Well, a couple of weeks ago I switched the platform that ran Not So Well Exposed from Pixelpost to Wordpress. At first I started playing with Wordpress just to get the hang of it’s theme system, but ended up cleaning the UI of the site and switching all together. One of the main reasons for the switch was the announcement that development for Pixelpost 2 was halted indefinitely and Wordpress has some core features that caught my attention.

Overall Wordpress is a bit bloated only for photoblogging, especially if you add tons of plug-ins. I haven’t really tested the two content management systems loading times, but I tried to get the most out of Wordpress so it should run a bit faster in some areas. Seeing it was my first Wordpress project I say it went pretty smoothly, but I did have to hack the CMS a bit more than I wanted to.

One thing at which Wordpress is better than Pixelpost is the “evil” SEO. I’m not really into creating the perfect content for search engines, but, I don’t want them to ignore me either, so having “pretty links” and adding some keywords to my content is a plus. And, besides, it’s sort of an out-of-the-box feature, unlike in Pixelpost.

Accessibility is another important feature of the current release, and this isn’t really a Wordpress thing, rather me paying a bit more attention to the code and to the way people interact with the website. The talk about accessibility comes up quite often in photography forums when discussing a portfolio or a photoblog, and many users think it’s irrelevant: “Why create an accessible website? It’s not like blind people come to look at my pictures!” No, maybe they don’t, but accessibility does not cater only the visually impaired. A keyboard based navigation system is imperative for the users who have impaired mobility. The left and right keys can be used to move from page to page on Not So Well Exposed.

But, the migration from Pixelpost to Wordpress wasn’t all Comic Sans and double rainbows. The hardest, most tedious thing to do was moving the actual content into Wordpress. Luckily it was only around 300 images, unfortunately, it was only around 300 images. Moving all the images I posted in 2 years of activity took a lot of time, because I had to rewrite captions for some, copy the keywords and stuff, but I managed.

In the land where content is king, content has to be treated properly. Links that reference the content, pages easy to use by most of the users and other behind the scene work won’t help a bit if your content is not the most important part of the experience. But I’ll be talking about the subtle changes in the layout that boosted efficiency in the next article that will be out in the following days can be read here.