Jakamarra

James, thank you for your time in responding. I finally worked out the problem finally. In the browser when I entered https:// …. it just switched to https:// …. and up came the error. I went to bed and looked at it on the tablet and no problem but the tablet was pointed to the ISP (Virgin media) DNS. I can’t change that in the router. My desktop points to OpenDNS. Once I had pointed the DNS to VM and flushed the cache it worked normally.
I relied on the propagation tool WhatsMyDNS.net showed that all DNS was updated. Clearly a OpenDNS server I was using was not fully updated. I will certainly remember this in future.
Thank you for the links and with all this I am wondering if SSL would be worth it as you can get some low cost certificates,
Back to trying to build the site,
Robert…

Thanks James for getting back to me. I think I have worked it out with the errors that I was getting. It is showing an SSL certificate that should not be there and pointing to the host not me. Chrome locks me out altogether and Firefox once I clear the cache lets me in once then jumps back to wordpress.com. Interesting that the default index.htm file was reporting a setup fault but I was thinking it was me not working on it. I have just put in a ticket and hopefully when I wake in the morning all should be fixed.

Robert…

Thanks for that I also needed to chown files and directory apache:apache all working fine now.

Robert…

Thank you for your advice I did not realise the consequences of doing something like that so I shall leave well alone.

Thank you,
Robert…

I see this thread is marked as “Resolved” but is not resolved for me.

I have installed the plug-in it is set to use Wp-mail and I also have installed WP-Mail-SMTP and that is definitely working. I have tried setting a different email address but that makes no difference. WordPress version 3.5.1

Robert…

I’m getting frustrated by the minute here. What I am asking for I consider to be a very basic function. I’m also aware that many people do not like the abbreviated post with the “Read more” prompt.

It would seem to me that this is achieved mainly through the themes. Therefore what theme(s) can I use. I am fed up of downloading so many scenes and none of them are working properly.

I know this is probably not the place to ask but is there an alternative to WordPress that is aimed at basic operation for people like myself who just want to run a simple personal website without all the programming? Because I’m beginning to feel that WordPress may be too complex for me and it is such a big community that there seems to be little support in for Newbies.

Robert…

Thanks for that I think that is easy enough for me to manage.