Wordpress - am I opening a can of worms?

Soldato
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Guys I'll try and keep this as brief as I can.

Basically my mum is an artist and has relied on me designing her a simple CSS based website for the last few years, she now wants complete control of it herself as has heard about the simplicities of Wordpress. She wants a very specific theme which I've downloaded.
Now I just created a Wordpress account and it appears to have custom themes you need to do it all yourself.

Therefore after some light reading it appears I'm going to need to do the following:

- Buy dedicated Hosting and a domain name with a company like Easyspace/GoDaddy etc.

- Install Wordpress myself using an FTP programme (I've no idea how easy this would be but I do have some experience with databases and FTP)

- Once I've setup the website she'll then be able to log in from her browser and chance things?

Is this correct. Are there any particularly useful guides which will walk me through all these steps?

Many Thanks
 
Soldato
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All she would need to do is be able to upload content such as photos of her art work and the description/title.

I can sort the rest for her I just want to check with you guys I didn't have the wrong end with the stick. Cost wise what will I need to buy from Wordpress?

At the moment hosting + domain is going to be about £45/year so I'm assuming the only other costs I need to worry about are the Wordpress costs?

Cheers
 
Associate
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I'd recommend going for WordPress.COM not .ORG. .COM is a much more one-click package but is still WordPress. They host it for you, you buy themes and plugins to do what you want etc and there's a lot more support. WordPress is a whole language to learn in its own right building on PHP, HTML, CSS etc etc.

WordPress is very very powerful if you know how to use it properly, as a CMS. I guarantee you'll find limitations to any theme that you buy out the box as the dev hasn't had your brief to build it on. So bare that in mind.

Alternatively, you could find someone like myself who is a WordPress developer to build you a theme and have it designed by yourself, your designer or a professional designer.

This way, you can be very specific in what you want. If you're after a basic enough theme, just a portfolio site, you can get it done for about £1,000. It all depends how much you value the use of a website.
 
Soldato
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I disagree, I think buying your own hosting and domain is the way to go as it gives you full control over your site, if she can find a theme that she likes then just upload that to the themes folder, select it in the UI and then away you go, you could also check out ThemeForest for a better quality theme although you'd need to put your hand in your pocket.

Uploading content and images can all be done inside of the UI.
 
Associate
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A lot of hosting has WordPress one click install now as well.

I wasn't referring to FTP'ing as been hard, but the themes and plugins you get on .com are much better for inexperienced users. There's a tonne more support for WordPress.com users from WordPress itself. Hosting is hosting, you have the same control on WordPress.com hosting, it's just all part of the package and installed for you. Plus, if you screw something up, they're there to help.

You have to upload image through the UI anyway.
 
Soldato
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The theme she wants is designed specifically for artists displaying portfolios of work so I'm sure it will suit its purpose.

To be honest we were looking to do this as cheaply as possible as she already has a fully functioning website which works great, it's just I have to make the changes for her.

I just wanted to check with you lot I wasn't being naive in my expectations in how to do this. Are you saying it is fairly straightforward in me uploading Wordpress, applying this theme and configuring the website?
 
Soldato
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Right then cheers mate. There's a plethora of self help stuff on Youtube so I'll have a stab at this myself for now :)
 
Soldato
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Tbh, I doubt she's going to get a massive amount of traffic so maybe consider a free host like x10? You can still use your own domain on it, and if you decide to later on its cheap and reliable to upgrade to them.
 
Soldato
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Dunked does look good but again it's just too restrictive. It's ideal yes, but you can't even pick which page you want as your default welcome page. She doesn't want it to go straight to her projects she wants it to default to a page which tells you more about her as an artist.
 
Soldato
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If you purchase some linux shared hosting then wordpress is likely to be one of the those available as a one click install so nothing to upload other than your theme and content to each posting. The main advantage with this is buying your own domain name as that enables you to build a brand and if you grow out of wordpress everyone will still know your site address which you may then choose to use a different site software. The downside might be that it requires someone to know when an update to wordpress becomes available and for someone to update your install.
 
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Soldato
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If you purchase some linux shared hosting then wordpress is likely to be one of the those available as a one click install so nothing to upload other than your theme and content to each posting. The main advantage with this is buying your own domain name as that enables you to build a brand and if you grow out of wordpress everyone will still know your site address which you may then choose to use a different site software. The downside might be that it requires someone to know when an update to wordpress becomes available and for someone to update your install.

I'm assuming this isn't a simple process, or not the case of clicking an update button?
 
Soldato
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It is quite straight forward, it's just getting used to a process of how to take a site backup, how to restore from it in case something went wrong. Plus staying informed of updates and acting upon them ASAP so the site doesn't fall behind and become more susceptible to being hacked.
 
Soldato
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At the end of the day though as someone said above she's unlikely to get a huge amount of traffic. It's not as if I'm designing a website for a big corporation. If I did get hacked I'd just wipe it off the host and re-upload a backup.
 
Soldato
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There are plenty of backup methods too, including free plugins which will perform scheduled backups to a cloud account such as Dropbox (and you can control how many backups are stored in the cloud so your space isn't depleted).

It's a good idea to do a manual backup (again, most plugins will do this) if you're going to upgrade a bunch of plugins, your theme or the Wordpress core.

For scheduled (weekly) backups to Dropbox I use BackWPup and for manual backups I use BackupWordpress (it's much quicker than BackWPup).
 
Soldato
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All I can say is I'm impressed. An hour and I've sorted out the hosting, installed Wordpress (was supported by the host and a one click setup like you guys said it would be) and the custom theme and pretty much got her website almost up and running.

One thing that is bugging me though. Is there anyway of getting the page titles from showing up as headings. It's not the end of the world if not but she'd rather they weren't like that.

Thanks this_is_gay for the recommendations. Once we've got the site finished I'll set one up.

Oh final question, I've had to transfer her old domain name. We registered a new .com one but she wants to keep using the .co.uk as the primary. Is this going to make my life difficult when the transfer completes or will it be simple to install our wordpress website straight onto the new domain?

Cheers
 
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