You may be thinking, why is she using WordPress and talking about whether or not it’s worth the hype? In my experience as a nontechnical person trying to create a website for the first time, WordPress has made my experience exponentially easier.
According to Elisabetta Adami, “In sum, WordPress.org presents itself as being made for and by everybody, contributing for free within and for an egalitarian diversified community, and free for uses ‘limited only by your imagination’”(2018, p. 607). Adami essentially critiques the idea of WordPress advertising as a site for all. They continue to discuss how the website allows theme creators to eventually move on to a board of creators, of sorts. This shows a clear community WordPress creates through its users. This further contributes to the advertising of WordPress being open source, the community contributes to the development of the site, i.e., the themes being created by users.
“WordPress lets users create a website that feels authentic to them while still looking aesthetic and professional, not low-budget.”
Bridget Cunningham- influenced by
Adami, E. (2018). Styling the self online: Semiotic technologization in weblog publishing. Social Semiotics, 28(5), 601–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1504713
As Adami further writes, when people think of a professional website, they now associate that with a clean, aesthetic look. WordPress tends to favor themes like, abstract, clean, elegant, and modern, to name a few. That aesthetic may fit for many of the users on here like business websites or professionals looking to establish a portfolio. However, that can come at the cost of the individuality of the user. The case study examined by Adami on pages 613-614 demonstrates how WordPress can help users achieve this clean-cut look. However, that may not always be what users desire depending on their target audience. In this case study, Adami discusses how the bloggers website and style had gone through a complete change. Although this may sound catastrophic to many users, the original blogger was an active participant in the clean up of the original blog. This demonstrates how WordPress still allowed her to self-style the website but follow what WordPress deems “desirable.”
With all this being considered, I find the aesthetic WordPress recommends helpful. My personality is loud and colorful, and because of that, I think I would get too carried away with decor, colors, and add-ons. All in all, I find that WordPress is extremely user-friendly and will continue to become more fruitful to me as I grow more comfortable with it and explore what it has to offer.
Curious? Read more
- Adami, E. (2018). Styling the self online: Semiotic technologization in weblog publishing. Social Semiotics, 28(5), 601–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1504713
- Cabot, J. (2018). WordPress: A content management system to democratize publishing. IEEE Software, 35(3), 89–92. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2018.2141016
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