Work

This is gonna turn in to a long ‘series’ of posts at this rate of going but hopefully it’ll be of use to some of you….

• here is post 1
• here is post 2

This is post no.3…..

Today, i installed wordpress on hotelsrevealed.com. The site is hosted with dreamhost and out of every hosting company i’ve ever dealt with before, dreamhost have by far and away the best interface / control panel.

They have a ‘one click install’ section where you can quite literally install a variety of open source software solutions with one click. Now installing wordpress is easy anyway, even if you have to install it manually…. but dreamhost make it so easy that anyone can do it, no matter what level you’re at.

Nobody likes to see the default ‘kubrick’ theme on a wordpress site, or the infamous ‘hello world’ post. Design is very important to me – it’s the first thing users see and when you’re browsing through hundreds and thousands of sites, you quickly fall in to the trap of judging a book by it’s cover. If that cover is not unique in any way, it doesn’t stand out and therefore i’m unlikely to pick that book up and read it…

Anyway, moving on from the analogies… i spent quite some time looking for a theme. The most suitable one i could find was this one by SimpleX. I wanted something plain and simple and easy to modify and this one stood out. Right now, there’s nothing on the site only the default theme and a hello world post. But you can see already that the site is taking shape.

I chose wordpress by the way for this project mainly for it’s SEO perks. It’s tried and tested. I’m comfortable with it and feel confident when challenging the competition for top spot in google. If i was feeling more adventurous i would have used joomla but it just takes more time and effort getting joomla ready. This isn’t gonna be a massive site with loads of potential – it’ll be a small niche site so it makes sense to keep it simple and put the emphasis on content rather than features or flash stuff.

My next post will be about configuring wordpress and putting right all the wrong that comes with a default installation of wordpress.