When I first heard about WordPress, people talked about it like it was a joke — the cheap shortcut for people who couldn’t “do real coding.” I wasn’t looking for money, fame, or even a side hustle. I just wanted to know what the fuss was about so I could talk with authority the next time it came up. What I didn’t know was that I was picking up a stone that would later prove to be gold — taking me from clueless newbie to community leader, and from replacing demo content to designing websites for real clients… and even offer consultancy services
“The thing you throw away may be the thing you look for tomorrow.” — Ugandan Proverb
Scratching in the Sand
People often ask me:
“Moses, tell us about your WordPress journey.”
I always laugh and say: “Ah, my friend, it’s the story of the stone that turned out to be gold.”
In life, we pick things here and there. Like children at the seashore — a shiny shell here, a bottle cap there, a flat stone for skipping on the water. You never really know which one will be precious until life polishes it for you.
For me, that “stone” was WordPress.
Back then, WordPress had a bad reputation in my circles. I have a computer science background, and among my peers, real developers stayed up late wrestling with raw code until their eyes were bloodshot.
WordPress? “That’s for people who can’t code,” they’d say. Even teachers, IT technicians, and random tech hobbyists had an opinion — and it wasn’t kind.
But one day, while working as a school technician, I saw my friend Mr. Dumba mention WordPress on a teachers’ WhatsApp group. He had just started using it to build sites and was offering to journey with some people.
I thought: “Hmm… let me check this thing for myself. If it’s nonsense, at least I’ll know. And if it’s good, I can talk about it without looking like I just fell off the mango tree.”
I wasn’t looking for money. I just wanted to have an opinion. You see, I’m the kind of person who enjoys jumping into conversations with some authority — even if I learned the thing yesterday.
My First Meetup – Lost in the Blocks
My first WordPress Meetup was all about Gutenberg. This was around 2018 — actually 2018. Gutenberg was super fresh and not even fully launched yet
Laurence was introducing this “block editor” thing. Everyone was nodding seriously. Me? Everything went in through one ear and politely left through the other without even greeting my brain on the way out.
Just as I was wondering if I had wasted my time, someone said:
“If you’re here for the first time and you don’t understand anything, that’s okay.”
Inside me, something jumped: “Eh! That’s me you’re talking about!”
The Mind-Opener: Offline Development
Then, Mr. Lutaaya introduced us to building WordPress sites offline.
My friend, this was a million Dollar revelation.
Until then, I thought websites could only be built online — which meant needing fast internet and a good computer. And in Uganda? The Internet was like a stubborn goat — expensive and disappearing when you needed it most.
With XAMPP, I could build ten websites in a week without spending a coin on data. They were ugly, yes, but they were mine.
Falling in Love With Elementor
Not long after, I met Elementor. Ah! It was like discovering rolex after years of plain chapati.
No coding headaches. Just drag, drop, and design. I paired it with the Astra theme plus Starter Templates (now called Starter Sites) and started cranking out websites — or what I thought were websites.
If a client needed a hospital site, I’d hunt for a hospital theme with demo data. School site? Same thing. All I did was replace demo pictures of dogs with cows, or gardeners with goat herders, and voilà — “Nice website!”
The Drupal Disaster That Changed Me
Then came my humbling moment.
At WordCamp Kampala in 2019, a UCU student asked me to help her migrate her site from Drupal to WordPress. I said confidently: “No problem!”
A few hours later, I realized… big problem.
This wasn’t a “replace the dog with a cow” job. It needed a full custom theme. I needed knowledge on custom design which I had never paid attention to. I had no clue how to make one from scratch. That day, I felt like a boda boda rider asked to fly a helicopter.
I failed her completely.
But in that failure, a fire was lit. I decided to actually learn custom design.
Facing Real Problems
By January 2019, I built my company’s first fully custom site. It wasn’t perfect, but it taught me about responsiveness, optimization, and making sure a site looked good on desktop, laptop, and mobile. My first website was so beautiful on Desktop but so broken on Mobile. Everyone was complaining about it and I wasn’t seeing the problem until I saw it on my phone. Whoah, it looked so horrible that a witch’s house was more organized. Everything was flying to where it found peace but inside my heart, I was happy with the learning curve that was super achievable.
This was no longer a hobby. I was in deep. Curiosity building into a desire
A few years later, I learned Divi. I learned Gutenberg properly now known as FSE (Full Site Editing). I even designed my first block editor site and felt like a genius. A few years later, I used the block editor to design an entire WordCamp website, with a friend (a member from the local community) — and it worked beautifully.
The real treasure, though, wasn’t Elementor, Divi, or even my first paying client. It was the WordPress community.
Other tech communities can be stingy with knowledge. In WordPress, people shared openly. Sometimes the knowledge shared required resources that even cost money but people still offered. In my very first days Rogers offered me a starter package with hosting and management and by then we were using the .ml and .tk domains from FreeNom since it was free. The people I met in the community teach you how to do the exact thing they do for a living — no gatekeeping, no “first pay me – Awesome, Right? I thought so too.”
I realized:
Contributing to WordPress is like washing the plate you ate on.
It’s a privilege, not a burden.
From Local Meetups to the White House
I’ve spoken at Meetups, organized WordCamps, helped beginners install WordPress for the first time, and served in multiple WordPress teams.
And I’ve seen where WordPress can go. It powers embassy websites. It’s used by the Ugandan State House. It even runs the White House site in the USA.
If the White House trusts it, my friend, no one can convince me otherwise.
From Rock to Treasure
I joined WordPress at version 4.9. Now we’re in the 6.x series. I’ve grown alongside it — from a confused attendee to a community leader, from a “text-replacing” novice to a custom developer.
When I picked up WordPress, I thought it was a useless rock. But when I washed it, shaped it, and put it in the fire, it gleamed like gold.
WordPress is gold. Pure and simple.
“The thing you throw away may be the thing you look for tomorrow. WordPress was my stone that turned out to be gold.”