My poking around in WordPress has empowered me to poke around with mum’s website and cook her up a custom theme.
Originally when I designed it (2008 I think?) I’d made it in HTML/CSS. A simple fixed-width layout with nice bright colours. I even had a splash page for it, such was the trend at the time ;-).
In September 2012 a committee member got in contact with me as he wanted to change the website over to WordPress. The Abbey website was hosted alongside my portfolio and website, so I was asked to set up FTP access so that the wordpress template could be installed.
Once they were all set up, I had a look myself I think this was my first proper experience with WordPress. I’d used CMSs before, but this was something new and wasn’t intuitive to me at first (all the theme customisation is in different sections, scattered about the admin area). I’d pop in every now and again, update the plugins and WordPress itself, copy over the posts from the Facebook page etc. just to keep things running. I’m not sure anyone other than me uses it any more.
Anyway, I’ve taken my old design and have added that in as the theme. As of now, it’s like we’re back in 2008 (but without the splash page). It isn’t responsive – back to the old fixed layout – but that’s something I can work on later when I know more what I’m doing in that regard.