A New Look

When I became an Elder at the church I attend, I asked to take over their website and revamp it into something I was proud of. I can honestly say, I did and feel I achieved what I sought out to do. But as the church website was getting better, I was struggling with my own; becoming ever increasingly disheartened every time I went to it.

At first I really thought that it was the platforms. I loved Wix, that we used at the church, and I could easily manipulate it to what I wanted. WordPress, even though had been around a lot longer, seemed too rigid. I was not happy.

But I took a chance and wanted to do a full revamp of the Pens And Wrenches site. I’m glad I did. Though I would like more freedom Wix has to offer, I do like that it limits many things I cannot do for my own protection. It’s kind of like God limiting us in a way. Even though we have free will — look at what we have done with it.

Take Myspace for instance. Wow, I’m going back far aren’t I? It was pretty amazing wasn’t it. As the first social media platform it was revolutionary to say the least. You could do anything you wanted in that space, and had no limits. A person could manipulate their page just like a website, and the more you knew, the more dangerous it became.

But there was a problem…

The fact that you could do so much with it: change fonts, colors, pictures, wallpaper, run video, music, and so much more; the more code and programming ran together. The more you “fiddled” with things, the more errors in the code there were — and it showed. Pretty soon, Facebook started and limited what people could do with parameters in place for that not to happen. You couldn’t manipulate how your page looked; all you could do is choose what to add or take out. Everyone’s looked pretty much the same with the exception of the header and pictures used.

I have to trust the people of WordPress that they know a whole lot more than I do about web design, and limit myself to the things I want to do. It’s like our relationship with God. He gave the first human beings one rule: ‘Don’t eat from the Tree of Good and Evil.” (Genesis 2:16-18) What did they do? Eat it. Then sin, sickness, disease, among a plethora of bad stuff entered the world and death through sin (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12). Man got so bad that God wiped the slate clean and kept 8 souls on the Ark with sin still residing in them, along with two of every kind of animal (Genesis 6-8). God later gave us Ten Commandments to live by and a mirror of His standard of goodness (Exodus 20:1-18). What did we do? Disobey them all in one way or another. My point is that I am glad for the parameters that WordPress gives me. For without it, like God, I would have to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch (more often than I would hate to admit).