When I decided to create this website, I knew I wanted to use up-to-date design patterns and technologies. Initially, while WordPress was the obvious choice for a blogging platform, I was really at a loss as to what to do for the rest of the content I wanted to publish on the site. At first, I contemplated designing a website from scratch, like I’ve done in the past. Along with a from-scratch design, I was thinking of designing and developing and custom content management system (CMS) in PHP (you know, just for “fun”). After about a month of thinking about this but doing nothing, I decided that custom solutions weren’t realistic.

Next I started poking around the web for popular CMS frameworks. I found literally hundreds to choose from, but none of them seemed very mature (especially after being so impressed with WordPress’ interfaces). I was reading more and more about people using WordPress as a CMS in addition to a blogging platform, but I couldn’t seem to find a theme that was both professional-looking and suitable for my needs. That is, until I happened upon a theme called The Morning After created by Arun Kale. Kudos to Arun, because his theme had almost everything that I was looking for. Having this theme is what pushed me over the edge into decided to use WordPress as a CMS. Given the excellent layouts in this theme, along with the awesome extensibility of the WordPress framework, I think I’ll be extremely productive in publishing content efficiently and in an attractive matter.

With this in mind, I can’t think of a better title for my first post here on my brand new domain. I’m diving into using WordPress in a non-typical way (as a CMS), and hopefully this is only the first step on my way to productivity and professional development.