learning styles, wordpress and design

If you visit my blog (yes, this blog, but maybe you read via Google Reader or some other type feed reader) right now, you’ll notice it is a bit of a mess.

A few months back, I decided it might be fun and useful to start learning more about WordPress. I have been experimenting with editing the themes to adjust colors and spacing for a while now, but with a limited knowledge of css, I’m usually just shooting blind and using trial and error. I bought myself a book on learning WordPress, but after a few days working through it, I gave up on it. But I gave up on that book at that time not WordPress in general. Just because I can’t learn it one way, doesn’t mean I can’t learn it some other way — this is something I’ve been trying to get Chloe to realize about herself, so I decided maybe I should apply the same theory to myself!

I spent time in March modifying a template for my TravelGoon blog (now defunct). For the most part, I was able to get it to look the way I wanted.

Now that it is April, I have switched my focus to this blog. Instead of simply modifying a few settings in the stylesheets, I have been trying to reduce the stylesheet of a simple theme down to the basics and to build it back up little by little, learning a lot in the process. I’ve also started editing the other files in the theme, trying to learn more about how the WordPress functions work.

Unfortunately, I’m not a graphic designer. I’ve ended up fighting to make things look how I think I want them to look, only to hate them. All part of the learning process, right?

Please excuse the mess here as I keep testing out new ideas. I realize that most people would do all these changes in a test environment and only release the final product. But as the theme of this blog has come to be about my learning and growing, I figured that the changes would be symbolic!