Coming to terms with WordPress

Here it is September and I’m just now making headway with my summer project – WordPress! WordPress is supposed to be simple to use, or so I thought…I figured it wouldn’t take much effort to figure it out since I know HTML and CSS. Boy was I wrong! I still don’t know where the HTML is hiding which makes it difficult to implement CSS.

I’ve gotten 2 sites set up and I’ve been helping Lee with hers, and it’s taken 3 weeks to do it! The free themes are pretty overwhelming; there are so many and they are set up to show you the blog page. I want to create websites where the blog plays a secondary role. I googled phototgraphy  themes for WordPress and found several good sources for premium themes. Themeforest is my favorite one stop shopping. The thing  I learned quickly about premium themes is that they explain everything the theme has to offer and lets you preview the pages. WordPress shows you a preview of the free theme, but it’s still hard to know what it will look like for images when all you see is the blog page with that boat image or pages of text. I like having things spelled out for me with appropriate samples.

I purchased a theme from Photocrati with 4 different ways to display images. I struggled for a week trying to figure out how the pages were created and how the menu worked…it was driving me crazy! There was a new update a few days after I purchased mine and it wouldn’t upload without making a mess. Photocrati responded to my email within a few hours but their advice didn’t solve my problem. After several attempts to fix things, they asked for my user names and passwords to take a look at the files. Their response was basically the same as the first time, the file was in the wrong folder…they gave me the same steps to try again. Isn’t this a good example of Einstein's  definition of insanity!

Here’s the deal in a nutshell:

Between Lee and I, we have 3 domain names, each one set up with its own hosting package with GoDaddy, and the Photocrati theme. My first install had a glitch that wasn’t apparent to a new WordPress user, I just thought WordPress was extremely difficult. As I noted before, the update completely ruined everything. I uninstalled the theme and re-installed the new version several times, I also uninstalled the WordPress application and re-installed it through GoDaddy. After numerous attempts, a whole day wasted, the thing worked. I don’t know how it happened but it works.

My biggest question for Photocrati is, if it was a simple matter of a file being in the wrong folder and since they had total access to my accounts, why didn’t they just move it for me? The folder was in the same folder as my other themes and the files were in the same configuration, I couldn’t find anything out of place and the solution they sent me failed twice, it would have been so easy for them to fix it, wouldn’t it?

My second site went smoothly. The license allows me to use Photocrati on as many personal websites as I want so I uploaded the same zip file to the new site. Don’t know why this worked the first time, but I’m not complaining!

Now for Lee’s experience…she had a domain name through GoDaddy so she set up her WordPress hosting through them too. Next she purchased the Photocrati theme. Every time she uploaded it, she got lines of text giving various error messages that pushed the dashboard off the screen making it hard to deactivate the theme. We both worked on her site, uninstalling both the theme and the WordPress application to no avail. As a last ditch effort, we uninstalled everything and I tried the installation on my computer. We’d become convinced that her firewall must be interfering some way. We discovered that I had to be an administrator for either of us to access her account from my computer which we can’t understand. So, starting from scratch, we installed the WordPress application again and then installed my copy of the zip file (which now worked on 2 sites) and nothing changed. It’s a mystery! Photocrati blames the way GoDaddy handles WordPress and GoDaddy says that there is a lot of trouble with Photocrati themes…neither attitude helps us! Lee has asked for her money back; we’ll see how that goes.

I downloaded Sandbox yesterday and I’m looking forward to playing with the CSS file so I can get a better understanding of how things work. I also start PHP and MySQL classes this week at Wake Tech, I’ll keep you posted. These are skills that seem very important to landing a job and they should make WordPress easier to understand. I’m also going to sign up for Lynda.com and see how those tutorials are.