theWickipedia

Website now live!

This morning my domain name finally was found, hurray.  Only took about 6 days and way too many refreshes of www.thewickipedia.com to see if it was alive yet or not.  Up until now I have been using a temporary link.  Now I get to migrate all of my WordPress links or whatnot over to the new url.

Anyway, last night I spend a considerable amount of time designing what my page will look like, and then took a plunge and designed the entire footer image.  I learned numerous new photoshop techniques and think it turned out quite well.  Credit to:

• http://kaoz-tutorials.com/ours/postit/
• http://www.avivadirectory.com/photoshop/creating-crumpled-paper/
• http://www.screenfrog.com/photoshop/scotch-tape-in-photoshop-tutorial/

Now when I have some time I will need to design a matching header and navigation menu for this site.  I’m also thinking about moving the search box up to the top right and combining it with some kind of area that looks like it is paper-clipped onto the website.  Some other things I might look into are things to optimize my blog for search engines.  I’ve heard a lot about the SEO pack and sitemap generator  plugins.

I had another idea for a sub-category of this site.  I was thinking about posting guitar-tabs, and more specifically ones that either I have written, modified, or think are very good.  Would anyone be interested in that?

Number One

Hello everyone!  This is my first blog post on my new website, www.theWickipedia.com.  I’ve been thinking about having my own website for quite a while now, and it was kind of a spur of the week decision over Christmas break to buy one.  It actually started when I saw a post on SlickDeals for a nice bargain on web hosting and domain name registration.  I thought it over and checked out the company to see if they were legit, and then bought the site.  It probably helped that I was kind of bored every night and needed something to do while I was in Nebraska visiting family, all of which would go to sleep about 2-3 hours before I even got tired.

The first problem I was immediately faced with was, what am I going to use to manage all of this…or better yet, I need a website to put online!  I quickly discovered WordPress and fell in love with it.  Things are so easy to do and I like how the entire admin interface is setup.  Adding, editing, and creating themes is fairly simple too.  I really like how you can switch between your themes with about two clicks in the admin controls.  As for a site layout, I’m starting with this torn paper theme that I found and was free.  It’s getting me started but I plan to re-do just about every single image and the code to make it my own.  I’m also looking into the different widgets and plugins that you can utilize through WordPress.

My plans for this website are fairly vague right now, I’m keeping it open to any and all ideas.  What I’m thinking about for starters is to write up reviews for various media (movies, tv shows, music, etc.) and post them here on this website.  I might even look into posting those reviews elsewhere, such as bigger name sites, to attract traffic to this site.  I’m also considering making either tutorials or various web graphics and wallpapers that I could host here.  Once I have the time I really want to make a WordPress theme free to the public and get it posted onto the WordPress site.  I think that would be something cool to do, and it might help draw in traffic to my blog.

Plenty of work ahead of me to make this website worth viewing!