I’ve been dabbling with WordPress since the late 2000’s. I’m not sure what the exact version was but I think it was around the Ella Fitzgerald days. One of my first clients actually pushed me into exploring WordPress and at that time I had no idea what was ahead of me, none of us did. The past 17 years working with WordPress has brought me into the mix on some unbelievable projects and taught me about countless niche businesses.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about those early days of WordPress, and really just my general involvement in the internet throughout my life. As we all step further into this new era of AI, I can’t help but compare this time in history to those early days online. Looking back over the past 25+ years it’s fairly easy (at least for the techies of the world) to mentally run back through the antiquated hardware, stacks of free AOL discs, ISP improvements, coding language evolution and the CMS battles over platform usage.
Projects on Projects
I’m writing this post as a bit of “call-back” to those early days online, at least my own involvement. I started my first WordPress blog (bigboomblog.com which now redirect here) as a digital scrapbook of my projects. My car and motorcycle creations, shipping container designs, Arduino chicken coops, and all the other random ideas that filled my life at the time. Ironically, the projects I’m working on now are oddly similar to those back in the day. However, the past 17 years haven’t produced many blog posts for these projects. I guess at some point the idea of writing about the projects seemed far less significant than actually moving those projects forward. Also, growing a business took a large portion of my attention. It’s wild for me to think about the number of hours I’ve spent living in the WordPress space over the past 2 decades but little of that time spent on my own sites.
Too Many Sites To Count
At this point in time I’ve built well over 500 websites. I’ve built countless WordPress blogs for writers and artists, close to 50-60 Chamber of Commerce, TDA’s and EDC websites, big and small Non-profits, and custom WordPress sites that break the boundaries of what this “cute little blogging platform” was built to do. I’m honored to have played a role, even a small role, in the evolution of WordPress on the internet. These sites were built out as I grew Big Boom Design here in Asheville and the High Country. While I grew my own business building website for other businesses I also got involved in teaching WordPress, Google Analytics, Adwords and any other Internet class the local community colleges would let me teach. Out of this came my involvement with the Asheville WordCamp where I helped organize, present and ran the all-day Precamp where we built 100+ websites as a big group. I’ve always been curious about how many sites and businesses that are up and running today thanks to the efforts of my Asheville WordCamp peers; and all those other WordCamps around the world.
I’m digressing a bit from my initial intent with this post but glad it’s turned into a celebration of WordPress and it’s involvement in my journey. The true intent of this article is to illustrate the depth and versatility of this little platform we call WordPress. It’s changed my life and lives of so many other people across the globe. For me, it’s be an outlet of creativity, documentation of wild projects, a collection of tails and tracks from the road, the cornerstone of my business for almost 20 years now, and I have a hunch that we’re about to see a whole new era of WordPress and the internet.
Looking Forward
As an optimist, technologist, and life-long-learner, I’m personally excited about AI and how things are about to change. It’ll be scary and exciting to say the least. There will no doubt be fortunes made and lives lost but I can’t think of a time in history where this hasn’t been the case with big technological advances. I truly hope we can all move through the next 20 years using the Internet, WordPress and AI (plus all the other platforms and tools) and push towards creativity, productivity and problem solving. We have an opportunity ahead of us similar to those early days of the internet. For me, I’ll continue to plow ahead with the tools and skills I have and the new skills yet to be learned. I’ll try to encourage others to dig into areas unknown and tackle projects far too ambitious to ever complete. Looking back and understanding how we got here is important but looking forward and plotting a path forward is far more important as we try to solve the problems at hand.
