I’m working on a friend’s website at the moment, so things have slowed in getting my new design up and running. Rather then let the site site and suffer, I’ve temp-skinned it with a theme that is at the very least goos looking and very functional. 
Please bear with me as I work. Thank you!
WordPress got wise, real wise. They’ve started to populate their new domain, WordPress.tv, with videos. This tickles me in ways I can barely begin to describe.
First: I’m a person who is very much supportive of people using the proper ending to their domains. The endings were created to help differentiate between content types. This way people would know from first glance just what the company is, does, and it’s intents.
And so forth…
Why else? Video Tutorials rock in my book! Reading a manual and jumping back and forth between pages, versus actually seeing what is being describe are two very different ways of learning. “Visual” people learn best by watching or interacting. “Abstract” people learn best from reading or looking at diagrams. I am a visual leaner rather then an abstract-text learner. So watching the videos as they -show- me what to do is exceedingly more helpful then slogging through pages after pages of Codex – of which some of it is not up to date!
Down side / Up side: It is not a “community” per say. Only certain people are allowed to post videos, unlike YouTube. This means a greater quality. This also means slower wait times as they put up more and more specific tutorials. They have to put the basics up first!
Go check it out! 
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This has been a rather educational experience and then some. Suffice to say everyone is trying to sell something, and often they are trying to sell you convenience wrapped up in a pretty little package. Not here. My services are by far much different, though I too can offer you that same convenience by doing much of this work for you for a fee.
Instead I would rather share with you the information and sites I’ve discovered that helped me. Yet as I do this I hope I do not “shoot myself in the foot” in the process of sharing what I’ve learned. I am a Web Designer after all.
So with a little bit of extra work, a lot of searching, and carefully selecting my keywords in the search engines, I’ve dug up quite a bit of information. This is my Journey into Word Press to CMS conversion.
CMS? For the non-tech-talk savvy, a CMS is short hand for “Content Management System” among other acronyms. What “Content Management System” means, to put it simply, is the back-end code that makes publishing web pages easier. It does the work of the monotonous tasks that normally must be done by hand. It does all of the of coding each page, for every page, in a site. All you have to do is create content!
It takes most of the repeated tasks, like coding the header and footer that are the same for every page, and does it for you while yet making sure it looks the same for every page. Well that’s a “Cliff Notes ™” version of the idea. For a clearer and more specific definition, here is a Wikipedia Article on CMS for your perusal.
So the idea here is that we are using WordPress to facilitate website building by changing the Blog software a bit. To some this may be “cheating”, but to others it is a form of efficiency and speed. To be sure, one should always give credit where credit is due. So here is a cheerful ‘hats off’ to the various creative minds that have put in the work and effort to make WordPress what it is today!
As you can see I’ve downloaded WordPress to run as my site’s CMS back-end. With the new version of Word Press you can use it as a Content Management System instead of just a blog. Since I do quite a bit of blogging, I figure I can use it for both.
So please bear with me as I work on the theme and re-style the site into a better web experience for you, my viewers!
To keep up to date with what I’m doing please see: http://draken_art.livejournal.com