After moving my blog to wordpress, I realized that I don’t need a separate website any more {and hence can save on hosting fees}. WordPress is powerful enough to create a simple website using functionality offered out of the box at wordpress.com. This post explains how I managed to do that. If you too want to setup a quick website on wordpress, Please read on ……..
WordPress allows you to change visual look and feel through something known as a theme. The idea is that you should be quickly allowed to modify the visual aspects of your site without worrying too much about. Applying a theme to a blog/site is a simple matter of a few clicks. When running off wordpress.com, it allows you to pick & choose any theme out of 75 really neat ones. Mostly one should find a theme that meets his/her needs. If you are running wordpress from a hosted machine; then you can even upload any theme that you bought or downloaded free from the web and use it. I settled after experimenting with a few for a theme called “Spring loaded” from the449.
Next Besides the blog, I wanted a set of links in the top navigation that would tell a visitor about me. WordPress has this neat concept of a Page which is basically a static HTML document. Once created, your theme can create a navigational set of links on top/left/right automatically. You can even select one of these pages as the default page when someone visits your website and have a separate link (blog) that points to your blog posts. For more information, refer to this wordpress support page.
Now the only piece remaining was pointing your domain to your wordpress account. This unfortunately is a premium feature and wordpress.com requires you to pay for it. However it is not very expensive as compared to hosting a website on your own. It costs something like $9.89 for a year. However you must change the name servers for your domain to those of wordpress. This article should help you out. With these basic set of changes, your website is up pretty quickly.
What do you think? How has your experience been with wordpress – it would be great if you can share it with other readers of this blog. Of-course any opinion on guneetsahai.com is welcome.
I did not get the part – ‘and wordpress.com requires you to pay for it’, its the domain host which require you to pay, right? wordpress does not care if you got the domain for free?
Comment by Tanvir Kazmi — August 27, 2009 @ 4:11 pm
Hi Tanvir, There are two separate steps here a) Buy a domain b) Pointing that to wordpress.com
If you are hosting your blog at wordpress.com then b) would require you to shell out some money ($9.97/year to be precise) to wordpress. If however you are hosting your blog on a 3rd party server then of-course this doesn’t apply.
Check out http://en.wordpress.com/products/ for more details
Hope this helps
Comment by guneetsahai — August 27, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
wordpress is better for blogs
Comment by Alain — December 8, 2009 @ 11:13 pm
Hi,
just found this post feed URL from my Technorati Top news Page.Really great post. Keep it up.
Thanks,
Michael
Comment by Michael david — December 29, 2009 @ 3:13 am
Hello,thanks for sharing information. I got useful information from your blog about wordpress. Thanks again.
Comment by Rainbow Skill — January 17, 2010 @ 10:58 am
Is it ok if I wish to post this data on one of my very own blogs? I think my readers would appreciate the info.
Comment by Nichelle Waygood — February 25, 2010 @ 1:24 pm
wordpress is better for blogs and thanks for sharing informations about the word press and keep posting blogs like this.
Comment by buy domain names — May 3, 2010 @ 12:13 pm