If you’ve poked around here very much you may have read about my years of professional website design experience – skills I could use to do all sorts of wild things with this site. I’ve intentionally hosted this blog on WordPress.com so that I’m limited in what I can do besides write.
WordPress.com takes care of things that, on a self-hosted site, tend to lead me down all sorts of rabbit holes that have nothing to do with writing. Unfortunately, the downside is that WordPress.com also withholds the power to change certain things I’d like to improve, if only I could.
One of those things – and this one’s a biggie, for which I owe you an apology – is the link color. Honestly I’m super happy with everything else I’ve been able to do with the design given the limitations, but the fact that it’s hard to distinguish links is not good usability.
I know I can upgrade to WordPress.com’s super awesome package, where they will let me edit my site’s CSS (styles, to you normal folk, which includes the link color), but I don’t want to go down that path. If I do decide I must have style editing I’ll probably move the whole dang site over to my regular (and completely awesome) WordPress host, Lightning Base.
If you read posts in the WordPress app or receive them via e-mail, you won’t get all the pretty styling but you will get better usability. If you have trouble picking out the links, usability matters more.
Back in the day, I was quite good at designing sites but steered away from that when PHP and Java came on the scene as I just didn’t have time to devote in learning them as it was all just a hobby. I’ve thought quite a bit about going self-hosted, but to be honest, it would be something all consuming, something it appears you’re more than familiar with 🙂 There are so many tools now that make it literally a point and click interaction with all the hard stuff done behind the scenes. My blog doesn’t have the traffic to justify spending more than the Personal Plan I currently use. Perhaps when (or if) I get some more time on the “life” side of things, I might venture down the self-hosted route.
Self-hosted WordPress is overrated for the average person. Or the person who wants to focus on the reason he/she put the site up in the first place. But for nerdy experimentation, it can’t be beat 🙂