viiiadesign

Yes, you need to get the ability to use MySQL. WordPress need a MySQL database where it stores just about everything, from users to posts to comments and more. Not sure about how much you are paying, but I’ve been very happy with Hostmonster, and they offer a whole bunch of stuff (including MySQL) as part of their standard package, I believe. I have my domain and hosting through them. What do you mean by WordPress’s ftp upload (file structure or ftp client? not familiar with WordPress have an ftp client built-in.) Also, what is it that you mean when you when you say “I really want to keep hosting my blog on my own website”?

When you say template, what exactly do you mean? Is it just visual or is it something with function? The link you gave makes it seem like it’s just a picture. For turning it into a theme, you have many options. What comes to mind first is that you basically have to decide where you want to define your main sections (kinda like making slices for optimizing an image) for your header, body, sidebar, ect. For your layout, I’d suggest it being generally structured like this (these are divs, btw):

[wrapper]
[header][subhead within the header for the dynamic date at the top and rss & cpanel links]
[nav]
[body, though technically “content” would be more appropriate]
[sidebar]
[footer]
[/wrapper]

That little nav section could be a bit tricky depending on how you get those links in there. Alternatively, you could try having that “subhead” section be outside the main “header” div. Something I would recommend doing if you know some about PHP, but not that much, is to take a couple free themes out there and break them apart. You can collect different php files for your structure and edit your one index.php file to accommodate the modified set of files. You can tweak it to get it in the order you want and use CSS from there.

I find this a la carte site design to be kinda fun and a nice shortcut. Also gets your feet wet in the php world. Just make sure you work with copies so if something goes wrong and you can’t fix it, all is not lost. Perhaps it is not the most professional way to get your site made, but it’s nicer than having to pay for someone else to do it, or settling on something you don’t like. Depending on where you got the various themes from, you may wish to consider giving credit to the people whose themes you used. Also, if you get really ambitious, there are several ways to get fonts to display that aren’t safe system fonts. There’s a php method (which I am not familiar with) and then there’s a method using flash and java, sIFR (see it here.) It is something to look into, however you may want to hold off on that for now and just work on getting your php going. Good luck!

Sounds like you want to modify your theme. How comfortable are you with CSS? If you aren’t comfortable with PHP, I’m guessing you might be able to throw in a display:none; for your sidebar and adjust the styling on other elements accordingly. Could be wrong though; the success of that would probably depend to an extent on what theme you’re using. Can you post a link to your page? If I can get to the page, I can get a good look at the CSS and how it relates to everything. I might be able to find some changes you can make to get that sidebar out of there. As a side note, future questions of this nature should be posted under the Themes and Templates section.