Another new start!

Well, I’m re-doing my website again. I’ve decided to give WordPress a go, mostly because in all previous website attempts I’ve had a lot of fun doing everything from scratch at the beginning, but then as it’s a bit of a faff to add a new page to add a new blog entry each time I never did it. Whereas WordPress seems fairly hassle free, don’t even need to open my FTP client.

I’ve been working on this theme to make it my own though, rather than using the standard one.  I started with this article at LifeHacker and then just had a fiddle about. I needed to look something up on CSS though and learnt about the border-radius and box-shadow properties – I thought everyone got that effect using images! So obviously I had to then use it on this. It already looks a lot better than my old thing just for that I think. Stuck with my standard black, red, and white though. Some things I think will never change!

I had some problems getting my custom theme installed though. Now, on my cheap hosting (1and1 linux starter) they did warn me when I installed WordPress that I wouldn’t be able to install custom themes, only the ones available to install from within the admin panel. Which I of course ignored and tried to do it anyway. It worked to a point – but for some reason not everything was coming up. The main problem was the stylesheet, I edited it but no lovely colour/font changes appeared. Then I realised that I couldn’t access the css with my browser, it showed a 403 forbidden error, but that didn’t happen when trying to view the css from an ‘official’ theme. I had a poke around looking for the dodgy .htaccess file or something, but to no avail.
So basically I backed-up what I’d got, installed the official theme ‘twenty-twelve’, and then using the theme editor tools within the WordPress admin I deleted all the file contents and replaced it with the file contents from the theme I made. It was a bit of a long way around it but at least I have my nice working custom theme now!

Only the new blog directory at the imaginatively named blog.emilyrocks.co.uk is re-designed at the moment but I’ll be doing the main homepage shortly.

And just to add, I’m basically in love with the new header font I’ve picked. If anyone out there who may be reading this wants to use it themselves, get it here!

So, will I actually be better at blogging this time? Only time will tell!

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