Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]

I started my WordPress blog last summer as a learning experience so I could offer more to my graphic design clients. For me, this has been fun, fun, fun. I’ve only scratched the surface in blogging.

In the past two days, I’ve helped my Willowgreen client, Jim Miller, set up and customize his own blog—The Contemplative Photographer. In the past three months, I’ve studied WordPress, revised a blog design to match his taste, and tried to set up the blog on his server. His server wouldn’t accomodate the PHP/MySQL technology. Then another client, Janet Newell at Trilobite Media, pointed me toward Blogspot. In one morning, I was able to set up a blog, and edit the stylesheet to display a variation of Jim Miller’s blog design. The next morning, Jim and I oriented ourselves to the basics of posting on Blogspot, and he has already written two posts.

That is when I decided I needed to expand my learning experience by setting up a second blog—a Blogspot-hosted weblog named … and a time to knit using one of their standard themes. Now I have a point of comparison between the two. I find it easier to compose a post, insert images (that I keep on my server rather than the WordPress server), preview posts, and edit posts on WordPress. I find it easier to revise a theme “look and feel” on Blogspot. Also, Blogspot offers other services that I’m looking forward to trying such as Google’s AdSense and Search options.

This process reminds me of choosing a computer or software. Each has its own strengths. Each, its own drawbacks. The consumer needs to first decide what his/her use will be for the product then make a selection that will best serve that purpose. For many years, I used QuarkXpress for publication layouts. I encountered several production problems with that software and now use InDesign. I used Freehand for vector illustrations, but changed to Illustrator when a new version Freehand presented too many production problems. I’ve used PCs, but find that a Mac serves my purposes better in the graphic design industry. Although I have a certain degree of brand loyality to MacIntosh and Adobe because they have consistantly served my purposes for the past twenty years, I’m always open to innovation. My standard is, to use the tools which help me do quality work efficiently.