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My First WordPress Site

Do you remember your first encounter with WordPress? I do. Looking back at how different things were then, I truly believe it’s grown much easier to get started. And we have so much more control when considering design options. This post is day 2 of the FromBlogsToBlocks campaign, celebrating WordPress 20th anniversary.

I first installed WordPress on my own domain in 2006, I believe. At the time, WordPress was still exclusively a blogging platform. Pages were not yet introduced, nor were widgets or custom post types. I had to build the database and configure my config file manually. At the time, many folks opted to install WordPress within a folder of their website. At the time, I believe my site was configured to be courtneyengle.com/wordpress. The top site was built with, get this, Joomla. But the blog content portion was WordPress. What a crazy configuration.

The default theme was also commonly referred to as Kubrick. It appeared the way you see in the information below.

https://wordpress.org/themes/default/

It would be at least several years until WordPress was truly ready to shine as a fully-fledged content management system (CMS), and shed the idea that it was just a blogging platform. By 2009 I had moved my WordPress subdomain install to the top level of my domain. I changed themes a few times and began blogging more consistently on the site. Traces of the original installation are still around on my site today. I have since changed my domain name a few times, but I keep the old posts to show how far WordPress and I have come in all that time.

Author

  • Courtney Robertson

    From high school business education to the WordPress Training team, Courtney helps people of all skill levels get their message out. She lives in south-central Pennsylvania, loves coffee, plays the mandolin, and has a very large vegetable garden.

    View all posts Open Source Sr. Web Design & Developer Advocate