Where do I start?

[kvnwpts]

Hi.

I do only have knowledge about HTML and CSS, everything else is unclear to me such as PHP, Wordpress…

I build websites in dreamweaver, that probably dosent make and sense but I’m justin informing you.

I have installed wordpress on my domain name and a blog appears, and I have a wordpress dashboard. (I have installed it).

From now on I have no idea what to do. I’ve done a website in dreamweaver… And it’s only HTML and CSS. Ofcourse I wanna have this instead of the blog that appears on my domain name.

On the website I have.

A logo on top.
Under a image slider.
Under I have 8 pictures of my latest clients I’ve done websites for.
Under I have another 8 pictures of the latest works I’ve done.
And in the site I have some div tags (open spaces) where I wanna put in some content.

So I have a div tag wich is 500x300px where I wanna have a twitterticker. If i install a twitterticker how do I place in that div?

Those pictures I have as the latest work. I wanna be able to update those so when I update it the last picture gets removed and the new gets added in the beginning.

And my imageslider, I wanna be able to update those pictures.

I’m just not sure how everything is working. Should i not use the jquery plugins i have installed on my site? Should I make div tags to get space for plugins on wordpress?

Where should I start and do can you answer those questions or you have any good guide for this?

//Kevin

[ralphm]

You probably need to start reading the docs at wordpress.org, because it is a fairly complex bit of software. Or there are some good books on WordPress, including some new ones by SitePoint. Modifying themes etc. is tricky, and often involves digging down into the many files that make up WP.

[kvnwpts]

Okay.

As a webdesigner, (mostly design and be able to update the site) ,would it be good to know much about HTML, CSS and wordpress, and skip the other things such as PHP and javascript?

@ralph_m

You probably need to start reading the docs at wordpress.org, because it is a fairly complex bit of software. Or there are some good books on WordPress, including some new ones by SitePoint. Modifying themes etc. is tricky, and often involves digging down into the many files that make up WP.

[CMS_Dude]

I don’t mean to discourage you or anything. But you realize this question isn’t that far off from saying …

I have some plutonium and scrap metal. And I’d like to build a nuclear reactor from it. What do I do next?

Obviously, that’s an exaggeration, but I hope you still get the basic gist of my point. But I guess if I were to look at this and give you some useful “next steps,” here goes:

1. Starting with your HTML page design … you’ll want to identify the elements of the page that you want to be “dynamic.” In other words, the parts that you want to be able to change using your CMS (in this case, wordpress).

2. Working with whatever CMS you’re dealing with, you will need to find out what pages or templates are being used to generate the page layout. In general, this will be something along the lines of page.php … or template.php in drupal … or even just index.php in Joomla. In wordpress, this is usually the page.php file in your theme’s folder. And from there, it will be a matter of replacing the code in this template … with your custom HTML file’s code. Again, being mindful of where you want the dynamic content to be.

3. Now it’s a matter of reading up on how Wordpress page files are structured within the context of themes … and making sure your dynamic content regions are in the right places in your template files. This isn’t going to be a simple thing; you’re going to need to spend several months, probably, learning the ins and outs of the wordpress cms (or whatever cms you’re dealing with). If you find, along the way, that your PHP skills are lacking, then factor in another 6 months to a year learning PHP.

Once you get past all of this, you will likely run in to difficulties you’ll need to trouble-shoot. In which case, you might have to start getting your hands dirty learning MySQL; at least to where you can understand enough to, say, retrieve a password or something from phpmyadmin. Not to mention that if you want to be able to develop this stuff locally, you’re going to want to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the LAMP stack (or at least a very basic and rudimentary understanding of things like .htaccess files, mod rewrite, and the php.ini file which you’ll likely need to configure at some point during your adventure). Factor in another 6 months to a year for all of this – and that’s being generous.

Again, I don’t mean to discourage you – I just want you to get a realistic idea of what you’re getting in to. Knowing this, if you’re not interested in becoming a web developer and in making a career out of this sort of thing … you might just try something much simpler, like Cushy CMS or PageLime … which can get you started much quicker, and will be more than adequate for a simple website. Going that route, you could probably have something up and running in the next month or so, if not sooner, and you could bypass most of the Wordpress template maze, along with all the PHP and mySQL nonsense.

[kvnwpts]

Hi. No you’re not. Thanks for the long good answer.

Basically, the ony thing I wanna be able to get or have updated is a news box, where you can write something or put a youtube video… A news field. Thats everything. So what should i go for?

@CMS_Dude

I don’t mean to discourage you or anything. But you realize this question isn’t that far off from saying …

I have some plutonium and scrap metal. And I’d like to build a nuclear reactor from it. What do I do next?

Obviously, that’s an exaggeration, but I hope you still get the basic gist of my point. But I guess if I were to look at this and give you some useful “next steps,” here goes:

1. Starting with your HTML page design … you’ll want to identify the elements of the page that you want to be “dynamic.” In other words, the parts that you want to be able to change using your CMS (in this case, wordpress).

2. Working with whatever CMS you’re dealing with, you will need to find out what pages or templates are being used to generate the page layout. In general, this will be something along the lines of page.php … or template.php in drupal … or even just index.php in Joomla. In wordpress, this is usually the page.php file in your theme’s folder. And from there, it will be a matter of replacing the code in this template … with your custom HTML file’s code. Again, being mindful of where you want the dynamic content to be.

3. Now it’s a matter of reading up on how Wordpress page files are structured within the context of themes … and making sure your dynamic content regions are in the right places in your template files. This isn’t going to be a simple thing; you’re going to need to spend several months, probably, learning the ins and outs of the wordpress cms (or whatever cms you’re dealing with). If you find, along the way, that your PHP skills are lacking, then factor in another 6 months to a year learning PHP.

Once you get past all of this, you will likely run in to difficulties you’ll need to trouble-shoot. In which case, you might have to start getting your hands dirty learning MySQL; at least to where you can understand enough to, say, retrieve a password or something from phpmyadmin. Not to mention that if you want to be able to develop this stuff locally, you’re going to want to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the LAMP stack (or at least a very basic and rudimentary understanding of things like .htaccess files, mod rewrite, and the php.ini file which you’ll likely need to configure at some point during your adventure). Factor in another 6 months to a year for all of this – and that’s being generous.

Again, I don’t mean to discourage you – I just want you to get a realistic idea of what you’re getting in to. Knowing this, if you’re not interested in becoming a web developer and in making a career out of this sort of thing … you might just try something much simpler, like Cushy CMS or PageLime … which can get you started much quicker, and will be more than adequate for a simple website. Going that route, you could probably have something up and running in the next month or so, if not sooner, and you could bypass most of the Wordpress template maze, along with all the PHP and mySQL nonsense.

[ralphm]

If you just want to do simple updates to your own site, you might as well just do it statically via your code editor. But it’s hard to get far as a web designer these days without being able to offer websites that clients can manage themselves, so it’s a good idea to learn a CMS of some kind—ideally one that can handle complex sites if needed.

[kvnwpts]

What do you mean with complex sites?

Would it be hard for a average person who knows wordpress to implent a news box where you can update news, text/videos etc. in a normal html and css website?

@ralph_m

If you just want to do simple updates to your own site, you might as well just do it statically via your code editor. But it’s hard to get far as a web designer these days without being able to offer websites that clients can manage themselves, so it’s a good idea to learn a CMS of some kind—ideally one that can handle complex sites if needed.

[ralphm]

@kvnwpts

Would it be hard for a average person who knows wordpress to implent a news box where you can update news, text/videos etc. in a normal html and css website?

It’s not hard, just laborious. By a complex site, I mean something like this: a user creates a new blog entry, a full article about some topic. You can set up a CMS so that a snippet of that article automatically appears on the Home page (and maybe in the sidebar of each page, too), without anyone doing anything. That’s what’s meant by a dynamic site. You could do that manually, but on most sites, it would mean a lot of pages being updated every time anything is posts, which is not very efficient.

[kvnwpts]

Got you!

@ralph_m

It’s not hard, just laborious. By a complex site, I mean something like this: a user creates a new blog entry, a full article about some topic. You can set up a CMS so that a snippet of that article automatically appears on the Home page (and maybe in the sidebar of each page, too), without anyone doing anything. That’s what’s meant by a dynamic site. You could do that manually, but on most sites, it would mean a lot of pages being updated every time anything is posts, which is not very efficient.