The first real decision was not what to write. It was what to build it on.
Qysh Me means “how to” in Albanian. The plan was a how-to portal for a language that had almost nothing useful online. That is a serious content operation. The platform had to serve the content, not the other way around.
We were two people with no funding. So I made a call I still stand by. We built on WordPress instead of writing something custom.
That screenshot is the whole thesis in one image. Two people, a stock-ish theme, and already a real publication. Categories. A featured slot. “Të lexuarat” sidebars. A working comment system.
None of it was our code. Our first article was Qysh Me Hape Llogari ne Gmail? (how to open a Gmail account). We published it the day we had the idea, because WordPress had already built everything underneath it.
Do not build your own
Building your own system feels like control. Especially when you are technical.
It is not. For a content business, a custom CMS is a tax you pay forever.
Every hour on your own editor is an hour not spent on content. Same for the media library. Same for comments. And content is the actual product.
WordPress had already solved all of that. Better than we could have alone.
What WordPress gave us on day one
- A publishing workflow our writers could learn in an afternoon, not a manual
- A mature editor, media handling, and revision history for free
- Categories and tags to organize a growing library from the start
- A plugin ecosystem for SEO, caching, and forms, so we added capability without writing it
- A theme layer that let us control the look without touching the core
The real lesson
WordPress was not a compromise. It was leverage.
Two people ran something that looked and worked like a much bigger operation. Because we spent our energy on content and audience, not on reinventing a CMS.
Here is my advice to anyone starting a content-driven product. Unless your core innovation is the publishing technology itself, do not build the publishing technology.
Stand on a mature platform. Put your scarce hours into the thing only you can make. For Qysh Me, that was Albanian-language knowledge. WordPress is what freed us to focus on it.
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