Changing Our Focus or Reinventing the Wheel

Posted On: 2013-07-24

Oh man it is so cold here this morning!

Sure, down here in the southern hemisphere it is winter but where I live winter is supposed to be very mild ... but not today! Today I'm typing like a mad woman just to keep my fingers warm!

Yesterday I came across a very interesting plugin that may be just what you're looking for if you use Wordpress as the foundation for the sites you build.

The uniformity across an entire website that WordPress offers to anyone building a site is wonderful but there can be times when you're building pages that you need to change things around a little and that's where this plugin might be very useful.

It can also be useful if you're looking at building a website where almost every sidebar needs to be unique and only associated with one particular page. Now there are some themes out there that allow you to have individual sidebars and there are some plugins that will let you do that when you're using themes that are not so user-friendly and either of those options work well in many situations.

We've used one or other of those options on several occasions when we've been building websites for clients but what do you do when you're building a website that will ultimately have 365 pages and each one of them requires a unique sidebar?

Well one solution is a plugin called Page Builder. It allows you to build responsive pages using common widgets and drag and drop.

Of course you can use it with the normal page and sidebar set up but, for the two sites that we're building that will have large numbers of pages and individual side bars, we'll build a page without the normal WordPress sidebar and include our own on the main page using a column that will give the same look to the page as if we had used the normal page/sidebar layout.

Page Builder is available from the WordPress plugin directory and it's totally free ... there doesn't even seem to be a premium version because you get everything you need in the free one.

And that's a nice little blend into the second topic I want to talk about today ... reinventing the wheel.

A few of us can still remember the time when if you wanted to do something different on a web site you either had to find a coder who could write a script or you did it yourself. Of course that could take days to learn and even longer to build, debug and then install but things have changed.

Just the other day my partner was looking at a book he had bought to help him learn some scripting language that he wanted to use. I had stopped to ask him how he was getting on with it and he laughed and slipped it back into the bookshelf. He had just realised that he didn't need to spend all that time learning how to write some code.

These days it has all been done ... someone has already written the code for most of things that we might want to do on our websites and all we have to do is either add the code library to our website or buy the code in a nice little package that will work right out of the box.

That takes something of a burden off the shoulders of adult webmasters and perhaps the term we use to describe ourselves is even out of date. These days we don't have to write our own scripts ... we don't even have to write a great deal of HTML ... we don't have to waste time reinventing the wheel because it's all been done for us.

So maybe we're not webmasters anymore ... maybe we should now be thinking of ourselves as adult marketers and our focus shouldn't be on learning all those coding languages.

Perhaps now we should be looking at learning the 'language' of marketing and discovering all those important little triggers that encourage people to buy what we're selling instead of just grabbing the free stuff.

And just something as simple as changing our job title can have a major impact on whether we succeed or not. We can go on believing that we're webmasters and filling our heads with scripting languages that we don't really need to know much about ... or we can starting focusing on what is really important to our situation ... how to make sales.