The blog (after a few more technical hiccups) is now up and running. A farewell post has been left on the old blog and a new post is up and ready for people to read.

I thought the presentation of my website went well. There were a few points which were raised though which I will have to look at.

1) The text on the most popular and recent posts section being too faint…this should not be difficult to rectify

2) The logo would look better inline with the menu…I am not sure how to do this and would result in a big change in the lay out design so may not be possible.

3) Make the text on the featured box more visible…again this should be easy

Since establishing a local server I have been able to create a working draft of the website and export an xml from the old blog site transporting all the content and media to the new site. And ready to present to the class.

So my issues with wordpress continue. I can not design from scratch in dreamweaver as you can not view PHP coding when not hosted in a server. To do this simply I am going to set up my computer as a local host. I intend to use the programme XAMP to do this. After installation I should then be able to view my site by putting localhost/wordpress into my browser and any updates I make will appear there automatically.

This should give me a sandbox like place to experiment with my designs and code tweaking it until it is ready to go up online.

In using word press it gives me several different possibilities of plug-ins and widgets. Having experimented with many different one I have decided upon the following for my final website:

Akismet - Spam filter for comments

All in One SEO Pack - To help with SEO optimisation

Disqus Comment System - A comment system that enables logging in with Facebook and twitter

Google Analyticator - Allows stat monitoring with Google Analytics

SexyBookmarks - A widget that allows effective sharing of articles

Twitter Stream - Shows the most recent twitter posts

WPtouch - Adapts the website for ease of reading on smart phones and tablets

Smart Youtube - Allows easy embedding of youtube videos.

If I find any more in the future that I wish to add then this is a very easy process.