Welcome to our new technology blog and relaunched website. Our intention is to use this blog as a place to share our thoughts and practical experiences with technology and to communicate what’s going on with Damson.

With that in mind, I decided a useful first series of posts would be to document our experiences in creating the new website.

This site is built entirely on the WordPress platform. Why WordPress?

WordPress is a flexible, powerful and extendable web publishing platform. If you are interested in setting up and managing your own website you should give it serious consideration. WordPress is used to power thousands of professional and personal websites across the web. The software itself is free and open source, with literally thousands of plugins available which extend it’s capabilities enormously. The WordPress developer community is large and enthusiastic, ensuring plugins and software are kept up to date, with regular updates adding new features. Many hosting companies provide simple setup procedures for setting up WordPress on your website. A short list can be found here. If you prefer a solution closer to home and wish to use an Irish webhost Blacknight Solutions provide simple WordPress installs and come recommended by many in the Irish blogging community.

Most importantly WordPress is designed for ease of use, meaning the user can easily add new pages, blog posts, themes or plugins themselves.

Step One: The Setup

If your webhost provides a simple ‘One-Click’ setup procedure for WordPress then you are in luck. For any non-technical users out there I recommend using a service like this. Alternatively if you want to get your feet wet before taking the plunge wordpress.com offer hosted wordpress blogs similar to Google’s Blogger. Here you can quickly setup a blog and take the software for a test drive and see for yourself if it suits your purposes.

If you wish to delve into the technical aspects of setting up the WordPress software on your site then I recommend familiarising yourself with the installation instructions on the WordPress site.

Step Two: Choosing a Theme

The toughest decision for us in setting up our WordPress site was deciding on a design. With WordPress it is possible to change the design or ‘skin’ of your site easily using themes. Themes come in an almost inexhaustible supply of design options. There are thousands of theme options to choose from. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be difficult and not all WordPress themes are created equal. A good webdesign company who are familiar with WordPress will be able to create a custom designed skin or theme for your wordpress installation. However, here at Damson we enjoy a challenge and like to get our hands a little dirty so we opted for the next best thing, a premium theme.

WordPress themes tend to come in two main flavours, premium and free. A premium theme is one designed and sold by a wordpress developer and will generally come with some customised features, good documentation and some level of aftersales support. Premium themes are aimed primarily at the business market and prices range considerably depending on the quality and the license you require. There are many premium WordPress theme designers out there and we looked at some excellent designs from companies such as iThemes and others. Eventually we decided on a design from WooThemes which closely matched our design specifications and needs. Not only do WooThemes produce some really fantastic looking designs, they also provide excellent documentation and support for customising their products. Being able to customise a theme easily and without breaking it should be a key factor in any decision you make regarding design choice. A premium theme may look amazing on screen before you make a purchase, but if it’s not easily customizable with your logos and content in order to make it your own, then you probably will be unhappy with the end product. Thankfully many premium theme designers provide one or two free themes on their sites. This allows you to look under the hood and get a feel for how customizable their products are.

Areas to look at when choosing a theme include:

• Ease of customization (will it break if I change this image/colour/font?)
• Customer support (if available)
• Documentation (Help files, FAQ’s etc.)
• Widgets support (those little accessories, gadgets and buttons on the sidebar and frontpage)

Well, that’s your lot for today, questions and comments are welcome below.

Tomorrow – Optimizing your WordPress installation and choosing the right plugins.