seeking some advice for planning

  • I’m in the middle of redoing my personal business website, and I’m using WordPress this time. I’d like some advice about how to go about this, for planning purposes.

    The current site is Path to Math Clarity but that has to stay up until the new WordPress site is ready.

    This raises the issue that I need to develop the site somewhere else and then move it to the above domain, when it is ready.

    I’m starting to play around with the new site locally with MAMP on my MacBook. Is this a good way to build the site, and can it be moved later, easily?

    Second, I’m not particularly good with design or WordPress. What I’m thinking of doing is developing a basic site around content, then hiring someone to help me “style” it (i.e make it look a little less generic). Does this sound like a good approach?

    I already purchased a “general purpose” theme, Jevelin. So this comes with lots of goodies, WPBakery and YellowPencil and so forth. I don’t really even know what those are. But is this a good basis for someone to work with, once I hire them?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • As a developer I beg you to use underscores because your site will be significantly faster than a site built with a page builder.

    Working locally is the suggested move. With WordPress one of the tricky things about it is that a lot of your site is just data in your database.

    If you use a plugin like All In One Migration you’ll be able to move your site from your local machine to your production environment very easily.

    During development make sure that you’re using relative url paths when referring to your site not absolute. So for a link you’d do the following.

    <a href=“/contact”>Contact Me<\a>

    Notice that the link above is just the directory and not the full path. If you write all your urls like this then you won’t have any url issues from localhost to production.

    I would suggest building the site with underscores and then using Advanced Custom Fields to create templates.

    If that sounds like fun to you, you’re a Google away from plenty of tutorials on how to use the underscores theme as well as ACF plugin.

    Hope this helps!

    – Freddie

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Freddie. Reason: Adding link to aiom plugin
    • This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Freddie. Reason: Added link for acf
    Thread Starter michaelmossey

    (@michaelmossey)

    Thanks, Freddie! I see your point about underscores and ACF. If or when I hire someone to style the site, they would probably be happy I started that way.

    But this also raises some issues around a balance between how much I can do myself and how much I hire someone to do. To be honest, I am time-rich and cash-poor right now. Ideally I could do a LOT myself, and maybe make good use of the page builders.

    Then I might hire someone for a fixed-price job to style the site. I know this raises other questions, like the working environment that developers prefer. I am a programmer, not for the web, but I know it sucks when my boss tries to dictate every single last thing about how I’m going to work. I know that if I advertise for a job to “style this site I built,” that a lot of developers aren’t going to want to work under those conditions.

    So what would you say is a good balance?

    On the side of doing a lot myself, I’m a programmer, and I can learn a lot of WP, but I might need site builders to help me with web-specific things and I might need a theme to help me be visually stylish.

    On the side of hiring someone, I am cash poor so this has to be a fairly limited job, but I want to make the experience pleasant for them.

    Under these conditions, do you think I could use WPBakery or similar, or would you still stay a thousand miles away from that?

    You mention SITE LOAD SPEED, but I’m wondering if your reason to prefer underscores might be even more for the reason to create a clean slate for someone I hire.

    Mike

    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    I’m sorry but this isn’t a topic for these forums and I am closing it. You’re really getting away from the code that is supported in these forums.

    Discussions about hiring anyone for anything is not for these forums. Please consider posting to https://jobs.wordpress.net/ or https://jetpack.pro/ instead.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘seeking some advice for planning’ is closed to new replies.