This is a post for the folks who’ve dabbled in a bit of HTML and CSS, but haven’t been able to move on to JavaScript because the thought of something so complex gives them a chronic migraine.

WordPress has had difficult relationship with JavaScript. As WordPress is (or was?) predominantly PHP based, JavaScript has played second fiddle, but now, the core WP team are intent on making amends by utilising JavaScript as much as possible.

I’m going to debunk some myths about JavaScript, well, actually some facts, because most of what you think about JavaScript is probably true.

Fact 1: It’s complex

Yep, sorry to say it but JavaScript is complex. You can guess your way through CSS and HTML, do this enough and you’ll become an expert at both. To some degree the same is true for PHP (or at least you can “borrow” bits from others), but when it comes to JavaScript, it is complex, the syntax is an absolute mess and it makes absolutely no logical sense. At all.

Fact 2: It’s in a constant state of flux

Every couple of years something new comes along in JavaScript Land that everyone (in J Land) raves about. jQuery? So last year. Now it’s all about React, Node and who’s knows what. Unless you’ve got a brain like a sponge, you’re going to be a JavaScript dinosaur in no time.

Fact 3: It’s taking over the internet

JavaScript is everywhere. When done right it’s pretty slick. When not done right it’s an absolute nightmare.

Fact 4: You can make an amazing website without JavaScript

You don’t need JavaScript to make an amazing website, in fact the best sites work great when JS is disabled.

Fact 5: It’ll probably all end in tears

OK, this isn’t actually a fact, nor is it a hope, but Flash was king of the world and that died a sudden death. If a client-side UI language came along that was logical and easy to get to grips with it could easily eclipse JavaScript, but whether that happens is another matter.

Ta-da! After over a year of saying “hhmm, maybe we should build a new goingbold.co.uk”, here we are!

Ehem, so it’s uhh well umm 2 pages (well, a post and a page), and uum doesn’t have a menu (because it only has 2 pages obvs). So welcome to a JAMVP (just about minimum viable product).

One of our goals this year was to launch a commercial WordPress theme, one that was really flexible and helped folks achieve something. Say hello to Campaign Pro, a campaign-centric WordPress theme jam-packed with features to help folks engage with their audience.

And then we started thinking, if we’ve built Campaign Pro for others, why not use it ourselves, so we are, from today, we’re running our own theme right here, on Going Bold. This is pretty exciting for us, firstly, because we’d had ideas for a re-build of Going Bold for quite some time, here’s a beta that we started building:

As you can see, the design of the homepage was pretty much there, all we needed to do was flesh out the child page templates (which wouldn’t have been too different from the image above as we’re suckers for minimalism). But squeezing in development time between client work and Campaign Pro was proving a little tricky.

We didn’t set out to use Campaign Pro ourselves on Going Bold, but as we were developing it, and falling more and more in love with a WYSIWYG editor so simple, anyone could use, we saw so many opportunities.

We’re quite literally iterating our site in the open, starting with just one page and one post, and going from there.

We’ve got a few bits to add (a gdpr privacy policy for one), but we’re looking forward to using Campaign Pro everyday ourselves.