Hastings Forum

I'm not sure if this is totally the right place for this thread, but it might be of interest to others who have contemplated a similar step, also some people might have useful comments to make?

The lockdown has been an impediment to my writing, all the local workshops and groups have come to a halt and I am not good at scribbling for hours in my lonely garret (many of my best ideas come in the corner of a pub or cafe!). So I have joined a couple of writers' online communities, Scribophile has proved to be one of the very best - friendly, helpful and informative.

Secondly, after a great deal of research, I have bought a domain name from GoDaddy (was lucky - got my real name + .co.uk) and I will probably go for Wordpress.com for hosting. I know it's basic but I need to test the water and hopefully later I can move it all to a self-hosted site.

All this is a massive step for me. I feel like Chance the gardener (Peter Sellers) in Being There as he is thrust bewilderingly into the outside world (whilst the background orchestra plays the theme from 2001 Space Odyssey!). No idea how it will work out, I may not even manage that well with Wordpress, but the idea is that the site will be more of a static website, a "showcase" for some of my work rather than a blog, but then it depends whether I end up enjoying myself and find people are following me!

I have been writing for years, had a number of things published in mags, online, a couple of books, but this is a first (and long-overdue) attempt to bring it all together and focus on sharing it more widely.

I am anticipating all sorts of teething issues, so I will be looking for people who might be willing to help me out - or who know of any good web wizards/geeks locally. Also, has anyone else set up their own web space? Well, I know about ten million out there have created a blog or whatever .. I mean people round here!

No backups: Unless you purchase their paid add-on, there’s not a backup system in place.

Sorry, Richard, I didn't quite understand your reply - unless you mean that the basic free package offered by Wordpress.com is without a back-up facility. That seems understandable from their point of view, but I am in fact thinking of getting a paid-for hosting package, so it will make sense to back things up later too (if all goes well and a lot of material gets uploaded to the site).

How much do you know about all this? I think I read that it takes several days/a week for a domain name to be registered and usable on a new website. So much elenentary stuff to learn!

I got it the wrong way round, it is actually the self-hosted site where you have to arrange your own back-up and other security. Small price to pay for peace of mind.

A couple of links for you seahermit:

https://websitesetup.org/choosing-blog-vs-website/

https://websitesetup.org/customize-wordpress-101/

You need a WordPress hosting plan and you say you have chosen GoDaddy.
You will need a page builder if you want an easy way to create completely custom WordPress designs.
Beaver Builder is the most user-friendly WordPress page builder plugin available on the market. The Divi Builder is yet another powerful WordPress drag and drop page builder for WordPress.

Thanks very much, Richard. At the moment it looks very much as if I have wasted my time and money with Wordpress.com. Very complicated and doesn't work well, the tutorials are very hard for a beginner to understand. But can you believe that one cannot even do a straightforward copy/paste job from Word without all manner of formatting issues coming up?!

I thought it was me, everything was coming out askew or double-spaced .. until I checked on the internet and there are only a few tricks (including downloadable apps) which enable you to copy text (but they don't always work!). Hardly a quick and easy way to upload a long poem or a story (anyone got all night?). I will of course see how it goes but I have used much easier sites, had a big profile on Myspace with pics etc. for years until MySpace was eclipsed by Facebook etc.

1. Open Notepad on your PC (or Text Editor on your Mac) and paste the text from Word into a new file. Copy the text from Notepad (or Text Editor) and paste it into the WordPress post editor.

2. https://blogs.extension.wisc.edu/wordpr ... from-word/

Online browsers like WordPress use HTML which does not support all the formatting features used in Word.
HTML is the one universal part of the web, every page you see on the internet with content inside of it is marked up with some version of HTML.

Thank you Richard, I do know about HTML!

The bottom line is that wordpress.com is free or cheap but also not very brilliant or smooth-working, considering that they have had plenty of years to perfect it. The software is awful - a simple copy and paste should not take half an hour before Wordpress gets it right, likewise even changing the colour of a font often took six attempts before it worked. Or if you re-align a "block" (pic or text) to the right, it goes to the left instead and you have to start again!

The instructions are atrocious - beyond obvious basic steps, when I tried to do anything slightly complex, I was confronted with an A4 page of technical jargon which was completely incomprehensible to me. Not how it should be in the 21st century.

I have made good progress, although the resulting pages are of course rather simple and Geoff would probably have a good laugh! And I am bleeding all over from physically wrenching text and images into place and kicking the computer a dozen times.

And my domain name has not been redirected to the wordpress site. More hassle chasing it up with the domain server.