About the WordPress Journey
Greetings and salutations!
My name is Telian Adlam, but everyone just calls me Teli, and I’ve been online in one way or another since about 1996. However, I didn’t get into internet marketing seriously until 2002-2003 when I started searching for that elusive be all and end all money-making project.
Well, let’s just say I was burned more than a few times and in late 2003, I decided to set up my first website dedicated to helping others avoid the pitfalls I encountered on my “making money from home” journey. This website was seldom updated because it was created the old fashioned way — plain HTML documents. Each update I made meant I would have go in and restructure the entire website.
Discovering WordPress
One afternoon while staring lazily at the HTML document and dreading the update, I told myself there had to be an easier way. That’s when I decided to try Movable Type; after a painful 2 hour installation process, my new content management system was online and it just sat there. Believe it or not, MT was not as user friendly back then as it is now and integrating a design was even worse.
Back to the drawing board. I wracked my brain a bit more and remembered that I had downloaded a blogging script the year prior, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it at the time. But, I was ready to take a second chance on it — the only problem was I couldn’t remember the name or where I had found it.
About another month (of praying) went by and completely by chance I found what I had been looking for and it was called WordPress. After downloading it (version 1.0 something back then), I had it installed and had my original design integrated within 2 hours. Ever since then, I developed a ongoing love of the software.
Transforming WordPress into a CMS
Back in 2004, I was one of the those people stretching the limits of WordPress to completely transform the look of a standard blog to a static website (i.e. turning WordPress into a CMS).
The client’s previous website had already been established and was a complete bear to manage. It was rarely updated although it was a site which needed to be updated almost daily. So, I decided to set her up with WordPress and her first objection was “I don’t like the ‘blog’ look!”
After much tweaking and shifting and planning, the new website was released and the client was thoroughly impressed. And since then, the trend of converting WordPress into a content management system continued…
In fact, when I debuted the original design in the WordPress support forum, I was met with many e-mails from people wanting to do the same. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the easiest thing to do and certainly not for the faint of heart. To put it mildly, it required a lot of code hacking to accomplish.
Thank goodness that all changed as WordPress evolved. Now, with the completely revamped theme system, just about anyone can use WordPress as their content management system. Using WordPress as a CMS was once a mystical art that only a special few knew about, but my goal is to shatter that misconception.
You, Too, Can Use WordPress as a CMS
There are already plenty of great resources out there which explain how to set up WordPress as a CMS (most free), but they also assume some level of technical knowledge of WordPress. If you’re looking to get straight to the point and learn start to finish how to create an affiliate website using WordPress, then I certainly recommend purchasing the How to Build an Affiliate Website Using WordPress course.
(By the way, in case you’re curious, this entire site is powered by WordPress — yes, that includes order processing and delivery, support forum and customer management. Just imagine the possibilities.)