I decided to make a new personal website. The last time I did this kind of thing was before the pandemic, and I did it with WordPress before, so my first instinct was to try WordPress again. But WordPress seems to have changed a lot since then. Or maybe I just forgot how annoying it is? Anyway, I found an interesting-looking theme to start with, but building on it is really frustrating.
Style changes don’t apply throughout the site when it seems like they should. I can’t change the font in the footer even though there’s a place where you can supposedly do that (you can select a new font but it changes nothing). I can’t move design elements around smoothly in the block editor, and I can’t seem to get out of the block editor either (although maybe that’s just a theme issue?). I’d like to make the background different on different parts of the same page, but I can’t figure out how to do that.
Am I going about this the wrong way? Do I need a different theme? A plugin? Should I use something other than WordPress? I’m annoyed with all of the AI stuff WordPress is pushing at me anyway. Do I just need to bite the bullet and teach myself CSS or whatever, given that I don’t want to vibe-code this site? Advice please!
edit: also, if there’s a better Lemmy community for this kind of question, please point me there!





Hi! Thank you so much. If you don’t mind, do you have any recommendations for someone setting up Bootstrap as a total beginner with no dev/design experience? I looked at a couple webpages about how to add Bootstrap to a WordPress theme, but most of the methods look like they’re way above my technical skill level. And I can’t find any Bootstrap-using WordPress themes that are available without a business plan (it looks like there used to be a few but they’re not around anymore and/or got moved to business only.)
Would one of these plugins work for me, do you think? https://wordpress.com/plugins/block-editor-bootstrap-blocks/ https://wordpress.com/plugins/wp-bootstrap-blocks/
Divi seems nice, but it’s too expensive for what I’m looking for. I think my former employer was using that with their WordPress site, which I added blog posts to a couple times (this was several years ago). But it looks I’d need to upgrade to a WordPress business plan and THEN pay $89/year on top of that if I wanted to use WordPress + Divi myself.