Q&A Session: From Web Hosting to WordPress

Starting this week I have the priveledge of having my husband Darryl writing some of my posts for me!  See – he’s already doing my homework for me!  These posts will go through a variety of subjects related to setting up and maintaining a site like this, taking the photos, and building/DIY’s. We really want these to be interactive posts, so if you have questions, please get them to us via a comment, email us with form on the Contact page, or through my Facebook Fanpage and he will do his best to answer them for you.

Today’s topic is an overview of the all the decisions we made in creating our blog. I have received a lot of comments concerning how to build a practical yet well designed site. I am very fortunate to have a resource like Darryl available to me for setting up and maintaining my site. Thanks Darryl!! This Q&A session (and future ones, if they are popular), and the more detailed How To’s that will come out of them are for those of you who may not have as much help as I do.

“Darryl, Say Hi to everyone!” said Jodi.   “Hi!” said Darryl.

Jodi: What is the first thing you did when you started my site?

Darryl: I needed to choose a company to host our website(s). There is a lot of choice out there. I ended up choosing Bluehost because I could demo the control panel (cPanel) that you would use to control your site, and they had great video tutorials on how to do most of the necessary tasks. I’m not going to lie; I was pretty intimidated getting into this at first despite having a fairly strong computer background. Once I used the demo for a while I saw how easy it was to administer the site; it is all point and click operations. For example, it literally takes 30 seconds to create an email address for yourself @yourdomain.com. Like I said before, there is a lot of choice in web hosting companies. I know people who are using Dreamhost and HostGator and like the service. Most of these services range between $4.95-$9.95 a month to host as many sites as you want and more email addresses as you could realistically use. I settled on Bluehost because the feature set vs. price seemed right to me, and I didn’t have to prepay for a few years in advance to get the low price. You *may* be able to make a better choice, but I don’t think you can make a wrong choice on this one.

Jodi: How do you get the .com for your site? And why choose .com?

Darryl: After you choose the name you want for your site (much harder than it seems), you need to check to make sure the .com/.net/.ca etc domain name is available to buy. The .com extension is the best known and internationally recognized, so it is usually a good idea to start with that. You can have multiple domain extensions all redirecting to one site, so you can have yourname.com, .net, etc. Each country also has their own extension (.us for the USA, .ca for Canada, etc). You can either buy your domain straight through your web host, or through a company like GoDaddy, which is probably the best known. The absolute easiest is to do it with your web hosting company because it keeps everything together in one place to manage. There are a few more steps, and more sites to log into, if you buy domains in one place and host elsewhere, but you can usually save a few bucks doing it that way.

Jodi: Which blog platform did you choose and why?

Darryl: I chose WordPress as the platform for this site. It has been around for quite a while and has a large developer community, which means there are lots of great plugins and templates to choose from. I also have a few friends who have had blogs for a few years now and they all use WordPress, so I knew I could get good advise and help if I needed it. From the cPanel on our web host there is a button that installs WordPress for you. Once it is installed you are ready to go. It comes loaded with a standard template to get you started.

Jodi: So how do you make a site look nice?

Darryl: Once we chose WordPress and had it installed on our web host, the next step is to add a template. A template is what gives your site a unique look and function. Search “WordPress Template” and you will be amazed at the amount of templates out there. There are some really good free templates, and a bunch of so-so ones. I chose to go with a paid template, because we were after a more unique look, and because they -usually- are better developed and have more features. I purchased a license for our theme at ThemeForest.net, which has an amazing (if not mind-boggling) selection of themes to choose from. You download the file to your computer, then upload it to your web host and then activate it in your WordPress Admin site. If I lost you after the “download” part, contact me and I will try to walk you through it. Paid sites range from about $10-$50. If you plan to have more than one website be aware that most of these templates are licensed for use on only one website. The free templates do not have that restriction. If that was a little too overwhelming, contact me through the contact page and I will try to help. Hopefully I can have a step by step type resource created eventually.
The only challenge I have found with Templates is that each one is configured just a little differently, which can make it difficult if you want to change to a new one at a later date.

Jodi: So far in the process, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently?

Darryl: Yes. In the process of creating some other sites after I finished yours, I found out about a different kind of WordPress Template, called a framework. There are a several frameworks that exist for WordPress and they attempt to solve different problems. My take on them is that they are made by the smartest of the smart developers, so they are typically more secure and more robust than a standard theme. Some of them are for developers, some are a single theme that is highly customizable albeit with a certain level of expertise, some are highly customizable with drag and drop type functions, and the last group rely on a “child theme” to be added on top. Depending on your level of creativity, interest, and determination, you can find the right fit for you.
For all of the other sites that I have in production right now I am using the Genesis Framework. You can customize the Genesis framework itself, or add a child theme on top. I chose Genesis because it is quite highly regarded and I like the idea of adding on my choice of themes on top. There is a growing amount (about 40 at last count) of child themes to use with Genesis. I can easily change the look of a blog in minutes by changing themes, without much behind the scenes work. For the more creatively inclined, the Headway framework is a blank canvas that you can edit with their intuitive quick start wizard. From there you can drag and drop any element in and make the site look exactly like you want. This will be amazing for some and overwhelming for others. I wish I had found out about either of these two options before I bought the theme that we did. Not all of you will want to develop multiple sites like I do, but everyone will want to tweak or overhaul their blog at some point. You pay a bit more for this, but it is worth it if you plan to a dynamic website; prices start at $79.95 for Genesis (including a child theme) and $87 for Headway.

The Simply Inspired Home blog will be converted over to the Genesis Framework when we are ready to “redecorate”.

Jodi: Okay, so now we have our blog all hosted and template chosen and all that, now what?

Darryl: There are some core plugins for WordPress that I would say are must haves. Plugins can be downloaded and installed right in the WordPress Dashboard.

• Akismet (The BEST at catching Spam comments)
• All In One SEO Pack (Gives you all the fields necessary to get good SEO results on your blog)
• After The Deadline (contextual grammar and spell checker)
• Google XML Sitemap
• W3 Total Cache (Speeds up the loading speed of your blog for you visitors)
• WordPress Editorial Calendar (Allows you to plan upcoming posts and display in calendar view)
• WP Security Scan (does a security audit of your site and fixes, or shows you how, any concerns)

Jodi: I think that is enough of this talk for today. Alright people, I’ve got Darryl’s (mostly) undivided attention for the next little while to answer some of these questions, so fire away. Depending on your requests, there may be a second post going through how to set up a WordPress site for the first time, setting up google analytics, web stats and all that important yet geeky stuff. It seems myself that I have become a version of Geek as well lately…

Other future Q&A posts with Darryl will be on topics like Photography, DIY, Renovations, furniture building. If any of you have specific questions for me to “interview” him on those subjects, please send them to me via the contact page email form.

I Hope this was helpful to some of you. We look forward to helping some of you out.