My First Website

This week I have been developing my very first website. My previous site had been designed by my talented friend and it looked stunning. The trouble was, whenever I wanted to make a change to the design or update the content, I had to find a willing designer to give me a hand. I wanted greater control and a site I could manage by myself, to be able to add and amend work, whenever I needed to.

I discovered WordPress.org, a publishing platform that’s completely customisable.

Creating my site was brought mixed emotions: confusion, excitement, frustration and a lot of despair. But I finally got the hang of it, chose a theme called “fjords01″ created by Peter Andre Jensen and played around with the different widgets to create the structure of the website. This is how it looks:

I learned about the useful WordPress plug-ins and activated the following:

• Category Visibility-iPeat by iPeat (Hides “uncategorised” from the category menu. I wrote an introductory post called “Recent Work” to introduce the work on the site but, because it couldn’t be filed under a client, the category automatically defaulted to “uncategorised”. I did not want uncategorised to appear in the client menu and this plug-in allowed me to hide it.)
• Custom Query String Reloaded by Moshu (Changes the number of posts displayed when viewing different pages. I wanted the home page to contain just very recent work so I set it to display only 5 posts. However, when someone selects a client, I want them to be able to view a lot of work, with minimal mouseclicking, so I set category pages to display 30 posts.)
• Kimili Flash Embed by Michael Bester (Embeds flash files into posts.)
• Wp-Sticky (Displays a post on the home page, regardless of the date it was published. I set the introductory post, Recent Work, as an announcement so it is displayed as the first post when you visit the site.)
• StatPress by Daniele Lippi (Displays real time site stats.)

It has been a lot of trial and error but I’m pleased with what I’ve achieved. There is still more to do – a personalised 404 error page and a new header image for starters – but I can continue to develop it over the coming few weeks.

Tags: plugins, wordpress.org