WordPress Girl

There are reasons people know me as a WordPress Designer – other than the fact that I’ve written the book on it. I’ve been developing/designing WordPress sites since 2003 – – and I think in blog time, that’s almost ancient. Occasionally, however, I do get requests for designs on different platforms (like Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, etc). Rarely – – and I do mean very rarely, I get an order for an Expression Engine site. I think in the 5 years I’ve been doing this – I can count on one hand how many orders I get for Expression Engine design. I don’t think that reflects the popularity of WordPress over Expression Engine, really – I think it reflects my services, mostly. People who know me, and seek me out, get the impression that I’m a WordPress gal. Which I am, make no mistake – but let’s face it – – I’m a designer and I work within whatever platform my client needs.

Because of the lack of Expression Engine requests I’ve received, I never really got into the program all that much, if at all. There was just no need to – and, quite honestly, no time for me to really dig in. And if I wasn’t getting the requests – – then I needed to focus on the areas that required my attention.

Recently, I was kind of forced into a site design for an existing Expression Engine site. I say ‘forced’ like it’s a bad thing — and it’s not. Let’s just say that certain circumstances happened and I was pulled, kicking and screaming, into learning the guts of a program that I’d never really taken a long look at before, due to an extreme lack of time to be able to devote to really learning it as well as I know some of the other platforms out there.

I finished the site today (whew!) and had a lot of fun learning the program. If you want to visit the site I just launched using Expression Engine – her name is Jade and her site is Jaded Sunburns. It was a learning curve for me – but stands in defiance to the old adage: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.

Jade already had several templates built on her Expression Engine site, and she uses a theme switcher to let you, the reader, decide which theme you want to view. Having those other templates already built in were a nice guide and I would be totally remiss if I didn’t give credit where credit is due to Danalynn – her original coding for the previous, existing templates were a huge help and sent me off into the right direction. (*hugs* Danalynn)

Jade uses some custom features on her blog, that aren’t necessarily inherent to Expression Engine, like:

• Theme Switching
• Private Posts
• Social Bookmarking (an installed Module)
• Tagging (an installed Module)
• Polls (and installed Module)
• Static Pages (another Module)
• Plugins, such as: Twitter Timeline, Magpie, Who’s Online, and more

Things like static pages and private posts are something WordPress does on the fly – so that was a bit different for me. And on 9/24 – WordPress will release the final version of 2.3 that will do Tagging on the fly, as well.

Expression Engine is very feature rich, with built in modules for a Photo Gallery, Forums, E-Commerce, and more. I’m happy to add Expression Engine Design to my repertoire of services offered at E.Webscapes. At my core, though – I’m still a WordPress girl at heart ♥