Essay

A Comparison Between Github Coding and Wordpress

What are the most significant challenges for a new learner?

I'd say that the biggest challenges are just the learning curve of everything. It can be very overwhelming starting off with coding, mainly because of how many functions and commands there are. However, once one gets over that learning curve, and gets a handle on how HTML coding works, it's very easy to start digging into it and making a website... with exception of course to the mandatory "why the hell isn't this working???" moments one is bound to have when working with code.

The learning curve is a little bit easier on Wordpress, as that's more of a visual builder, but that too has its initial problems. Mainly with trying to navagate the website and trying to understand what everything is supposed to represent. If I may personally comment, I'm not the biggest fan of Wordpress's UI. It's not the worst, but it does feel claustrophobic and cluttered at times.

What advantages do you associate with one method over the other?

Generally, I think of Github vs Wordpress like this: utility vs ease of use. As I mentioned in the last section, Github has a fairly daunting learning curve because of how much there is to learn before you can make a decent website. However, once you do learn those fundamentals, the limit of what you can create practically has no limits. Wordpress, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. It's designed to be as user friendly as possible (whether it achieves that is up to the individual user). As such, complex code is simplified down to visual buildings and themes that takes seconds to create. But with this simplicity comes a price: restrictiveness. While Wordpress is easier to use, you're essentially limited by the capabilities of the theme selected; and even the most advanced themes are cellblocks compared to the freedom HTML coding allows.

What challenges are there for modifying the layout and organization of each site?

Without repeating the "utility vs ease of use" argument again, there are some things with Github layout coding that I've come to have some issues with. If you look at my website, you'll probably notice the background has some coloring issues for pages that extend down a certain ways. I was hoping to do a gradient background to help give the site a more fluid feeling, but stumbled across an issue here. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that layouts are very visual in nature, and since Github is a purely text coding program, you're more or less guessing how things will look once you save and reload. This can lead to a tedious and time consuming process where you type something, save, switch windows, reload, and check to see if the page did what you wanted it to. And if it didn't, then you have to switch windows again and either try something else or look up a solution.

What skills are necessary to learn and develop these sites in either format?

To avoid just saying "coding," I think there are three main skills that one needs to develop in order to make a decent website: structure, CSS, and layout sense. For structure, I'm not refering to the visual structure of the page, but rather the internal structure of the code. Specifically, the hiearchy and layers behind the scenes. For example, the body tag at the very top and bottom, the headers, the text, the image layers, etc. These are, more or less, the basic building blocks of a website, as websites are basically just different divisions and sections stacked and organized on top and within each other. Thus, understanding the different layers, levels, and divs is essential to working with both Github and Wordpress.

Next is CSS. If structure was how the different sections were organized within the code, then CSS is how everything will be organized on the screen. Whether it be alignment of a paragraph or the shadow under an image or the weight of a header, CSS is an essential part of making a website more than just small black text on a white screen. Likewise, CSS helps save time. I believe that most things done on CSS can also be done in the main code by modifying the tag info. For example, if I wanted to bold a word, I could type [b] (pretend those are angle brackets) in the text. However, using CSS, you can simply make a bold preset and call to it whenever you want a section bolded, rather than manually bolding it every single time. I cannot stress enough how much of a time saver this is, and that's only scratching the surface of what CSS allows a web programer to do.

Finally is layout sense. If CSS is the coding side of visualization, then layout sense is the visualization of... visualization. Basically, layout sense is having an understanding of what makes a website look good. And that's not just in the sense that it's pretty to look at. I said earlier that a small complaint I have with Wordpress is that the editor feels claustrophobic and cluttered at times. Having a good grasp on layout sense is a way to prevent such situations like this, as you'll understand what's a user friendly website and what's an eyesore. This can also help you save time with things like images, as it can be a bit of a pain to impliment them into a website without having an idea of how it will turn out in different screen sizes. I admit, this last bit is one that I struggle with myself, which is why I hope to get better at it as the course goes on.

What skills do you think you want to learn to improve on this website?

Just to quickly name a few (and try out list making):

Don't forget to also check out the Wordpress version.