jonimueller

Yep, you are wise to employ the 301 permanent redirect to capture traffic from the old site. I have heard that you really don’t have to keep those redirects in place for much longer than six months. Once people find your site through the redirects and adjust their bookmarks, you should feel comfortable removing those redirects after a time.

The benefits of using WP to drive your site are that it’s search engine friendly right out of the box. Combine that with the myriad plugins that do nothing but enhance that and you are well on your way to a nicely optimized site without having to spend a fortune on an SEO expert. Of course, if that is a big concern of yours, you are prolly best to go ahead and do much more in the way of SEM, but as I said, it’s a great START in the right direction with a minimum of effort on your part.

It is a very popular blogging app/CMS and I think it’s at the apex of its popularity right now. This is good because it means that there are a lot of people who are very familiar with it so there’s no shortage of help (this forum, independent tutorials, new ways to push the WP envelope) if you run into trouble. There are a vast array of plugins that let you do just about anything with WP.

The ability to edit your content online is great and it’s as easy as typing in MS Word. (Although I discourage you from cutting and pasting from Word into WP. Word is *not* a text editor!) But the convenience of being able to add and edit content will keep you from dragging your feet about updating your site because it’s a bigger PITA to write an HTML page and upload it to the site than it is to create or edit a post or page.

I’m glad you are not giving up, PurpleRose. Once you have your lightbulb moment, and you WILL if you’ve been designing for as long as you have, you’ll be amazed at what you can do with it and how flexible it is. Good luck with it!!!

You guys are making mountains out of molehills. It’s a basic HTML layout, and you can plop the WP guts into it. When I design for WP, I create the basic structure, all the divs, etc. Then I section it off into header.php, index.php, sidebar.php and footer.php. Once that’s nailed down and validated, I work on fine tuning it. Depending on the complexity of the design and the functionality I want my theme to have, it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

These tutorials should help tremendously:
http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/

http://www.cre8d-design.com/blog/2006/01/27/blog-design-101-creating-your-own-wordpress-theme/

http://jonathanwold.com/tutorials/wordpress_theme/

And I saved the best for last, my friend, Shelly:
http://anekostudios.com/2006/09/21/how-to-create-a-wordpress-template-or-theme/

In Chris Pearson’s Cutline Theme (which is what necolas1 is using), the pages are hard coded (for the love of God, why?). You should substitute this code so that the pages will automatically appear on the top nav bar:

<?php wp_list_pages('&title_li=','title_li= '); ?>

For “site design” and flexibility Joomla is leaps and bounds ahead of WordPress. At the sametime what Joomla blogware exists is no comparison to WordPress.

You’re joking, right? I hate Joomla because you can’t create a tableless design, especially if you use modules. Or if it can be done, it ain’t easy. So that statement is disingenuous from a design standpoint. Anything that relies on tables for its layout or design cannot possibly be flexible.

If all you want is a border around your entire layout, just create a wrapper container and center it from left to right:

#wrapper {
   margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
   border: 1px solid #f00;
}

Style the border however you want as far as pixel size, border style (solid, dotted, dashed) and color.

In your header, under the body but before everything else, add this:

<div id="wrapper">

At the end, after the closing footer division and before the closing </body> tag, add this:

</div><!-- /wrapper -->

That should do it.

Are they enabled in the particular theme that your site is using? They must be enabled on a theme-by-theme basis in order to work.
http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs/how-to-enable-gravatar-on-wordpress-25.html

Have you tried to login to Gravatar.com using your WordPress.com email address? It should work. If it does, you should see a dashboard/control panel that has at least one gravatar on it.

P.S. When you’re as old as I am, believe me, you appreciate being thought of as a kid, no matter WHAT the context! 😉