I’ve been working a huge amount with WordPress sites over the past few months. Whilst I wish I could use Smarty templates in the themes to make them nice and clean, I’m making do with what I’ve got. Once you really delve into developing WordPress and understanding all the functions you really do start to see the real power of it. There’s a lot of talk about ExpressionEngine and Ruby CMSs being the best for large scale sites, but I haven’t used these myself – WordPress I think is great for both designer, developer, customer and visitor. I think the thing that held me back was thinking that you need a strict tabular design with WordPress but really you can take any website and convert it to an editable form for your clients, really good. Rant over!

2012 marks a year where I want to make a major change in how I do business, since the past few years have been relatively unsuccessful on a professional perspective. I’d say on a personal perspective things have been excellent, almost a 8 / 10. But this year anyway, I have debts to pay off, and changes to make. I talked about having a vision in an earlier post this year and any business changes that I make should be aligned really with one or more of these aspects of my vision. However, I’m not going to make any changes until I’ve got on top of my current situation – for the past few years I have tried setting goals and take on big projects but I am reminded of the following Bill Gates quote :

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Basically, I take from this the following – if you are already inefficient at doing what you are doing, and you try and heap a load of other stuff on top of what is already an inefficient operation, then everything is going to fail spectacularly. So, the head of my list for 2012 is to become larger than my current place… Huh?

You can advance only by being larger than your present place, and no one is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place.

The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.

A little quote I’ve taken to heart from the Science of Getting Rich there. Basically it makes a lot of sense. If you have things unfinished in your life, and you are trying to start lots of new things, then you aren’t going to get anywhere. The unfinished things are going to drag you back, and keep you in place.