millenium’ in its name, and everyone was playing Snake on their Nokia 3310.
I started to play around with some software that came bundled with Microsoft Office called Frontpage. It was a WYSIWYG editor for websites which meant I didn’t yet need to learn any code. It was similar to how websites on platforms such as Wix now built. Websites were reasonably easy to make, but the code it created was horrendous, and the website wouldn’t always look the way you wanted once published.
By 2003 I was studying web design at University and learning HTML and how to code basic websites by hand. Most monitors then were 1024 x 768 pixels, so websites were usually created to look best at that size.
In 2004 I enrolled on course and purchased a very large book to learn how to build websites using Macromedia Flash. Flash made websites could be animated and had more flexibility regarding the design. Before Flash websites were built using tables which were far from ideal. You may remember Flash websites as having a rather pointless animated introduction page with a “Skip intro” button that was usually clicked almost instantly; they were usually accompanied by whooshing sounds. Flash websites died out with the introduction of the iPhone as they would not display them at all.
One of the most significant advances in website design for me was the introduction of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This made stying the website and making any style changes much quicker.
Before CSS every single element on a website had to be styled individually. For example, every time there was a heading, you had to assign it a size, a font and a colour. If later down the line you wanted to change the style of the headings, you had to go through and change each one individually. With CSS all of the headings look to an external style sheet for their appearance. You only have to change the style once in the stylesheet and all of the headings in the website automatically change to that style. Even today CSS is one of my favourite elements of website development.
The next language I learnt was PHP. I used this to build basic content management systems and contact forms. It also made website updates quicker. Where a section of a webpage appeared on multiple pages throughout the site (such as the header), I could create the header as a separate file and ask all the pages to include that file. This meant I only had to update the header once and it would update throughout the entire website.
In 2008 I started to experiment with off the shelf content management systems to allow clients to update their website easily. I tried WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Of the three WordPress was my favourite; it was user-friendly and flexible that I could tailor it to my exact needs.
I’ve now been working with WordPress for over twelve years creating custom, bespoke themes and even plugins where required. I much prefer hand-coding WordPress themes as this delivers far superior results than using a drag and drop interface.
For the majority of websites, I believe that a well maintained and updated WordPress website with a well-coded, bespoke theme is the best fit.