At some point you may decide to take the leap from a pre-packaged online blogging platform such as Blogger or Wordpress.com and set up your own Wordpress installation.. It may seem like a crazy notion but if you choose the right host they will do most of the work for you. Also these days the very nice people at Wordpress have made the installation a fairly painless experience with excellent software and tutorials.
Then of course you need to install a new theme. There are thousands available – wordpress.org/extend is a good place to start. Then you will need to use an ftp client such as Filezilla (free, open-source and excellent) to upload your new theme (this will go into the following directory www.your_blog.com/wp-content/themes). Then activate from your Wordpress dashboard by going to dashboard>design>themes then click on the theme you’ve uploaded.
At some point you may wish to start to edit your theme – changing fonts, colour schemes or even graphics. This can be done straight from Wordpress by going to dashboard>design>theme editor and directly editing the stylesheet. This all works very well but the possibility of making a mistake is high and this will ‘go live’ as soon as you hit update.
The best way to deal with this is local editing on your computer. Open your themes files in your FTP client and drag the stylesheet and images folder into a new folder on your desktop. Then save a page from your blog as html only in the same folder – open that page in a text editor such as wordpad and change the address of the stylesheet from a URL (probably something like <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://your_blog.co/wp-content/themes/your_theme/style.css” /> to a local address such as <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css” />.
This will then mean you can open your saved page in a browser and edit the style.css without touching your real website.
If you know nothing about CSS (cascading style sheets) then please ignore this article and go straight to the pub, drink several large fruity cocktails and talk rubbish to men named Nigel.
This tutorial and others are also available at Penfold’s Emporium.
Penfold.
Thanks Penfold…you do make it sound easy
If you go with DreamHost, the installation is automatic with one click.
I taught him everything he knows you know ……
No probs Madamoiselle D. Things can get a tad daunting at times but if you take it all bit by bit it’s fairly straightforward.
Thomas – Dreamhost is definitely a good choice (especially if you get a promo code from me to get some money off!)
DP – not strictly true. You taught me everything that you know (it didn’t take long).
I kept some back you know …… for a special occasion ……
A) I don’t know any men named Nigel who talk rubbish. Flotsam perhaps, but rubbish.. never.
B) For many, the idea of using an ftp client is daunting. They don’t know what one is, how to use one, etc. Hostgator offers the ability to upload directly from their cpanel… eliminating the need to learn or use an ftp client. They’re an affordable, easy, awesome host to use and offer an idiot proof Wordpress installation. They have damn fine support too, stats, a whole load of options available (so many I don’t even use much of it) and honestly.. it’d be hard to beat what they offer. Seriously… uploading straight from your hard drive to their cpanel. No ftp client needed at all. I’ve used nothing else.
Fraccers has a link in the sidebar. Click my name. No ftp client needed. Oh.. did I say that already? LOL
Your ‘upload panel’ in your hosts dashboard is basically a web-based ftp client. Either is as good as the other – although a decent ftp client supports drag and drop making it (and your website files) an extension of your hard-drive.
I know 2 men named Nigel and one of them talks rubbish. The other, well the jury is still out…
I tried once with wordpress and i thought it’s more complicated than blogspot, besides it was difficult to find wordpress tutorial. u know i still new in blog. Nice blog, maybe i should try wordpress another time.
I know several men named Nigel but none of them intimately ……..
I realize that Penfold… but ask someone who doesn’t know as much as you, to figure out how to use an ftp client and they’ll choose to stick with blogger or the .com WP instead.
Offering that easyness to people means that having a self-hosted blog is available to an additional set of people.
Smartie pantses (meant in the best possible way of course) like you sometimes forget about the people for whom even using an ftp client is a huge and daunting thing. Some say those people shouldn’t have their own site then… I’d prefer to think instead, that this logic means anyone appreciating how much easier life is with platforms like Wordpress also shouldn’t have a site… but then we’d be back to the old days where there were tons of really bad sites on crappy places like geocities because that was the only option for people who didn’t have *all* the knowledge others did.
Hostgator’s web-based ftp client accessible via their cpanel, is a wonderful option for people who don’t want to worry about using a stand-alone ftp client.