First up, let me apologise for the radio silence from the Mrs E blog of late. I have been so fucking busy this month that I’ve barely had time to sit down let alone write an interesting and informative blog. Things have calmed down a bit this week so here’s what I’ve been at…
Wordpress is now available from Mrs E!
When I first started out as freelance, the first question everyone asked me was could I do websites? The answer was always no. Even though I had built my own website and worked with MirrorSphere building theirs – I was more than happy with the design element, I use X Pro (an unbelievable good, fully customisable theme) and even know a bit of CSS now that can take the editing even further. But I had no understanding of hosting. MirrorSphere are techy enough to do their own and I made a massive hash of arranging mine.
First up there is the ridiculous WordPress.org/.com minefield. There are actually two different versions of WordPress: WordPress.org and WordPress.com. So what’s the difference? Basically, WordPress.org is customisable with themes and plugins and is self-hosted – meaning you can use your own domain name choice. WordPress.com is less so, it has basic formatting and the appearance cannot be changed much. It also means your website will be called myname.wordpress.com. For some reason, I still cannot remember which is which. Maybe .com sounds like it should be better than .org? Who knows. So putting this here actually helps me out more than it does you!
Which brings us to hosting. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find the whole thing massively complicated. You need to find a host that will include a WordPress install (as you are using .org you do not need to pay .com for this – I have twice now and have only just realised how stupid this was). A lot of the recommended ones (namesco in particular) have crap user interfaces, are difficult to navigate and charge you extra for simple things such as getting your emails on your phone.
So what’s the answer? It’s who you know. It’s who you grew up with. It’s who you knew full well has run a thriving Web business since she was a teenager. It’s KayDee Web. Thanks to her I can now offer the full package, website design & hosting that is not run by a complete idiot.