Sara R. Cleveland

I am glad that I opted to install WordPress in a subdomain. Despite the fact that WP is arguably my best option for the simple, out-of-the-box blog functionality that I wanted I have to say that it is a pain in the butt. I’m glad I did not attempt to do my whole site in the context of WP. Here’s why:

Despite my web development background setting up my own theme was a hassle. In fact, if it weren’t for my afore mentioned background I think I might have given up. Thank goodness for YouTube. If you ever decide to attempt writing a custom theme of your own I highly recommend YouTube as your first go-to resource. Spare yourself the often incomplete and frustrating written tutorials.

The problem with creating my theme wasn’t even really PHP, which I hadn’t touched since a whole semester before graduation. Really the problem stemmed from needing to really understand how WP uses the files and the WP functions.

I think attempting to stuff all the functionality I have planned for the main website into WP ultimately would create more headaches than it would resolve, so for now we’ll all have to make due with the subdomain. It’s not the seamless blog integration I had hoped for, but I think when the main site launches you’ll agree that I got pretty close. Hopefully some time in the near future I’ll be able to either transition to a full WP-based site (yuck) or be able to pull off something super tricksy with iFrames (also yuck). Till then…