Reaching The Other Side

So as it turns out getting my own site hosted with a custom domain was the easy part.  Once I secured the domain and set up WordPress (WP) I had a lot of work ahead of me.  In order to have a functioning, professional looking, site I needed to find a base theme & customise it to look and work the way I want.  THAT is the hard part.  In the end it took me about a month (and a lot of frustration) to get it to 90% of what I was hoping for when I shelled out the cash for the site hosting and domain.  Here’s why!

While WP is a fantastic free and open source environment for creating websites it seems to have a missing piece.  As I found out immediately WP is currently geared toward 2 communities.  The first is the complete novice and for them WP is a great quick solution that offers just enough to let you produce a reasonable site.  It doesn’t offer much customisation but you can get something out there with little experience and even less complication.  The other community is geared toward the more hard-core developers out there who understand the development languages that are utilized to program a site.  PHP and CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) are scripting languages used to define the look, feel, and action of a web page.  PHP requires at least a basic understanding of programming in order to pull from it the value that it can really deliver.  Clearly over my head! CSS is designed to be a little less daunting but still requires at least a bit of education before you can make it do anything more than change the colour of text.  So, you ask, what about those of us who want a bit more than basics but aren’t genuine code monkey’s?    The answer turns out to be very unclear.

After much searching and a whole lot of cursing the day I plunked down my credit card I found something of a bridge between the two communities.  For a fee (like everything else that solves a problem) you can buy certain WP themes that come with a complete set of settings that make the changes to the PHP and CSS files for you.  All you need to do is select the setting you’d like to change from a pre-set list, what you want to change it to and it makes the changes for you.  Unfortunately finding a theme that has both the look & feel & functionality you want, as well as, having the settings pre-defined isn’t that easy.  I got lucky and someone suggested a theme to me that turned out to have 90% of what I was looking for.  A little effort on my part, a little help from some friends and the online forum from the theme developer, and now I am about 95% there.  The theme cost me $US95 but saved me from having a custom developer create one from scratch which would run several thousand dollars so it was worth it.

In the end, a little elbow grease, a little luck, and a little money got me almost all the way home.  It’s not a perfect solution so I think there is room for the WP community to further bridge the gap and release more themes with pre-defined settings.  In time, I think that’s exactly what will happen.