Data Driven Wordpress Web Site

I have been struggling with the appearance of my website for years. Man, it is not a easy job for me, a developer at heart. And it is eaven harden for me to accept the fact that I really can't make it. Now it is the time. What I can do?

Well, how about give my website a nice jacket with Wordpress or Blogger? There are hundreds of thousands themes there, if not millions. Fancy ones, simple ones, just pick one and install it. 

Google Blogger is the first option I investigated to redesign my website. The main advantage of Google Blogger is that I do not need to worry about hosting. Free. And my website will site there for years even if I forgot it someday, as long as Google did not give the blogger up. However, you have to follow the rules to use Google Blogger. Nothing is free at the end. What you sacrifice to choose Google instead of self hosted Wordpress is the freedom with your website. And if you mess up with the rules, you will find your website wiped out by Google someday.

Wordpress.com is another option that I do not need to worry about hosting management as well. I pay around $100 per year and I will plenty of space for your website. However, there are limited options for themes, and javascript, frame are not allowed in the website. Not good.

So Self hosted wordpress it the solution that I am going to use. Now let me start this journey, at the first day of Chinese New Year of Monkey. Yeah!

To make this journey a more interesting one, I started to check around for nice themes, which is really fun. There are many different websites that sell wordpress themes. It is pretty hard to find a good one, and especially a fast one. Some wordpress themes are supper boggy and slow, even though it looks nice.

After some research, I decided  to use the NewsMag wordpress theme. it has the basic features that I want, such as bbPress (a nice wordpress forum.that I may need). it is fast. And it has several different layout options. Also it sells pretty well. 



Note: if you want to use Nelio External Featured Image with this theme, the following article is a solution to fix the feature image issue: Nelio External Featured Image Not working with Newsmag theme

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