Craig Allen

I started blogging on WordPress around 2008 after I got my first IT job at a small nonprofit. The main reason was to keep track of what I was learning so I could refer back to things I discovered when I needed to remember how to do them in the future. It was a now defunct site called “Open Waves.” “Open” because I believed in the free exchange of ideas and information, and “Waves” as in brain waves.

It made sense at the time.

I had been creating websites since I was 13, before CSS existed. I taught myself HTML by looking at the code in other websites, which at the time used tables for design and layout. It was messy, inefficient, and took forever. I found free hosting on GeoCities to proudly display my work. I then blogged for personal enjoyment on Xanga and even tried setting up a few sites on Blogger very briefly.

But once I discovered WordPress, there was no going back. I remember thinking at the time that although it was mainly used and marketed as a blogging tool, you could also create static pages of regular content. So it didn’t take long before I used it to create complete websites, whether they needed a blogging component or not.

From there I dove into theme development, and learned enough PHP to be dangerous. While I don’t currently create custom themes anymore, those years of developing my coding skills have benefited me in so many ways.

So, for the last 15+ years, I’ve used WordPress to build all the websites I’ve created for myself and my clients. I’ve trained and tutored people to use WordPress to maintain and update their own websites, and offer many additional services with WordPress at the forefront. In many ways, I’ve built a career from leveraging WordPress to design and develop solutions. Learning and implementing the WordPress Philosophy has given me the ability to help so many people.