Imagine you can create your own really funky foodblog with recipes, just the way YOU want it. Or a page with job postings that you want to be able to show and hide at your whim.
You can buy plugins for that, of course. Some of them are great! But as the makers seek to serve a larger audience, you may get confronted with tons of features you may not need at all. And often these slow your site down. Which potentially bums out your visitors and can actually affect your ranking in search engines.
Besides, you’re kind of stuck with what the makers consider logical, both in functionality and design. Which may not be logical to you at all.
I will demonstrate how I approached both cases like a programmer would, but in a very simple and straightforward way. I learned to work with custom fields and custom post types (which is not scary at all, take it from a girl who actually suffers from dyscalculia, a form of dyslexia with abstract stuff like numbers). Once you get the hang of that, you can create almost anything!
Do you need to know PHP? No! When I started to think about this approach, I knew virtually nothing about PHP, and I discovered you really don’t need to, to achieve goals such as a recipe website and a job site.
My demonstration will be done with Advanced Custom Fields, CPTui and Elementor Pro. However, I’m aware of the policies in general. I will not promote my own business and I will never state that these are the only useful tools to get the job done. There are plenty alternatives to these plugins with which people can use to achieve the same result.
Main goal is to show how the process of deciding how to approach setting up the structure of your records (posts) works. Which starts by grabbing a pen and a piece of paper!
- Anne
(PS The recipe website is my own and will go live in a few weeks, the jobs website is from a customer who willingly allowed me to use it as a case in my talk 🙂 )