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Having a ton of fun building my first project website. It’s a personal website so there’s not much that really goes into it, but making some things that are difficult is sometimes. It can be a challenge!
My thoughts recently…
- I wish I read some of the “how to” help stuff before I began. Just because I’ve made websites before (20 years ago) doesn’t help me much.
- Explore different hosts.
- Know that your level of customization is slightly tied to your membership level (need a higher than premium tier to use plug ins on .com… that’s crazy! But for me it’s alright I suppose)
- Explore different themes/templates before settling on one and thinking “I’ll just change everything”
- Explore all of the functions before building a “final” design. Too many times I’ve discovered something new and exciting and I tend to veer off my intended path.
How about some of yours?
It’s been 20 years or so I started using WP
And I was so obsessed by widgets back then in my sidebar.
I went from host to host just eventually to start my own hosting company for niche bloggers and WP.
And that was when I was still a fan of Joomla but WP made its way into my life and I never looked back
6. A handful of plugins is fine, but don’t use too many, especially ones that will break your site when removed
>*Know that your level of customization is slightly tied to your membership level (need a higher than premium tier to use plug ins on .com… that’s crazy! But for me it’s alright I suppose)”*
That isn’t related to “WordPress”.
That comes down to knowing that [Wordpress.com](https://Wordpress.com) is a hosting company with their own version of WP that has a bunch of features removed on the lower level plans. Easily one of the most confusing things about WordPress – we got posts on this daily… like yours 😉 No other host does that.
Knowing that “WordPress” refers to *free*, open source software that anyone can install on any web server, is something everyone needs to know before diving in to WP.
As said before, you confused wordpress.com – a company that uses wordpress – with the software freely available at wordpress.org.
You should mention this in a support chat with them. Why? Because they claim this isn’t confusing. Tell them about your experience.
What then? Yes, you should learn about designing or developing with WordPress (downloaded from wordpress.org). There a a lot of good tutorials available. If you want to develop for it the udemy course “becoming a WordPress developer” by Brad Schiff is good. If you don’t wanna get your hands on code this may not be for you and you may wanna go to the tutorial section on wordpress.org on how to edit with Gutenberg.
Many different routes and you’ll get about as many answers as replies here.
So much about WordPress has completely changed since I first started building sites with it. When I first started I think WordPress was on about version 1.5. It hadn’t evolved to be a cms and was still mostly a blogging platform. The default theme was Kubrick and a bit of a pain. Most of the things taken for granted now like menus, widgets, page builders, media library, ACF, etc etc weren’t a part of core or not created at all yet. There was much less tutorials and training.
Back then I wish I knew about good hosting, how to solve whitescreens and http 50x errors, template hierarchy and how to create custom templates.
At the time I first played with WP, I was also trying several other full fledged PHP CMS that were popular at the time or more in use like PHPNuke, PostNuke, XooPs, Joomla (back when it was newly forked). Looking back, those systems were much more difficult to theme and get running vs WordPress, even in the early days! WordPress really made installing and creating your first post a 5 minute affair vs all the competition which were frequently a pain in the ass and could take hours of troubleshooting.
If I were staring out today, I’d want to be knowledgeable about hosting and how it impacts WP (especially cheap shared hosting), I’d want to have a good grasp on HTML/CSS/PHP/JavaScript. I’d want to be able to make changes outside the admin dashboard or with a plugin. I’d want to be able to troubleshoot common issues. If I was only concerned with creating content,!id want to find a good site builder/theme and learn it well or dive into the block editor and FSE (though I am still way more productive with my builder/theme vs Gutenberg). If I was a dev, I’d want to be able to create my own custom theme and plugins and be able to extend WordPress to do what I needed it to do on a project by project basis. I’d want to know about headless WP and how WP could be integrated into other web apps and services.
These are my hints:
* There are multiple hosts you can choose, and usually, you can try it the first two weeks and get a refund if you don’t like it. So you can try something else. Run /wp-admin/site-health.php, or other.
* Choose the permalink structure on/wp-admin/options-permalink.php before launching the site. Changing it later is not the best choice because Google started indexing your site. You will probably not need to touch Apache or Nginx config files, but it’s better to check.
* Enable Akismet; otherwise, you will get tons of spam. If you don’t want comments, and I probably think you do, disable them.
* Pay attention to the theme you choose. The “design” section can be confusing. Styles, templates, patterns. There are tons of free themes in the wild. Check the homepage, page, post, 404, privacy page, mobile views, everything.
And other folks here have already mentioned.