One of the great things about WordPress is how flexible it is. There are many different basic layouts (themes) which mean you can change the way your site looks in a few minutes (sometimes…) while keeping the content intact (sometimes…); there are countless plugins which do all sorts of flashy things like installing animated slideshows and displaying Twitter feeds, while other plugins monitor your site visits and manage your spam messages. Another great thing is that these plugins are often built by enthusiasts and they are either free of charge, or very low cost (couple of dollars at most).
One of the bad things about WordPress is that the themes and plugins are often built by enthusiasts and they are either free of charge, or very low cost (couple of dollars at most).
Yes, the good thing is also the bad thing. A free plugin or theme which has been built by an enthusiast may suddenly stop working and the guy who built it may not be enthusiastic any more.
I had a technical problem with this site today – I was trying to make some changes to the way the contact page worked following installing a different form plugin, and discovered what appeared to be a little bug in the theme I’m using. So I installed the latest version, to see if this fixed it.
It didn’t, but it did improve the look of the site a bit, so I went with it and carried on trying to tinker with the navigation menu (in case you’re interested I had added a “thank you” page which I don’t want to have a button in the navigation, but it was all or nothing – despite the correct tick being in the correct box in the control panel).
Anyway, I got a bit carried away and thought I’d change the background image of the site, which then broke the whole layout!
A quick search online, and I can see plenty of others had found this happened to them, but the developer of the theme hadn’t replied for several weeks, so it seems that his enthusiasm for a free project may have waned slightly.
New theme installed, and some fiddling required. Some plugins didn’t fit the layout quite how they used to and I had to pick a few new pictures. But an hour and a half later and I’ve got a fresh new look to the site. Shame I only wanted to spend 10 minutes on it…