It’s Friday.
For a month or so, I planned to create a new website. The project began with an offer from my web hosting company, Newtek. They were offered an unlimited hosting plan for 9.99 a month if I agreed to pay for 2 years in advance. The feature that made this offer attractive was the new platform would allow me to host multiple domains on one account. Since I have 2 domains, moving both of them to the same account would save a few dollars a month.
Now I like to save money, but it was just as important to replace the tired old hand-built website which was difficult to maintain. So I took the plunge and ordered a new hosting account.
After some research, I decided to use the WordPress platform. Fortunately, Newtek provides an automatic installer, so it was quickly installed through the hosting account’s dashboard. Next I began to tryout some WordPress themes.
WordPress (WP) is a web development tool that thousands of websites depend on. It is open source software and quite capable. The challenge is finding a theme that has both the desired design and capabilities wanted, AND has the ability to adjust and customize layout and colors, too. This is not an easy task as there are thousands of themes to choose from. Fortunately there are demo websites which illustrate the look and feel, however these do not always illustrate how much customization is available in a particular theme.
I selected a theme called Stellar based the fact it is designed to showcase photography and on a review. It’s a premium theme so there’s a charge to use it. It is responsive, so it’s supposed to adapt to various screen sizes (e.g. Desktop vs tablet vs smart phone)
Once downloaded, it installed easily into WP. Then the fun began as I tried to figure out which parameters controlled which effects. This is not an easy task as there are numerous menus and some parameters that effect a particular screen maybe spread across multiple menus. In the end it took several days to finally understand and become comfortable with the theme and sadly find out its weaknesses too.
After building a basic gallery or two, the menu structure followed. The ability to group gallery thumbnail images onto a page is a feature called Gallery Archive. This works nicely (once figured out) but it would be nice to be able to control the look and the order of the presentation on the page.
More posts to come on this subject…