“No Wonder People Pay You Loads of Money to Do This for Them”

I recently built a WordPress website for my son. He’s into bird and nature photography and I thought it’d be cool to collate his best images somewhere other than Flickr and Facebook groups.

I surprised him with it when he came home from college.

He tried to make out he wasn’t impressed, although I could tell from his smirk that he was secretly chuffed.

He’s never shown any interest in building websites, so I expected this kind of muted reaction. But it exists, and he has the domain name if he ever wants to use it in the future, either for his photography or something else.

A couple of days after showing him the website, he went for a photography session in Daisy Nook, our local country park. He grabbed a few nice images of a deer in the morning sun and asked me to show him how to add one of the pictures to his website.

So, I showed him.

To me, it’s a simple multi-step process. To my son, it was much more complicated than that.

After showing him each of the steps, he said, “No wonder people pay you loads of money to do this for them.”

I laughed it off, but he has a point.

When I build a website for someone, they tend to sit on the “I’ll leave it alone” side of the fence, or the “I’ll get stuck in and work on making the site better” side of the fence.

I don’t see many wobbling nervously on the fence itself.

But some do.

They’ll dabble with making changes and installing plugins, sometimes even having a go at creating page designs using the block editor, while being a little more cautious about the things they think might break the site.

WordPress has this effect on people. From the outside, it looks like it’s easy to update and easy to break at the same time.

And it is.

But I always encourage people to get their hands dirty and have a go. If you’ve got a decent backup system in place, most things that go wrong can be fixed. And if you’re making bigger changes, you can always work on a staging copy of the site first.

You might discover that you actually enjoy working on your website.

Or you might discover that you really don’t.

Both are fine.

There are plenty of people who aren’t interested in working on headlines, optimising landing pages or wondering why a plugin has suddenly stopped playing nicely with another plugin.

Which is cool, too.

That’s where people like me come in.

I can help with that kind of thing. All you have to do is ask.

And my son?

Well, he hasn’t suddenly developed an interest in WordPress. But he knows how to add a photograph to his website now.

And that’s probably enough for the time being.