[Monolith]

Please forgive my web design puntering in advance.

I've registered a domain name for a site I wish to work on over time. I've currently got it hosted as a free Wordpress site and a CSS template plugged into it that bears little relation to what I want to ultimately achieve. I understand that with the paid $30 upgrade you can only edit existing CSS templates accepted by Wordpress (?).

My question is really: for a web design punter with a little bit of CSS assistance available is this the best way to go? I appreciate that what I'm asking is pretty useless but I don't know how to progress and don't really want to spend my time learning how to design at the expense of concentrating on the content at hand. Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[csl]

Buy hosting from someone. Heart internet are good, and have an easy wordpress install.

Trawl through http://themeforest.net/ or one of the other theme sites or search free wordpress themes to find a theme which is as close to what you want as possible. Then install it on your wordpress site.

Change it around if you understand a bit of code and hey presto.

[csl]

this advice is based on me lazily assuming you want a fairly simple site...

[dave]

I used wordpress and bailed on it after a year. Basically I felt it was too reliant on various plugins to do anything nonstandard (i.e. have a site that doesn't look identical to everyone else that uses wordpress), and thus reliant on the developers of those plugins to make sure that they still worked with whatever the latest version of wordpress was. And that's another thing, the frequent updates to wordpress were a pain to install (and I'm IT savvy and not an idiot) to the extent I just gave up trying to install them in the end. I think it would be OK if you're going to go down the line of paid plugins and themes, but then you may as well just pay for a proper managed web solution and let some other fool do the donkeywork. I found that by the time I'd pissed around doing a bit of coding to get a wordpress site to look right I could have written my own from scratch anyway.

I know a lot of people swear by it though, but I also no a lot of the people who swear by it also spend a lot of time they don't talk about fixing various problems with it.

[Monolith]

Buy hosting from someone. Heart internet are good, and have an easy wordpress install.

Trawl through http://themeforest.net/ or one of the other theme sites or search free wordpress themes to find a theme which is as close to what you want as possible. Then install it on your wordpress site.

Change it around if you understand a bit of code and hey presto.

I did do this (though not tweaked CSS yet) but realised I might need to look into paid upgrades.

I found that by the time I'd pissed around doing a bit of coding to get a wordpress site to look right I could have written my own from scratch anyway.

I know a lot of people swear by it though, but I also no a lot of the people who swear by it also spend a lot of time they don't talk about fixing various problems with it.

This is precisely the sort of user experience I was looking to hear about. A quick google about Wordpress sites and themes shows a lot of people are happy but when I start totting up the cost of everything, I'd probably be better to save some pennies and get a decent web design pal to help me from what you intimate Dave. I'm looking for something very basic. Presently I've plugged in:

http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/the-columnist/

http://wpshower.com/themes/imbalance-2/   is also along the lines of what would do for now. I've found a couple of articles about how to 'de-blogify' a Wordpress site but even they admit it's near impossible to avoid the impression that it's powered by Wordpress.

Indecision!

[Bubba]

Basically I felt it was too reliant on various plugins to do anything nonstandard (i.e. have a site that doesn't look identical to everyone else that uses wordpress), and thus reliant on the developers of those plugins to make sure that they still worked with whatever the latest version of wordpress was.

You need to take a little care picking plugins and not use anything that's not well supported, but I've not had this problem with Wordpress as much as I have with something like Firefox. 

And that's another thing, the frequent updates to wordpress were a pain to install (and I'm IT savvy and not an idiot) to the extent I just gave up trying to install them in the end.

Not sure when you stopped using it Dave but Wordpress updates are automatic now (i.e. self-installing) - literally 3 clicks if you have decent FTP access to your webspace.

You can create a very good Wordpress based site without spending any money whatsoever, there's a lot of high-quality free supported themes out there. You just have to spend a bit of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.  If you really like the look of a paid template and it's supported for future versions then they're usually relatively cheap considering the effort that somebody has put in.

What exactly are you trying to achieve with it Monolith, you mention de-blogifying it but why? Quite a lot of sites use Wordpress as a CMS, not just a typical blog but at the end of the day you might be better off using something different.

[Johnny Brown]

What Bubba said. I know a few freelance webdesigners and they all seem to have gone over to using wordpress as the CMS back end to all their sites. We've done a couple at work and it seems to work well and not at all limiting. Like most other things in IT, once something becomes the dominant platform the plugins/ support etc just snowball and it becomes a no-brainer. Last updates, as Bubba said, are just click, click, done.

[Monolith]

What exactly are you trying to achieve with it Monolith, you mention de-blogifying it but why? Quite a lot of sites use Wordpress as a CMS, not just a typical blog but at the end of the day you might be better off using something different.

I have a number of lofty business ideas that I hope will unfurl over time. I actually work as a Content Manager for the NHS at the moment and can appreciate the ease with which content can be readily uploaded/amended and displayed differently merely by adjusting the template style. Inasmuch as I can gather, you can't get access to the underlying HTML structure which is something that I would like access to for a couple of power geek friends to have a handle on intermittently.

From what folk say though and at the level my idea is at, Wordpress would probably be the best option at 20 fuck alls for CSS access and 10 fuck alls for domain name mapping. I've purchased maltoftheearth.co.uk but currently have about 5 mins worth of effort in testing the Columnist layout referred to in an earlier post:

http://www.maltoftheearth.wordpress.com

I do like this grid format but I wonder if I can remove the reference to it being a template designed by Billy Blogs at the bottom left of the landing page (probably not).

[Paul B]

for once there isn't a comment in the code saying "Don't delete this line" etc.

[slackline]

Could you not just use a regular expression to find the relevant file/line in the files that make up the the add-on, remove it then package back up again?

(NB - I've never touched Wordpress or their add-ons, and I'd also imagine it might piss off the author if they discovered they weren't being credited for their hard work)

[Bubba]

Inasmuch as I can gather, you can't get access to the underlying HTML structure which is something that I would like access to for a couple of power geek friends to have a handle on intermittently.

Are you familiar with the difference between hosted Wordpress, i.e. wordpress.com and the self-hosted alternative, i.e. wordpress.org ?

It seems that if you have a blog at wordpress.com then pretty much anything you want to do out of the ordinary is a paid upgrade.

If you host the blog on your own webspace using the free software at wordpress.org you can do what you want with it so you have access to all the template/underlying html and also you can install any theme you want without having to pay for the upgrade that wordpress.com would require.  Also, you wouldn't be paying for domain mapping, etc.

I suspect that for what you want to do you'd be better off paying for some hosting and building your own Wordpress installation rather than letting wordpress.com do the hosting whilst offering less flexibility and charging you for all the extras.  By the time you've paid $30 for the "Custom Design" upgrade, $13 for the "Domain Mapping" and $30 for the "no ads" you'd get more flexibility *and* save money by hosting it yourself with a decent hosting company.

<edit> Here's a page that gives more detail on the difference between the two flavours of Wordpress.

I do like this grid format but I wonder if I can remove the reference to it being a template designed by Billy Blogs at the bottom left of the landing page (probably not).

I suspect that a condition of being able to use that theme is that the author's name is included.  On a self-hosted site you *could* remove it but I never do - you're getting their work for free, why not credit them?  You could probably change the CSS to make it a little less prominent but still keep them happy.

[Monolith]

Are you familiar with the difference between hosted Wordpress, i.e. wordpress.com and the self-hosted alternative,

I wasn't really to be honest Bubba. I am a little more familiar now though having read around a little. I can accept that this project is a slow burner and as such I think I'm willing to consider going down the Wordpress.org route. I have some assistance available from friends to get the bones of a template or edit of one up and running. I'd just really like to avoid adverts for instance which you obviously need to pay to be removed. As you mention, once you tot up all these extras here there and everywhere, I'd be getting what I actually want for a lesser cost even if it does require me to learn a fair bit as I go along.

I had a recommendation for http://wordpresshosting.34sp.com/ who are based in Manchester and who seem to have a reasonable monthly hosting charge. I'd be grateful of any other recommendations also.

[Bubba]

Seems like quite a good deal but double check you have full access to the Wordpress installation in order to edit theme files, etc.

[Monolith]

Right, I've created my account with 34sp.com. They were super helpful on the phone and all the reviews I can find spoke highly of them. Their support number is also a standard UK number which is great. I've sorted the DNS details at my domain name registration and done a full install of Wordpress into the hosting control panel. Here's to a steepish learning curve!

Thanks very much for that advice Bubba. I definitely think that this is the way to go with a view to the future.

[Johnny Brown]

I created my first theme via this theme generator. Fairly simple, but it was a good place to start.

[Paul B]

I created my first theme via this theme generator. Fairly simple, but it was a good place to start.

is your site word press then?

[Johnny Brown]

Which one? The Abracadabseil one is, in part. The remake is ongoing and will be all WP - Aide has just done the BLoX one, entirely in WP.