So I’ve just finished the first version of the website, no doubt it will continue to change slightly over time. It’s all powered by Wordpress, using a number of different plugins, bits of code found on the internet and various other websites such as Twitter.
The number one tip I would have for anyone planning on creating and running a business blog or website is: focus time on getting things finished and working, rather than trying to understand how they work.
Most of the hard work has already been done to achieve what you’re looking to do. Whether that be changing your blog/website layout, displaying your most recent blog posts on the homepage or setting up an image gallery. There’s no need to go digging into Javascript and PHP to understand how to program all this stuff, all the tools are already available to allow you to implement the infrastructure quickly, allowing you to concentrate on producing content that will add real value to your blog or website.
95% of it exists as Wordpress plugins and the other 5% can be found in the form of PHP, Javascript or other code snippets through a quick Google search.
If something you’re trying to achieve is eating up time and holding you back, look into how the same end result can be had in a different way. For example, when I was trying to find a way to display the most recent Twitter updates, I first came across the ‘Twitter for Wordpress’ plugin. I’m sure it works fine for a lot of people but to cut a long story short, I spent around two hours trying to troubleshoot a PHP error that it kept generating intermittently. In the end I ended up using the official Twitter HTML Widget which has worked fine.
