My first few hours with WordPress

A few days ago I installed WordPress, because I wanted to create a new personal homepage and start blogging. And to showcase some of my writing and my music.

WordPress is fairly self-explanatory so I didn’t need a manual. And after finding the Radiate theme I quickly got the “parallax” effect I always wanted to have – not the best parallax I’ve seen (no pun), but better than the old static web-pages.  But I quickly hit a limit: I could find no easy and straightforward way to create a photo album I was happy with. The only solution seemed to be to download and use various freeware plug-ins, most of which overloaded my system with spam messages inviting me to upgrade to their “pro” version.

So I took a timeout, investigated a few other CMS systems, even installed Drupal – and after another hour gave up in frustration and returned to WordPress.

So far, WordPress seems to be a fine product. But it also seems to be a home for “bait-and-switch” theme and plug-in developers, promising you much but delivering next-to-nothing in their freeware version.  And so far, I am seeing a few signs that my web-hoster might also be playing bait-and-switch, trying to get me to upgrade to the “high performance” version.