Chicken and egg problem: trying to move from default blog to external hosting

  • I’m very new to this, so I may be fundamentally misunderstanding something.

    I’ve recently created a WordPress site, leaguefactions.net, for a League of Legends community. It’s a “Free WordPress Blog”.

    Really, my goals are modest — functionality and a clean appearance — and I’m almost happy just leaving it as is. Almost. There are two things that keep me up at night:

    (1)
    The inability to pretty up the FACTIONS header (currently in bright orange) or back it with a plain charcoal banner or something. EDIT:
    Scratch that; just realized I could remove the text and replace it with an image. Obviously, the current image I have for the title is ugly, but I get how I could pretty that up in Photoshop or whatnot.

    (2) The hideous Arial font.

    More ambitiously, I might add:

    (3) Others have recommended certain themes, such as Salient or X, which apparently I can’t load without hosting the site elsewhere.

    (4) Apparently there are all kinds of (seemingly quite basic) things that you can’t do unless you have the site hosted on your own server.

    (3) and (4) appear to have some bearing on (1) and (2) in that one of these themes would address my font and header gripes, and also in that apparently once it’s hosted externally you can accomplish some more cosmetic changes by editing the .css files.

    Here comes the chicken and egg problem.

    I did a little searching and found this page: How to take WordPress to the cloud using Amazon S3/

    I already have an S3 account set up, so I decided to give that a try.

    At one point, it recommends a plugin, called W3, in order to gather all the WordPress data, the site’s photos, and so on so that it can be moved up to S3.

    Problem: as far as I can tell, you can’t install a plugin (such as W3) unless your site is externally hosted.

    This seems like a “can opener in a can” problem. I can’t install the plugin unless my site is externally hosted. I can’t externally host my site without the plugin to export the data.

    What am I missing?

    What can I do to either replace that repulsive header or set the site in a font that isn’t Arial? (I get that I could probably put in manual font tags on every page, but that seems rather cumbersome. Maybe a template of some kind?)

    How can I get it hosted on S3 given the can opener in a can problem I described?

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  • Thread Starter CupcakeTrap

    (@cupcaketrap)

    Follow-up: realized that I could just delete the ugly orange text and create a new title/header image. The new image is not much better, but I understand how I can pretty that up in Photoshop or whatever.

    So really it’s just the Arial now.

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