tech ronin

Dipping a Toe into WordPress, Part 5

Guess who transferred her tokerud.com domain from Forest.net to Dreamhost? Guess who is now rocking the Thesis WordPress theme and that theme is running my tokerud.com site as a WordPress blog? Yeah. That would be me.

My tokerud.com site has about 6 *static* web pages so it was not a huge challenge to migrate those pages. But then I was going from a static homegrown website to WordPress blog. I knew nothing about WordPress prior.

In Part 4 of this series, I told you how Word Press for Dummies was the ticket for me to jump back into this project that had bogged down in February. I consumed the book last weekend. Now I'm up and running on WordPress.

Picking a WordPress theme was my sticking point. I didn't like what I had found in the fairly scanty free themes research I had done. I kept hearing about a premium theme called Thesis and started honing in on that. It turns out that there's a whole ecosystem rotating around the Thesis theme. The buzz is really good. I liked how it looked. I like Chris Pearson, the one man show behind the theme.

The price is $87 for 1 blog and $164 for more. You can start with $87 and then upgrade later for $77 to use Thesis on as many other blogs as you want. Given that I bill an hour of my time for well over $87, the price was no barrier. A really good theme will not only make my site more attractive and functional, but it will save me hours of work potentially.

So, I bought it and installed it immediately. I did run into a lot of questions many of which are still to be answered, but I'm totally thrilled to be up and running overnight. I've got lots of documentation and blog posts to read.

I was lucky yesterday to have my business associate, Scout Tomyris, helping out with WordPress and the Thesis theme. She didn't know it either but the company is great and she did some good things for the site. A couple of her accomplishments were to get some of our photos up in the upper right corner rotating through the site and figuring the best size for the photos. She also put up the Janet, Sally and Scout tabs (pages) for us.

I now am committed and will be learning more fast. Stay tuned. If you want to start at the beginning of the series, use this: Part 1.

Dipping a Toe into WordPress, Part 4

Yay! I'm finally back on my WordPress project. I must admit that after spending a fairly lengthy time choosing a web host: Dreamhost and then installing WordPress, I got stuck on choosing a theme. It seemed too hard to do on my own. [Link: Part 1]

This last week I found out that WordPress for Dummies, 2nd edition by Lisa Sabin-WIlson was released in late February this year. I had the misinformation that it was delayed beyond February. But no. Now I know what I've been missing.

I immediately ordered the book on Amazon. I considered the possibility of a Kindle version of the book but I'm glad I didn't go that way. First, the Kindle version is the 2 year old first edition of the book. What a disappointment that would have been. Second, it is easier to work with a physical book like this as you do want to flip back and forth between sections and pages easily. Third, the Kindle 2 version doesn't show tables very well according to reviews of the book on the Amazon site.

I love this book. It is highly readable and well done. It does what it says it is going to do. Perfect if you are new to WordPress. In my case, as an experienced blogger and person who has been a smalltime webmaster since 1995, WordPress for Dummies gives me a great foundation. I feel totally confident now pressing ahead with my conversion of my static tokerud.com website into a wordpress site with a blog at its core.

Three whole chapters of the book are dedicated to themes: Finding and Installing WordPress Themes, Understanding Themes and Templates and Tweaking WordPress Themes. Now that I've read these 3 chapters, I understand how themes are constructed and am much more confident moving ahead. There is more safety in themes than I anticipated. Sure there can be bugs in themes but I can see they are fairly modular so you could cut out the broken piece and substitute something simpler version that works while sorting out the problem.

The book made me instantly comfortable with the WordPress administration panel. I was quite impressed and began confidently setting things up to my liking. I feel well equipped to continue this project.

You can see my current tokerud.com site and compare it to my in-progress WordPress blog. Just remember that I've only done a little of the work so far and the look is probably a placeholder. But it should be an interesting comparison in the end. I am tempted to figure out how to create the look I have on tokerud.com over on my blog. I might. It would be instructive and the switch would be less jarring. [Next installment: Part 5].