When I was approached to speak at the WordPress Singapore meetup, I immediately thought of sharing my experience in designing in WordPress.
My husband and I had been running our own brand design company since we were dating in the early 2000s. I started offering website design services built on WordPress from 2009. In those days, the only way I knew how to “customize” a website was buying a paid theme and tweaking the colors to suit the brand.
However, that was not exactly customizing a website. That was merely adapting a paid theme to the company’s look and feel.
Custom Web Design with Elementor
A decade later, I came upon a paid theme done with Elementor. That was my first experience using Elementor. When I realized how easy it was to use Elementor’s drag and drop feature, I immediately paid for its Pro version.
Now, customizing websites was my selling point. Although every website should have the same flow of a header, body and footer, I was able to do so much more for my paying clients.
Zee the Tech Fairy
After the Covid pandemic in 2020, I stopped taking in website projects as I was hit with major depression. I took an elaborate leave from work. It was only in 2023, after helping a dear friend, I started offering WordPress website tech support to SEO blog writers as the Tech Fairy.
From working on paid themes and then customizing WordPress websites for clients, I learnt how to work on WordPress themes that are used by these SEO blog writers. Most of them are on Kadence and I had a couple of websites on Generate Press.
Working on these different builders on top of WordPress taught me to adapt and be more flexible. I also learnt that designing for corporate clients is totally different from these blog owners.
Aesthetic vs Functional Websites
While my previous corporate clients were more particular on the aesthetics of their website to carry their brand colors, my blog owner clients are more concerned with the functionality of their homepage.
Yes, only the homepage. They are more concerned with how functional their homepage is as the rest of their website showcases all of their articles they have already written.
Consistent in Header and Footer
One of the main important things to remember when working on different themes or builders within WordPress is that they are meant to help you set the look and feel of your website.
You will always need to set your header and footer to show the consistent information throughout. These header and footer are usually set once and are seldom changed.
Designing in WordPress for the Last 20 Years
In the last 2 decades of my experience designing in WordPress, I learnt that different niches have different needs to their websites’ look and feel. As the years progressed, I have also learnt to be less dependable on multiple plugins. The minimal plugins, the better.
Working with different niches taught me to be more flexible when I think of website design. Some clients may value aesthetics more and some focus on functionality without much concern on aesthetics. And then there is definitely a group of people who would want a good balance of both.
My journey in these last 20 years have made me advocate for WordPress. There will always be the camp that thinks WordPress is complex. But my stance is that WordPress can be as easy as A to Zee.
