I decided to make a new personal website. The last time I did this kind of thing was before the pandemic, and I did it with WordPress before, so my first instinct was to try WordPress again. But WordPress seems to have changed a lot since then. Or maybe I just forgot how annoying it is? Anyway, I found an interesting-looking theme to start with, but building on it is really frustrating.
Style changes don’t apply throughout the site when it seems like they should. I can’t change the font in the footer even though there’s a place where you can supposedly do that (you can select a new font but it changes nothing). I can’t move design elements around smoothly in the block editor, and I can’t seem to get out of the block editor either (although maybe that’s just a theme issue?). I’d like to make the background different on different parts of the same page, but I can’t figure out how to do that.
Am I going about this the wrong way? Do I need a different theme? A plugin? Should I use something other than WordPress? I’m annoyed with all of the AI stuff WordPress is pushing at me anyway. Do I just need to bite the bullet and teach myself CSS or whatever, given that I don’t want to vibe-code this site? Advice please!
edit: also, if there’s a better Lemmy community for this kind of question, please point me there!
Note: This is from the perspective of 30 years of web design, which is not to say I’m an expert, just that while I do personal projects, much of my time has been spent designing for small businesses and the like. I think it’s a good way to go, mind.
If you want to learn coding by hand, you probably don’t want to bite off learning HTML and CSS from scratch. Use a framework like Bootstrap (there are plenty of frameworks to choose from), which gives you a good baseline of CSS to start with.
If I was using something like Bootstrap, to get different backgrounds in different parts of the page - this is what “section” divs are for, because you can assign a background to each section. Well, this is true of divs in general, but in the Bootstrap contet you have sections. Inside sections you have rows, and then inside that you have columns. That’s how you can set up the parts of your page, with content going in different subdivisions of the page.
If you prefer a more visual way of working, I can recommend WordPress and Divi 5 (specifically as opposed to Divi 4), although the latter is not free. But it is a highly flexible solution that gives you the power of WordPress on the backend, but a pretty darn good builder on the front end.
Hi! Thank you so much. If you don’t mind, do you have any recommendations for someone setting up Bootstrap as a total beginner with no dev/design experience? I looked at a couple webpages about how to add Bootstrap to a WordPress theme, but most of the methods look like they’re way above my technical skill level. And I can’t find any Bootstrap-using WordPress themes that are available without a business plan (it looks like there used to be a few but they’re not around anymore and/or got moved to business only.)
Would one of these plugins work for me, do you think? https://wordpress.com/plugins/block-editor-bootstrap-blocks/ https://wordpress.com/plugins/wp-bootstrap-blocks/
Divi seems nice, but it’s too expensive for what I’m looking for. I think my former employer was using that with their WordPress site, which I added blog posts to a couple times (this was several years ago). But it looks I’d need to upgrade to a WordPress business plan and THEN pay $89/year on top of that if I wanted to use WordPress + Divi myself.
Bootstrap is not intended to work with WordPress, although there were - as of a few years ago - multiple themes that did integrate it, for free even, so if you have the ability to install themes, there are Bootstrap themes. However, that does mean that you’re dealing with multiple complications, because WordPress is not natively designed for handcoding.
I’ve done it with plugins, mind. I don’t recall the plugins offhand - I haven’t done that in several years - but there are plugins that give you syntax in a code editor for pages. But it is sort of all hacked together.
I was suggesting Bootstrap as a possibility for hand coding your site, not with WordPress. I personally used a bit of simple PHP templating to do things like have a shared navigation that detected what page had called it so it could highlight the link to the current page and do other nifty things, but that means adding a third skill on top of learning HTML and CSS.
That said, both of those plugins look interesting. They don’t give you access to program the entire page from scratch, so you’re still using whatever theme you’ve chosen - that’s a constraint I would not pick for myself - but it may be one you’re comfortable with. Certainly I might play around with that to see if it meets your needs.
I’m not sure where you’re hosting, but when you mention a WordPress business plan, it implies to me that you might not have the right host. lol. Plainly, any cPanel or VirtualMin hosting should allow you to install WordPress, and frankly most should come with something like Softaculous or built-in script installers that will get WordPress installed for you, down to creating the database. Any host that holds back features behind a “business plan” is trying to make money for nothing. Some hosts offer some tools that perhaps used to be useful years ago, but it’s been quite a while since you could do everything from staging sites to moving the WordPress site around as needed, backups, restorations. Plugins for scanning for viruses, caching - anything they offer you can do without them. Before WordPress gained the native ability to keep itself up to date, for example, some services were based on plugins that would update all your WordPress installations at once and keep them updated. But that stuff isn’t needed anymore.
I just stalked your posting history a little because I have an idea, but first - I see you registered the domain through WordPress. I would assume they allow transferring the domain away, which is not a concern if you retain hosting there. And the registrar doesn’t matter as long as you can access the DNS to update what IP the domain points to. Although in general, I recommend NameCheap because they are pretty much no-bullshit. They also stood up for me in my 15 mintues of fame, which I only bring up to explain why I support NameCheap.
Although your posting history is a bit short… I still think I’d be willing to take a chance on you. I’ve been hosting since 1997, and it’s gotten pretty cheap these days. For example, I host almost all of the Simutrans community and have done for 25 years now. I have at various times hosted a few random sites for folks, and I’d be willing to create a space for you to play with, if nothing else. I use Virtualmin on my servers, which includes the WordPress Workbench which allows you to install it, clone it, et cetera through the hosting control panel. You’d have the ability to create subdomains off the subdomain I’ll set up for you to play with, so you could install multiple WordPresses to test different configurations. No charge, and I’d be glad to host you if your projects are relatively smallish and don’t take up large resources, which most projects you could host on any cheapish shared hosting wouldn’t anyway. :) If that sounds fun, lemme konw and I’ll set it up and PM you login and info.