Well, home has been pretty good. I’ve been rearranging my room, so the unpacking process has kinda reached a standstill until now (I’ll definitely have photos when I finish). My dad has started building the new deck in our backyard which is super exciting – it will be nice to see something back there again. This Sunday is my graduation party which I am pretty excited about. A good bunch of people are going to make their way over here to my house to enjoy some good food and some good fun.
So, now for the frustrated part of this post. I’ve been working on an online portfolio of my design and photography work (a few of the jobs I’m interested in require these). I had found a CSS layout that I really enjoyed from OSWD and had started the tedious prospect of altering the CSS to meet exactly what I wanted… No matter how you go about making a portfolio in strict CSS or HTML, it will take a little work with each new update.
As I was going through this and launched a test site (after realizing that Geocities is being shut down, I resorted to Bravenet) I remembered *duh… custom WordPress themes would make this soooo much easier*. I looked into the cost of upgrading to a premium WordPress account to use my own CSS and it wasn’t much at all, found a custom theme that I liked from an outside website, everything seemed to match up so I bought the upgrade. Surprise! The custom CSS wasn’t exactly what I needed, but because of how the custom theme was set up, I didn’t know this until I tried to install it. So, silly me, I looked through the read me for the theme that mentioned needing the domain name for the site. Well, I had already planned on buying a domain through WordPress since they were only $15/year, so I went ahead and purchased it. I had just gotten all this grad money, so it all seemed fine in my brain – if I didn’t like it or use it, I just wouldn’t renew next year. Surprise! The custom domain wasn’t exactly what I needed either, but again I didnt know this until I tried to install the custom theme.
Now, some of this is definitely my fault for not looking around a little harder, but at the same time, the author and creator of the new custom theme I found (not from OSWD) created a terrible process and instruction sheet. There wasn’t even a “requirements” section on the page, which I think would be a definite positive for those who are new at using custom themes on a premium WordPress account.
Another small portion of my frustration goes to WordPress, whom I love for the free blogging service and layouts I get, but from whom I expected way more out of when receiving a premium upgrade. The upgrades page is a little deceiving and I think there should definitely be somethign on the CSS Upgrade info section about the fact that FTP themes and custom made themes will not work with a CSS upgrade – or any WordPress upgrade for that matter.
I sent two support messages to WordPress – they have no email address or phone number listed, only a submissions form (which is very well laid out, by the way). It says there’s 24/7 support and I wanted to make sure mine wasn’t overlooked at all, so I sent the two… and still haven’t even received a “message received” generic email, which would definitely be appreciated in this situation.
There is a way to do what I want to do, but it is through WordPress.Org + an outside hosting site (generally costing a good 40% more than what I paid) which is different from WordPress.Com. WordPress.Com is the hosting site and blog site in one. WordPress.Org allows you to download the WordPress client and customize it however you want for your outside hosting website and you can use FTP sites and completely custom themes made by outside artists and authors. WordPress.Com only allows manipulation of the CSS for the layouts they provide – and only premium members who have selected the CSS Upgrade can modify the CSS. Yeah. So exciting, I know.
I’m sure there are a lot of you who have absolutely no idea what I was talking about through a good 75% of this post (CSS and FTP… what?) but for those of you who do, argh, I say! I’ll stick with my free WordPress account and my more-time-to-create-but-better-looking portfolio website until I can either afford the easier way or WordPress creates an amazing portfolio template available for free (hint hint, WordPress). Hopefully I’ll get a response from the support team to deactivate the domain and cancel the upgrades I purchased.
Anyway, I’m going to head back to my portfolio work and getting my room ready for the weekend. You all have a great evening and, if there’s anything positive to take away from this, it’s to always be a skeptic when things seem too good to be true. Or is it some times you have to learn the hard way? Oh, whatever… : P
