I am a WordPress god! Ok, not really, but I _am_ enjoying the fact that I can now manipulate a WP theme pretty easily. It’s true – the more you use CSS, the more you play around with web design, the better you get at it.

I host a number of different websites for myself and for friends on my shared account, and I’ve been helping a guy who maintains one of those sites tweak a WP theme to force it to behave. He’s done most of the actual template work, taking an existing one and hacking it pretty heavily to change it to a very different look and feel. I spent a couple of hours IMing with him last night adding additional tweaks to the theme – like adding a navbar at the top of the header, dropping the sidebar completely from the theme (since it’s going to be essentially a static CMS once everything’s in place), and changing a number of other small elements. It was fun to realize once all that was done that it was a lot easier now than it had been the first time I tried to change and manipulate a WP theme back a year or so ago. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable both with how individual WordPress elements function as well as with CSS itself in being able to position and affect various things on the page.

From the first time I started teaching myself HMTL about 10 years ago until now, I’ve always enjoyed playing around with web page design. I’m pretty much self-taught, which is also why I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like to. I’m pretty well-versed in HTML and CSS now, and I know enough about PHP to be able to hack the code, though I don’t know enough PHP to write pages from scratch, much to my chagrin. But sometimes I don’t wonder if I shouldn’t go into the information technology business. I love playing with server-side utilities, I love hosting websites, and I love just building things out of code. It’s a hobby that I’m pretty passionate about. I’m just afraid that if I ever turned such into a business, I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

I don’t know if I’ll ever actually step into the IT business – it would probably require me to find both the time and the money to pick up formal training to finish filling in the gaps of my coding knowledge, and that’s not something I’m sure I’ll ever be able to do. But the prospect of being able to go freelance sure is appealing to me. I’ve always wanted to be self-employed. There’s plenty of time, though, so it’s an option that I’ve not completely ruled out yet.

I’m starting to think, though, that it might be time for me to create another WordPress theme. Anyone have any suggestions for layout and features?