Website help?

alta-photography · Jul 5, 2010

Hey guys...I love this forum. Been lurking for a while and decided to join. Here is a question for you:

Im starting my business (weddings/portraits/pets/kids) and am in the beginning stages of building my site. I want to start a blog and have it on mysite.com/blog. Im currently using wordpress, but it is giving me fits. What blog service do you guys use? WP? Blogger? Etc.

Any help appreciated.

RegRoy · Jul 5, 2010

Most popular blog software (or backends) are pretty good but it really comes down to what you need to do with the software - your question is kind of like the questions I've been asking all day about using photoshop.

But how is WP giving you fits? What are you trying to do that you can't? Personally I've used many blog/CMS systems and I currently use wordpress for my main blog because it's highly customizable and there's a tremendous following out there for support.

I used to have a site at blogger but I left because of the limitations imposed by Google.

Are you using a self-hosted wordpress blog or on hosted at wordpress.com?

alta-photography · Jul 5, 2010

self hosted...its weird because the one on WP servers have a LOT more widgets to use. What Im having problems with on my domain name is that when I put widgets in, they dont show up on the site. You can check it at alta-photography.com if you want. The side bar contains NONE of the widgets that I have on the WP hosted site at Alta Photography

BTW, it is WP 3.0

Any help?

RegRoy · Jul 5, 2010

Do you mean that on the self-hosted site the widgets are unavailable, or that the widgets are available but that when you put the widgets in via the control panel and they aren't showing up?

alta-photography · Jul 5, 2010

some arent available, but the ones that are wont show up.

RegRoy · Jul 5, 2010

ok - putting aside the ones that aren't available (can you find them and then install them by hand in the plugins directory on the hosted site -- it's pretty straightforward), are you using the version of the theme that is plugin-ready for WP 3? I've seen this theme before and some themes are not "ready" for WP3.0.

Also, did you customize the sidebar at all? Because it's possible that you may have tweaked something that make the sidebar functionality problematic (been there, done that). If you didn't make any changes, try uploading new copy of sidebar.php from the original .zip file from the theme and see if that helps. If you did make changes, be sure to backup sidebar.php (to sidebarBK.php or something like that). Also, just make sure you backup everything once before you start playing around (forgive me if you know that already -- I can't tell you how many of my clients don't backup).