thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Thanks for this Adam. Of course in a real life scenario there is a bit of finishing off to do on the site. WP-eCommerce has a whole range of configurations and extras that can be added. Best point for me is that it already has pre-built code for most of the popular payment gateways.

Another big plus is for music you can link back to iTunes store but still direct traffic through your own branded website.

Most users would set-up a few more plug-ins to add various functions. For example SEO and maybe navigation , bookmarking, contact form, Twitter and backup plugins. best way to think of a plugin is like a mini application. They are similar to those used on iPods or Facebook but can also be very simple widget style add ons.

Choosing the right plugin can take longer as many of them overlap and some are better than others. Still you can see how many downloads there and been and the big ones are into the 100,000+ level. Always useful to check the stats and user feedback.

WP-eCommerce for example is showing 169,109 downloads (now 174,262! another 5,000 in a few days.)

On the design side very few users would keep the theme “as is”. At the very least most users would want to add logos, change colours and shades to match their own branding. Almost certainly you would want to change font sizes and styles. Changing this is done via CSS (stylesheet)which is like a design filter or interpreter that you view the underlying website data through.

Some themes have options to say – swap out the header panel or icon sets. You can also commission a designer to build a theme to match existing brand assets. Besides design skills they need to be able to work with CSS and PHP to build the theme set.

In the early days choosing a theme that is closest to your existing design is a way to save time and speed up the roll-out of a WordPress based site.

WordPress is now 6 years old now and there are still many website users who are surprised to find out that it can replace most of the content managed system around and it’s very simple to use.