Mr Site

[Di Sandland]

I love wordpress and use it a lot in my working life (I'm a web writer) but don't you have to have the paid wordpress to be able to use the templates? I know their back-end stuff is second-to-none and I use it very successfully for SEO stuff (two of the sites I work on are consistently number 1 on google - and yes I am gloating but only a bit). But if I'm already tied into a contract with Fasthost there is no way I can justify then buying extra capability with wordpress. Although I understand writing for the web, I have no idea about the mechanics of site building so any advice and information would be more than welcome.

[Joe]

Ooo an expert web writer - I'll be after you for advice very soon (css is not my friend )!! Probably you know most of this, but I bet there are readers who don't, so forgive me...

Wordpress is free as are most of the templates (well over 1000 I think) BUT there are a collection of what they call "commercial" plugins and themes. Frankly, the few of these I've looked at are absolutely no better than the free ones, they just come with support so you can get them customised.

Wordpress is just something you load onto your website. Provided your host supports the things that Wordpress needs, you can put it on any host...

It's best if you think of Wordpress (and similar things) as a complicated webpage that someone else has written for you and on that complicated webpage are some secret forms that only you can see that change the way everyone else sees your page. You download it from Wordpress, change the passwords and things and then load it onto your own website .

But the thing I like best about Wordpress is that the tutorials for getting it going are brilliantly written. There are things you have to do when putting up a new site and they are complicated but Wordpress holds your hand and doesn't assume you know (or want to know) what it's all about!

As for contracts and tie-ins... fasthost.com certainly support all you'd need to run Wordpress on your existing site (you just need PHP scripting and MySql), almost all of them do! You can try it out by setting up a blog page on your existing website and when you like it, just point the main entry-point at Wordpress... there are tutorials on Wordpress that tell you what to do step-by-step in English (well, American).

Now, about my css question...

[Di Sandland]

oh, cheers Jo. And you can ask anytime about the writing side of things - cept for now cos I've had enough and I'm logging out. PM me

[Joe]

Ooo, a quick trawl about the interweb suggests that this e-Commerce plugin/ is considered the top of the tree for making shops on Wordpress... I'll give it a go and report back (in a different thread, sorry for hi-jacking again).

[jille]

Justhost offers wordpress as one of the free site builders. i did a wp blog for a little while but I didn't like the blogroll thing down the side, can you get rid of it? I might have a play and see what i can do with it
thanks

[Joe]

Yes, all those items in the side bars are configurable - though we might need to beg Di's help with any style sheet mods...

I'm not advertising Wordpress btw. I think it's a really good package for people who want to get stuff up on the web without getting all tech-y. I hand edit php, html and sql for my sites because I'm odd enough to think six hours spent trying to get all the words to line up is a good use of my time!

[Di Sandland]

I think, Joe, you might have given me more credit than I'm due. I am a content writer - so I can get you to the top of google with your content but somebody else does all the style thingies! Any content help you want, no probs whatsoever.

[Di Sandland]

Justhost offers wordpress as one of the free site builders.

Duh! I hadn't even noticed that! Shows how long I've been sitting on my hands over this. I bought the disandland URL a few months ago now but have done nowt with it. I want to use it for my silver work, which not many people have seen yet to be honest.

[Joe]

another promising css guru hides under the coverlet! I'm going to be stuck using frames forever!

[agent_44]

Di, Wordpress is free open source software - you can install it on your own hosting or use theirs, and there are thousands of third party templates out there you can use (many also free).