Gutting WP

I'm working on a website designed to show off my designs as well as the designs of others. I can promote designers I admire and share cool art, resources, architecture, anything cool I find online. My goal is to build traffic through networking.

I began the site as a fully hand coded website, from scratch. To deal with dynamic elements I was going to create a WordPress blog and read the posts as JSON. I got it working perfectly... until I uploaded it. Then I hit the dreaded cross domain limitation. After wrestling with this for a while I decided to bite the bullet and make my site fully WP. BUT I grabbed a completely bare bones theme as a starting point. It was pretty much style-less. So it was a perfect choice.

I've gutted the templates and ported over what I had coded. Then I used WP methods to populate portions of my site from pages or specific category posts. It still has issues, and the look is weak, but the back end is nearly complete.

http://norman.atwebpages.com/

Underengineering

Am I the only one? Maybe I'm not a very good programmer. But so many times, when I see code snippets or scripts or packages, I end up ditching it and writing a super simple version of it. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like there is a lot of overengineering out there.

I look at my own code and it always seems so simplistic. It looks Duplo to everyone else's Technic. But it does what it's supposed to.

I do like minimalism even in code. It seems to me if something can be done with basic tools or minimal lines of code, that would be the way to go. Not out of laziness, but readability and maintainability. If that solution proves to be too basic, then it can be expanded. And increasing complexity - I would think - would be easy to do against minimal code.

Only make it as complex as it has to be.

That seems like a sound approach to me. Keep it light and flexible. Maybe I'm wrong. Feel free to give me an ear full if you want.  :)