Is WordPress what I'm looking for?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to start up a new website and, as an exercise, am considering creating it using WordPress - I've never used WordPress before and am keen to experiment with it, and I also believe that it may have a useful feature for helping me develop the project that I'm working on.

However, before I take the plunge and start on this endeavor, I wanted to ask the advice of you experts here at CompilaExchange, giving you an idea of what I want to achieve and whether WordPress will allow me to achieve it.

Basically, what I want to create is a largely text-based website (not a lot of graphics) that contains articles - each article will be quite lengthy and therefore will need splitting into several pages so as not to be too long - so, at the bottom of each page it will need navigation links that say "Next", "Previous", etc.

I'd like the site to have a header with a custom logo and custom navigation buttons (which I can create in Photoshop).

To this end, I have a couple of questions:

1) If I created this site in WordPress, would I be able to set it up so that people could comment on the articles (which I'd like them to be able to do), even if I set the site up as a "CMS" style site rather than as a blog? Basically I'd like the site to function like a website rather than a blog, but with the facility for people to leave comments on certain pages of my choosing.

2) In WordPress, given that most of the site would be text-based, with most of the graphics being used things like the navigation bar, etc., would creating the site in WordPress allow me to input text from Wordpad, Noteboard, Microsoft Word, etc., into the site without having to go through the labourious task of manually inputting all the formatting code (line breaks, bold text, etc.)?

3) (A Compila-specific question) - Given that this site would be predominantly text-based and would only need one e-mail address, would Compila's Linux Starter package - http://www.compila.com/web-hosting/linux-web-site-hosting/starter-w... - with its 500MB of webspace be sufficient in size (in your opinion), and does that hosting package support the installation and operation of WordPress?

At the moment, this project is just one that I'm mulling over, but if I decide to go ahead with it, the above information would be very useful to me - so, if someone could please advise me re: the above, that would be fantastic. Many thanks, everybody! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Tags: compila, hosting, website, wordpress

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Harvey Raybould on January 16, 2010 at 2:58

Hi Chris,

Firstly good luck with the new project and yes in my honest opinion WordPress would be the perfect application for you.

Try to not think of WordPress as a blog, it is so much more than that now, but also has the huge benefits of a blog system.

It can be modified/tweaked exactly how you want it to be. The key thing is to carefully choose a good theme, one that suits the style you want. There are thousands of free and paid for themes available, have a look on WordPress.org or a search in Google for WordPress themes.

The theme can then be customised using CSS, so you can put in your own images, colours etc. As standard WordPress provides you with page navigation, however you might also want to consider using a "Related Posts" plugin. On Compila's blog, we use one called YARPP, this adds, automatically, related posts to the bottom of each article.

Inside the admin area of WordPress, you have an Add Posts section. In here there is an interface that lets you create the article, but there is also a facility to paste from Word. However, this is not perfect, and sometimes you have to put in bold text manually, or add line breaks to the end of a paragraph. However, you do this in exactly the same way you would within Word. i.e. highlight the text and click the bold button, or simply go to the end of the line and hit the return key. So you do not need to enter html code for this.

There is an html facility as well, just in case you wanted to enter some html code manually yourself.

The Starter plan does not support WordPress because you need to have a mysql database, so the Bargain plan would be the perfect plan for you. There is also an automatic installation of WordPress within the Cpanel. However, I would suggest a couple of options for you first. Firstly try wordpress.com, where you can set up a free blog site or alternatively I could set you up a Free Trial and you can try WordPress on here first.

I hope this helps and please let me know if you need any more information.

Regards

Harvey

Permalink Reply by Gerald Hornsby on January 17, 2010 at 1:43

Hi Chris

Welcome to the community! I use Wordpress *a lot* - I have several sites with Wordpress blogs set up, even one that has Wordpress Multi User (MU) installed, so I can create a number of blogs (usually travelblogs) without needing new domains.

As Wordpress has developed over the years, so it has become more than just a blogging platform, yet it remains simple to use. As Harvey says, Wordpress has a flexible theme (call it a template or skin) structure which allows you to change the look and feel of your site simple, quickly, and without losing any information.

I'm currently using a couple of sites (one mine, one for a client) instead of a static website. The beauty is that you have a "Latest News" facility (via the blog functions), as well as static pages for more traditional website information. Have a look at http://sunshinecoastwebsites.co.uk/ (which is my site), which is Wordpress with a fairly unmodified free theme. This one http://caxton-books.co.uk/ is my client - again, a Wordpress installation, but the theme files are being heavily modified to suit their design requirements (I'm in the middle of some changes to the layout, so ignore funny panels and the like).

The point is - you can use Wordpress for a whole host of website requirements. It's cheap, and easy to use, and their is a huge support network with themes and different plugins which extend the functionality of the basic software.

How many of the these text articles would there be? I'm wondering whether they could be put into a static 'page' rather than a blog post. In my sunshinecoast website, the theme automatically added comment capability to pages, as well as blog posts.

Good luck!

Gerald

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