13 Points in Building a WordPress Web Site

I recently completed my first commissioned  web site.  I used the installed version of WordPress and the Atahaulpa theme to create the entire site to her specifications.   Cool, eh?  Here are 13 steps and/or observations about the process.

1.  Decide if WordPress is going to work.  Although there are still some elements I don’t know how to handle, I’m starting to think you can do just about anything with WordPress that you can do with any other site building software.  It just takes a good working knowledge of CSS.

2.  CSS is a little like HTML.  It’s a computer language used to communicate between computers.  I’ve seen it referred to as a “skin” to go over the top of HTML.  I don’t know or care about the finer points.  It gets what I want done, and that’s enough.

3.  Why not just go with Dreamweaver or one of those other site building programs?  Because once the site is set up, it’s much, much easier for those of us who don’t want to turn into programers to make changes for ourselves  with WordPress.  A ton can be done through the WordPress dashboard without worrying about things like root files and sqrl tables.  Much less scary.

4.  Getting everything pulled together for a personalized web site, however, does require some knowledge of those scary things.  The more specific, the more knowledge you need.  I’m still learning about sub-domains and multiple loops.

5.  Working with someone to bring their dreams alive can take you in unexpected directions and be a lot of fun, but is also time consuming.

6.  Help boards run by people who are condescending tend to be less than helpful.  You’d think people who came up with a program to bridge the gap between us mere mortals and CSS wizards would be a bit more understanding.

7.  After agreeing on a general tone and limitations, we bounced around the internet looking for graphics that would be appropriate.  She had much clearer ideas of what she wanted than I originally thought.  Most of my suggestions were shot down.  Though a bit round about, she directed me to a particular image from a graphics site.  This one little piece became the cornerstone for the site.

8. I set up a mock site on my own host that we used to create the site.  This proved a very, very good thing as it took quite a while to get everything ironed out.

9.  She already had a site up.  Importing was quick and easy.  Once we set up all the pages, we went through each one page by page making changes, including tossing some out and putting in entirely new ones.  This part is actually pretty easy with WordPress.  Setting up a page is like setting up a post.

10.  With little effort I can generally swipe anything I want to off the Internet.  Still, I am very conscientious about copyright issues.  This makes me doubly amazed when I run into people who are trying to make a buck off of things in the creative commons, like pictures from catalogs that are a couple hundred years old.  Does merely scanning something make it yours?  I think not.

11. Then we got really, really picky about colors.  Did you know that particular shades of just about any color can be picked out through a code?  But it doesn’t show up the same on all monitors because most people don’t stop and calibrate them.  That means red on my computer can look brown on someone else’s.

12.  Did you know that HTML relies on your computer to provide whatever fonts might be used?  The code can go to three levels of specificity.  Getting too fixated on your chosen font isn’t necessarily going to do you any good as some computers won’t reproduce it anyway.

13.  Site building takes more patience than I expected.  Not just a matter of waiting on the person I’m making it for, but dealing with bugs and glitches and plowing through code is enough to make you wiggy. After a while, all you can do is giggle.