www.amydaynes.com

This week I have been setting up my own website at www.amydaynes.com. Previously I had a site that was designed by a friend of mine. It was great. Only one problem. Whenever I wanted to make a change or update it with new work I was having to find designers to help me out.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist and so I wanted greater control. I wanted to create a site that I could manage by myself. I wanted to be able to add work, delete work, move work or amend the copy whenever I felt like it. I wanted to be able to choose how the work was displayed, how it was filed and how it appeared.

Then I discovered WordPress.org, a publishing platform that is completely customisable.

Creating my site was a journey filled with excitement, frustration, confusion, learning and pride. I chose a theme called “fjords01″ created by Peter Andre Jensen and played around with the different widgets to create the structure of the website.

I learned about WordPress plug-ins and have so far activated the following:

• Category Visibility-iPeat by iPeat to hide “uncategorised” from the category menu. I wrote an introductory post called “Recent Work” to introduce the work on the site but, because it couldn’t be filed under a client, the category automatically defaulted to “uncategorised”. I did not want uncategorised to appear in the client menu (which was effectively the category menu) and this plug-in allowed me to hide it.
• Custom Query String Reloaded by Moshu to change the number of posts displayed when viewing different pages. I wanted the home page to contain just my recent work so I set this to display 5 posts. However, when someone selects a client, I want them to be able to view a lot of work with minimal mouseclicking so I set category pages to display 30 posts.
• Kimili Flash Embed by Michael Bester to embed flash files into posts.
• Wp-Sticky to display a post on the home page, regardless of the date it was published. I set the introductory post, Recent Work, as an announcement so it is displayed as the first post when you visit the site.
• StatPress by Daniele Lippi to view real time stats about my site.

It has been a lot of trial and error but I’m quite pleased with what I have achieved. There is still more to do – I would like to personalise the 404 error page and design a new header image incorporating my logo – but that’s the beauty of WordPress. I now have the control to work on this site whenever I can. I am learning as I go and hopefully the site will continue to improve each time I work on it.

If you do have time to visit the site I’d greatly appreciate any feedback or comments you might have.