Support » Installing WordPress » Pre-Installation newbie questions

  • Hello
    I have a website (www.effectivevideo.co.za) that I have decided needs to be revamped.
    Whilst I have a coding background, I am not an experienced web developer and put this together with a bit of effort and patience.

    But revamping it seems like quite an effort and I am looking for something to make my life a bit easier.

    Thus my interest in WordPress

    But I have a couple of questions before I dive in:
    1. My web site is operational and I rely on it to drive business – I cannot afford to have it down whilst I take the time to learn and rebuild the site in WordPress.
    Is it possible to run a wordpress site in parallel whilst I build a new site based on wordpress?
    So the wordpress site will be built in a test env and then when I am happy with the new site I can then deploy it it the live URL

    And if so then is there a guide that will show me how to do this?

    2. Can wordpress embed video into the site as per my samples page?
    http://www.effectivevideo.co.za/samples/html and http://www.effectivevideo.co.za

    These are my 2 primary requirements and any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • If you load wordpress into a sub-directory and work on it, you can then move the entire wordpress codex to your root following the advice here.

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

    Basically all you need to do is change the pathnames within wordpress – remembering to ensure that the permalinks are updated.

    As to video there are ways of embedding video, either through the dashboard (control panel for WP) or using plugins. It would probably be best to check which is best for you. If you create a WP directory copy the WP installation into it you can play with it as you want.

    If you are looking around for themes plugins etc. then try to make sure that they will work with the version of WP you want to use. These lists are littered with problems where wrong versions are used or upgrades disable older theme/plugin functions.

    Make sure you have the correct versions of MySQL and PHP installed on your server (this should not really be much of a problem, but some hosts do have strange ways of running software). You may already be using one, but if not check you can create a Mysql database before you install WP as WP will need to know the name of the DB.

    If possible go for a manual install rather than a one-click install offered by some web hosts as this will give you more control. You will need full ftp access.

    Thread Starter NeilAdamson

    (@neiladamson)

    Hi

    Thank you very much for this response it is greatly appreciated.

    I will start building a wordpress site in a sub directory as a start and go from there.

    Also, I make use of Statcounter (www.statcounter.com) and Google adwords/analytics to track the number of visitors to my site and why they went there (i.e. what keyword search took them there)

    Is it possible to add HTML code snippets to wordpress sites so that these tools can continue to provide me with the necessary stats on my site.

    Thanks

    Is it possible to add HTML code snippets to wordpress sites so that these tools can continue to provide me with the necessary stats on my site.

    Yes. I have inserted my analytics into the header.php.

    Once you have WP installed, go into the dashboard and then into appearance. When you select a theme (or twentyten if you leave the default) use the editor option in the menu.

    A list of files pops up on the left of an editing screeen. There should be one called header and this adds the header to every page viewed. I added my code inside the <head> tag and can see the details on my analytics.

    There are some good plugins – though I can’t remeber them off hand – that do analytics and search engine stuff. Once you have the site up have a play with some of them.

    If you do add a plugin/theme you don’t want the make sure that the plugin /theme/widget is removed from your dashboard then go into ftp and remove the folder from the relevant wordpress\wp-content folder. This ensures that all the code goes!

    Thread Starter NeilAdamson

    (@neiladamson)

    Thank you very much for the comprehensive reply.
    I have installed WordPress and can view the detailed site, I am now familiarising myself with the dashboard and control panel.

    I am having a problem uploading files – it is a permissions problem in trying to copy the image / file to the WP directory, there appear to be a lot of threads on this so will look through those and see if I can resolve the issue.

    Next trick is to find a suitable content theme as my site is not really a blogging site but more of a content rich web site.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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