(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

WordPress is a great way to learn about the web. You need very little experience… drive and enthusiasm will put you over the top! Andrew Caldwell -self-proclaimed Leader of the Free World – tells you just how it feels, to go from web zero to web hero, in about a weekend!

I’ve Just Wasted $53 on Hosting and a Domain, s***, What Now? HELP!?

-By Andrew Caldwell

If you’ve ever thought about a website or a blog, you want to sell a product online, tell the world what kind of car you drive, that you can play a death metal polyrhythm on the drums or are trying to setup a business, WordPress is definitely for you!

WordPress? A blog? A website? Possible, but daunting. It’s always been something I’d been interested in, earlier in the year armed with a credit card, I purchased a domain and some hosting, and had a go at a ‘website tonight/go daddy’ style web builder. Let’s say the results far from knocked me off my seat… So that was that, if I wanted a hot looking website with all the functionality of other cool sites I’d seen online, I was going to have to ‘obtain’ a copy of a web design program and learn how to drive that, or better still, pay someone a lot of dollars to design one for me, oh joy.

The second and more recent attempt at a website was far more successful, I’d set a date in my calendar that I decided I was going to be ‘sick’ from work, and my first ‘paid’ day as a web designer begun! Again armed with said trusty credit card, I purchased a domain, got a ‘bonus’ first month free of hosting and I was away…

I’d heard about WordPress a little bit but didn’t have a clue. My knowledge of HTML was that it was ‘some sort’ of programming and Java was the annoying thing that often stopped me being able to watch movies online. So it’s safe to say I was a web designing retard.

So after purchasing the domain and hosting and having a massive panic attack, I wrote a flurry of ‘Help me, what the eff do I do now!!!’ emails to my web host, Dave from Website In A Weekend, Ali from Aliventures and Jonathan from Illuminated Mind. Thankfully these people where in a different timezone to me so after I’d calmed down and consulted Google, the planets all aligned and I figured out what was going on. Once the day was over and I had a website, I received the replies from my panic attack email respondents and I was slightly embarrassed, although they were all very helpful!

People often ask me stuff, I don’t know why, I’m not smarter, I just type more things into Google! So a few ‘how to’ questions in a search and (not so shameless plug) looking around on Website In A Weekend and I had scratched together what looked like a website.

I already had some blog posts saved up in a word document, so that wasn’t an issue, but as you’re crawling around the internet, like I did, I had the following questions ticking over;

• How do I get one of those green ‘share this’ buttons at the end of my posts…
• How do I show my number of subscribers? (I left this counter up for two weeks until Ali suggested it probably wasn’t that impressive that it read ‘13’ subscribers!)
• How do I even get subscribers in the first place!?
• I don’t know what that orange RSS button is all about, but I want one!
• Steve Pavlina has a donate button, why can’t I?
• Some peoples ads look really good, suit there site and are actually decent products, I want them on my site too?
• All the probloggers out there recommend a contact page, well I’m snookered then, because I know bugger all about coding?!

I was relieved to find out (and am still always amazed) that WordPress has a massive community of developers. These people pride themselves on handy plugins and application for WordPress websites. I am also blown away that WordPress themes are FREE to use for your site!

I was under the impression that editing anything on my site would involve messing around with template files, too many of these “<>/wrong” and a whole lot of foreign symbols.

Again, back to google or the wordpress.org forums and a sigh of relief! I was pleased to know I wasn’t the only person who’d ever asked for a green ‘share this’ button at the bottom of my posts, and better still, someone had gone to the trouble of making a wordpress plug-in to fit the bill!

Anything you want to appear on your site is pretty much a search engine, download and a few clicks away! WordPress revolves around installing plugins onto your webhost server, then within your wordpress dashboard you activate the plug-in, then you’re away. Instead of putting together screenshots, and a lengthy instructional list, like everything else wordpress related, someone online has already had the same issues you are having! And more often than not Dave has written something about it! (Installing Plug-ins -> here).

I could go on for days about how ridiculous it is that WordPress is FREE! I’ve learnt a hell of a lot since getting involved with it three months ago, next time you’re checking out a website and you’re impressed with the layout, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll more than likely find ‘Powered by WordPress’.

Andrew Caldwell – Self proclaimed leader of the free world, recently embarked on a quarter life crisis and has resigned from the employed working world. Recently started leadersofthefreeworld.org, giving you an insight into the mind of the free, cynical, entrepreneurial and passionate.