Working on this new site has actually been my first foray into using WordPress, if you can believe it. I’m not unfamiliar with the world of blogs, nor am I unfamiliar with the world of content management systems. However, I’d always used Blogger for the former, and Coranto (a perl-based news publishing system; was around before even Blogger existed, and predates RSS, for the most part, but very very customizable).

Wanting to put the benefits of each of those together, I knew I had to finally foray into WordPress. Moreso, I’m currently working on a website for a client that will almost certainly be using WordPress as its CMS. Working on my own portfolio site was a good way of figuring out how its internal mechanisms worked, especially since said project would push the system into ecommerce territory.

For creating a portfolio site, WordPress’s beginnings as a blogging system has its upsides and downsides.

As for its pro’s, WordPress, like other populist blogging platforms, are built with the author’s sanity in mind, so the process of creating new posts and publishing them are as streamlined as possible. When most of my time should be spent on finding and executing creative (and sometimes uncreative) work, the less programming and fiddling with FTP I have to do to showcase my latest projects, the better. I’m sick and tired of sites I had in the past that were functional on the front-end, but a pain to work with behind the scenes. The lack of updates made me look like I hadn’t done anything recently.

Meanwhile, being such a popular platform as well as being open source, there was more than a wealth of templates, themes, and plugins at my easy disposal in order to customize my site to accomodate the requirements of a portfolio. I had originally picked out a theme (I know, I know, I should design on myself from the ground up, and I plan to at least customize this one in the near future, but otherwise I would’ve never gotten a site off the ground) that was so ridiculously slick that one would be surprised to learn it ran on WordPress, but in the end, I found myself having trouble figuring out its mechanics to alter it as I needed. The current theme I have now, with proper due credit on this site’s footer, feels more like a blog, but still looks different enough from one to have its own professional personality (at least I think so).

On the other hand, having so many options available also lead me to have to prune unnecessary features out of my theme as I saw fit. After all, the work, the visuals, had to be center stage, and I had little need for social networking features and other blog-centric accoutrements. I shed a small tear having to rip out features that has made WordPress such a rich and popular platform, but I feel proud that it’s all in the name of streamlining.

Which of course leads to WordPress’s biggest con as a portfolio platform: having to conform it into something it wasn’t originally made to do. I spent a week just trying to rearrange the most basic layout elements and features in my first go at creating this new site, and I spent another half day on this current incarnation, just to get it to display image galleries, and quicktime and YouTube links just as I want them to be. Had I built the site from the ground up by hand I would’ve known where every piece of code was located and could shuffle things around (relatively) easily, but using WP I had to constantly figure out workarounds and clever tricks (with the help of Google, of course).

There are still lots of workflow issues to figure out (I am still trying to figure out how to alter WP’s image thumbnail naming convention; currently because of it I am still tied to an FTP client, albeit in the most minor of ways), but overall I am really happy to be back scratching my updating itch, and hopefully this leads to tons of great business along the way.

Meanwhile, stay tuned, cause there are tons of projects that haven’t been put up yet, and many of those already up will continue to be fleshed out still.