I changed to Wordpress.org
I got to week 9 and I just wasn’t satisfied with the way my online magazine was looking. My theme was called Argent, which was the closest match I could find to suit the idea I had for my online magazine. I had a specific colour in mind that I wanted to use and most templates offered limited colour palettes. I wanted to limit the use of the colour black on my website, only using it as the body text of my articles and I couldn’t find any themes that offered this kind of option.
Additionally, the widgets section just didn’t look right and it was REALLY bugging me. I dislike the black shadow over the widget, and the way they were floating so awkwardly at the bottom of the page, as you can see below, and the template had very limited customisation options.
After many hours of playing around with different themes and trying to make something work, I couldn’t find anything that left me satisfied.
I then went off and created a simple homepage proposal of what I wanted my online magazine to look like and decided to seek a friend who has some website design skills. I asked if he could help me to produce something similar to this proposal:
He told me that I’d be better off creating a site from wordpress.ORG as opposed to Wordpress.COM which is the commercial side of Wordpress. I read the brief and it states we are to use Wordpress but does not specifically say that it has to be Wordpress.COM. Even if it were not allowed to use Wordpress.ORG, I still wanted to create the page and use it as a site proposal.
After speaking to James, he said that he doesn’t see a problem with using Wordpress.ORG, so I began developing my site from there.
We created a private Wordpress website (which means it’s hosted by another web hosting provider, in this case I went with the the web hosting provider “1and1″) using the free Wordpress source code (which is the content management system of Wordpress) downloaded from Wordpress.org.
Here’s a guide as to what exactly we did to get my website up and running on Wordpress.ORG:
Went to wordpress.org —> Clicked on “Download Wordpress” —> Read information and downloaded the latest working version of Wordpress
This way we were able to modify the Wordpress source code and themes through HTML and CSS (MaInly CSS) to suit what I had proposed.
If someone would like to follow this route that allows you to change the CSS and HTML as opposed to using the wordpress.com templates offered, there is a support page available with all the instructions on how to install (https://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress). Once installed, you have full access to change the CSS and HTML codes.
I’m very pleased with the outcomes!
