Why I Chose WordPress To Build Boofkay.com
For years, WordPress intimidated me.
The first time I looked at it, I saw menus, settings, plugins, code-looking stuff and about a hundred opportunities to click the wrong button.
I wanted simple.
I was comfortable with drag-and-drop website builders, so I avoided WordPress and tried just about everything else.
Wix.
Squarespace.
Google Sites.
GoDaddy.
Duda.
Even Zoho.
I remember using some of those early drag-and-drop builders when they were incredibly basic.
Over time, they all started moving toward the sections, blocks and containers we use today.
And eventually WordPress became a lot easier to approach.
But the analogy that finally made WordPress make sense to me was this:
Wix is like renting.
WordPress is like owning.
There’s nothing wrong with renting.
A lot gets taken care of for you.
But when you own the house, you have more control over what you build, what you change, who you hire to work on it and where you go next.
That was important to me.
The Website Was The Advertisement
I used Wix for years.
And for a long time, I blamed Wix for my frustration.
I’d build something that looked great on one screen and terrible on another. I’d move something two pixels over, check another screen size and suddenly wonder what happened to the website I had just designed.
I knew I had the creative ability to help businesses with advertising.
I knew how to come up with ideas, offers, words and visuals.
I just couldn’t get my own website to show what I wanted.
And that was a problem.
If you’re a local roofer and your website is ok, people aren’t blaming the roofer.
You get a little bit of a pass.
You’re there to fix the roof.
But if you’re an advertising agency telling businesses you know how to get attention, communicate clearly and make things look good, your own website better back that up.
Mine needed to look good on a desktop.
It needed to look good on a laptop.
It needed to look good on a tablet.
Most importantly, it needed to look good on a phone.
I was advertising creative advertising.
The website was the advertisement.
I Needed A Change Before I Exploded
At the time, Wix was offering new editing tools, Editor X and eventually Wix Studio.
I didn’t want to spend more time learning another editor.
I was already frustrated.
I felt like I had the ideas in my head but couldn’t get them onto the screen the way I imagined them.
At some point I thought:
If I’m going to spend all this time learning something, maybe this is the time to finally learn WordPress.
Then I Found Ferdy
This is where Ferdy Korpershoek enters the story.
If I was going to learn WordPress, I needed someone who could explain it without making me feel like I was slowly being poisoned with boredom.
I needed somebody entertaining.
Somebody patient.
Preferably somebody funny enough that I wouldn’t fall asleep halfway through configuring a plugin.
I needed Ferdy.
Ferdy’s tutorials helped get me through the door.
I started watching.
And watching.
And rewinding.
And watching some more.
Eventually you develop a dangerous little thing I like to call YouTube confidence.
You watch enough tutorials and suddenly think:
I know WordPress.
No.
You watched someone who knows WordPress.
There’s a difference.
I Made The Same Mistake Again
Once I had WordPress and Elementor in front of me, I started making the exact same mistake I had made with Wix.
I was trying to do too much.
I wanted to customize everything.
Move everything.
Change everything.
Make every screen interesting.
Make every section different.
And then eventually I realized something that changed the way I build websites.
Stay in your lane.
I’m not a coder.
I’m not a web developer with 15 years of experience.
I’m not even sure I would call myself a web designer.
I run an advertising agency, and I wanted to design my own site because I wanted to understand the basics of what it actually takes to get a website up, running and working properly.
I consider myself much more of a creative artist.
Give me the framework.
Give me the lines.
Then let me fill them in.
That’s where I’m strongest.
The words.
The offers.
The images.
The videos.
The ideas.
The strange little things that might make somebody stop scrolling for two seconds longer than they normally would.
Once I understood that, everything changed.
Simple Takes A Lot Of Work
Steve Jobs talked about how much work it can take to make something simple.
I understand that a lot better now.
Making something complicated is surprisingly easy.
You can pile on animations, videos, effects, moving backgrounds, buttons, widgets and clever layouts all day long.
But if the visitor doesn’t understand what you’re saying, none of it matters.
And if your beautiful desktop design turns into a complete mess on a phone, what’s the point?
The challenge isn’t adding more.
A lot of the time, the challenge is knowing what to remove.
The words need to do their job.
The images need to create an emotion.
The offer needs to make sense.
The visitor needs to understand what to do next.
I Still Want To Throw A Cinder Block Through The Monitor
I laugh now, but it’s only a mouse click away, that helpless feeling. You know what you want to do. You do it, but it doesn’t work. You try and try until your patience dies.
Then you look at all the buttons, the settings, the customer chats, the different windows that lead to a brick wall, trying to navigate it all just to get someone’s attention – your attention.
WordPress still frustrates me.
Elementor still frustrates me.
Sometimes I change something and have absolutely no idea why another part of the site suddenly looks different.
There are moments when I can feel the frustration climbing up my spine and I imagine picking up the monitor and tossing it out the window.
I don’t.
I stand there.
I plead with the computer.
I walk away.
I come back.
I rewind the tutorial.
I ask ChatGPT.
I try another setting.
And eventually, somehow, I get through it.
That’s learning.
It takes time.
It takes patience.
It takes practice.
And it takes being willing to be terrible at something for a while before you start getting good at it.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
My dad used to say:
KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The older I get, the smarter that advice sounds.
Especially when it comes to websites.
If you’re a local business owner, you don’t need to build Tesla.com.
At least not yet.
You need a website that looks professional.
Works on every screen.
Explains what you do.
Gives people a reason to choose you.
And makes it ridiculously easy to take the next step.
That’s it.
You can get fancy pants later.
Wix Wasn’t The Problem. I Was.
That might have been the biggest lesson of this entire process.
Looking back, I could probably build much of what I’m building today using Wix.
Wix wasn’t necessarily holding me back.
I was fighting the framework instead of using it.
I was trying to reinvent the wheel when I should have been concentrating on making the wheel interesting.
That realization actually made me appreciate Wix more.
I kept thinking I needed a better tool when what I really needed was to get better at using the tools already in front of me.
WordPress helped me understand something I probably could have learned using Wix:
The platform doesn’t make the website interesting. You do.
So Why WordPress?
Because I was sold on WordPress.
The name.
The reputation.
The enormous community around it.
WordPress powers more than 40% of the websites on the internet.
Maybe some of the reason I wanted it was advertising.
I kept hearing WordPress.
I kept seeing WordPress.
In my head, WordPress had become the engine of engines.
And I wanted Boofkay built on that engine.
Learn More About WordPress
If you’re thinking about building with WordPress, these are a few good places to start.
WordPress.org — Get Started With WordPress
A good starting point if you’re new to WordPress, covering the basics of planning, installing and setting up a WordPress website.
The main WordPress help library, with guides for the dashboard, publishing, media, customization, maintenance, security and more.
The official WordPress plugin directory, where you can explore thousands of tools that add features and functionality to a WordPress website.
