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I have a client that I am doing some work for that is being done in exchange for legal work. It is always good to have a lawyer when you need one or in my case, I have some credit with one!!

He wanted to incorporate the features of WordPress along with a template that he liked. I figured that this would be an easy thing to do but it turned out that I have done about 20 hours of research and still did not know a clue of what to do.

First thing I did obviously was to start up a WordPress blog and after about 7 hours of training videos thanks to Lynda.com I was able to set up a regular WordPress blog using the templates from WordPress. I find that it actually is a pretty good forum to use to create blogs and it does give you some more wiggle room in comparison to the others.

I am hosting my own site through Go Daddy so I had to manually install the program on to my FTP site. In doing this I learned that the whole basis of WordPress is databases. More on this in a second. Now being adverturous, I loaded the index.php in to Dreamweaver to see if I could change the site’s color, put up my logo and make some basic changes. Well that was not a smart idea because there was little to no code on the page except PHP code that linked to what appeared to be databases. Well after I looked over MYSql I found out that it was the case.

Very confused I was!! (Sorry, Star Wars fan!) I then looked some more on Google and found this great article Convert XHTML/CSS To WordPress! Jestro is now my new hero out there in cyberspace! This was the first of 30 articles that I either read or scanned that started off with “we are going to make this simple just for you Jeff” and that they did!! What I learned is that WordPress is basically all database. All your settings, articles, links, RSS, everything is stored in one of several databases which is why you can not see the code when you open up the index.php page in Dreamweaver or what ever you use. The index basically acts as the hub for the header, footer and sidebar(s) and when you open the page in a web browser, that hub creates the website using the PHP links.

I strongly suggest that you look over this article for yourself and see! I am seeing more and more request from people that are looking to use WordPress in their sites and they are going to want to stick to their original design to do. In other words, WordPress is something that you are going to need to learn in the web design world!!