It's 6am on Sunday morning and I'm sitting on the balcony of my accommodation here on the Gold Coast. From here I can see the waves rolling in on the beach not far away and away out on the horizon I can see the lights of a ship as it slowly moves up the coast.

Below me a part of Australia that never seems to sleep is beginning to come alive just that little bit more and I'm sitting here hoping that the next five hours will fly by so that Steve and I can get back to day two of the Word Camp convention that we're attending.

Over on Rated Hot last week I mentioned that we were attending this convention and I urged anyone who read that column not miss any chance they might have of attending meet ups, workshops and conventions that might happening near them ... and after just one day of this Word Camp I've got to tell you guys the same thing.

Steve and I have sat through a day of very interesting talks brought to us by some very knowledgeable people. We've worked with WordPress almost from the very start and we still do work with it but in just one day we have learned so much more about it and even Steve ... who doesn't have a high opinion of any content management system ... now wants to see what he can do with it.

We've seen how WordPress can be used for online shops that can sell anything from real estate to instant downloads for music ... we've seen how WordPress can be used for community groups and even social networking and I'm sure that many of you guys have used it for all those things too.

No doubt you've used it as a direct marketing tool ... to provide information with some advertising tacked on ... you may have even used it as the basis for a pay site. Like many of the people at the convention you've pushed WordPress way beyond what the guy who created WordPress ever envisaged when he released the first version of his content management system but I doubt that anyone has ever used it for what the keynote speaker at the convention uses WordPress for.

This lady is a brilliant person ... she has multiple degrees with Honors ... she is currently working towards a PhD ... she has worked in a variety of industries and has built up and then sold several different businesses ... and now at a relatively young age she uses WordPress to help her remember her life and to survive just a little longer.

That may sound just a little strange until I tell you that this lady suffers from a very rare form of dementia that is slowly destroying her brain. So she uses WordPress to help her remember what she has done through the day ... who her friends are ... and even who her family is.

And by doing that she not only helps herself to remember but she pushes her brain to do things that it should have stopped doing long ago. Her doctors are at a loss to explain how she can still function because her memories and her ability to think should have disappeared by now. Sure, there are times when she struggles and her address to the conference was not without pauses as she tried to find her place in her notes and remember what she was saying. When people asked her questions she struggled to remember the answers, but she still functions at a higher level than some ordinary folk I know and far beyond what anyone expected of her since she was diagnosed with this disease.

So don't be afraid to look at taking WordPress way beyond what you're using it for now. If this lady can use it to keep her brain functioning then with a little help from plugins and developers WordPress will do just about anything you want it to do.

Genesis
As we all know if you want to change the way a site looks when it's built in WordPress you use a theme that works with the WordPress framework and there are plenty of themes for WordPress that are available out there. Some are paid themes ... that you can pay a little or a lot for ... and there's a myriad of free themes available too and with this industry's hunger for anything free most of us opt for those free themes.

Don't feel bad if you use any free theme that catches your eye ... as I said, most of us opt for anything that's free ... but if you're serious about building something in WordPress that will actually work as you want it to without a huge amount of tweaking and finger-crossing then you really do need to start thinking about paid themes.

But when you do decide to make the change to paid themes don't rush in blindly because there are paid themes that are worth the money and then there are paid themes that aren't worth a cent.

After this convention and some time spent listening to a talk given by a web designer we're going back to the office to look at the Genesis theme. Yes, you have to pay for it ... a whole $59.95 ... but one license allows you to use it as many times as you want and across as many domains as you want.

It seems to be a theme that is customizable in so many different ways and you can even have a different design for different pages within the same site simply by choosing some options in the control panel. There's also quite a community that has grown up around this theme and that means that there's plenty of help if you run into trouble so check it out and while you're looking at Genesis have a look at these sites as well ... designsbynickthegeek.com ... genesistutorials.com and billerickson.net

And while you’re looking at sites perhaps have a look at VaultPress.com. If you’re too busy ... or too lazy... to back up your WordPress databases then maybe VaultPress can help you.

See you next week.

02/20/2012 - Tales from the Street

01/23/2012 - Getting Inside Their Heads

01/17/2012 - Planning to Survive

01/09/2012 - Headlines and Creeping Jobs

01/02/2012 - What Are You Planning for 2012?

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