WordPress for beginners? I admit, I was pretty excited about testing out WordPress this week. From what I've heard and read so far, this sounds like a great beginning for setting up an interactive library website. What better than an inexpensive (free!), customizable software program, that can be easily adapted to meet the needs of different libraries (and others). After testing it out this week, I wasn't hugely impressed, overall. (And having read and heard so much about Drupal this week, I'd be interested in giving that software a try and seeing how the two compare.)
In trying out WordPress with our experimental site, I made some basic changes (color, background, etc) to the appearance. That was the easiest part for me, considering I'm not trained in computers and do not have experience in programming or using html. I posted some comments and blogs (though had a hard time figuring out how to add to the blog page at first...). I added my own bio page, and uploaded a photo to go with it - a fairly easy process, given the instructions by our team leader. I experimented with choosing useful plugins, and activating them. (I got stuck, though, in that I didn't realize you then had to go into the widgets part of the dashboard to, essentially, activate them again, which didn't/doesn't make sense to me...) I even added a comment in using the "Quick Press" box, not knowing where my comment would show up on the site. It came out in a section by itself - not the comments or the blog page. Strange, I thought. Also, I was a bit frustrated by the fact that I had to keep going back and forth between the dashboard and the real site, and then the only way to get back to the dashboard was to use the browser's "back" button, or else close the window and log back in again.
Also, I noticed that the more widgets and such that were added to our site, the worse our site looked - with a long column of info (some useful, some not terribly) along the side, and nothing much in the middle except for some comments, which were sent before we switched to the blog section. There were several occasions when I was unsure what to do to solve a problem (such as having activated a plugin, but not seeing it showing up), and the only way I found to solve the problem was to blog about it, and ask our team leader. Now, granted, had I been creating my own site, and not had a team leader to go to, maybe I would've been more persistant in trying to troubleshoot on my own, but that may or may not have helped. I found it greatly beneficial to have a leader in this project. Something to consider were I thinking about setting up a site of my own...
Having now looked at and tried out WordPress (though only for a week), I must admit, I do appreciate its potential. I think that it's great that libraries can dowload it for free, customize the system to fit their specific needs, and access a wide range of help in its very large community of users. This appears to be a program that could be highly beneficial for libraies who are trying to make their sites more accessible and usable by all users, and would benefit by a free and fairly simple to use system. I also like the idea of being able to use Scrilio in conjunction with WordPress, to have one's catalog available in this format. WordPress has been touted as a program that's easy enough for beginners to use. I would have to say that that would depend on the beginner's and just what they're doing with WordPress. Being a novice myself, I found the site somewhat easy to use once set up, but only from the standpoint of "tweaking" what was already there, or doing things like adding blog postings, once I knew where to go to do it. I think, should I be the one setting up a site without any technical support from a department, or at the very least a tecnologically trained person, I suspect I'd have a lousy site and it wouldn't have been worth my effort.
That brings me to my next question. Should I be a librarian working as such in a library, I'm wondering just how much time I would have to devote to setting up and maintaining a site such as this. I spent a good deal of time just looking through plugins this week, trying to find ones that would be interesting and applicable to our fake site. THen there was the time spent posting blogs, commenting, replying to blogs and comments, and may other things which required daily attention. It seems again, that though it's easy enough for beginners to tweak WordPress sites, it might be that they would be best maintained by an IT department or a very tech-savvy person with the time and know-how to work with the system to create not just a useable site, but a good one.
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