This week I’m working on completely redoing my website. I’ve always had a hand-coded site, something I’m proud of because I went through the effort of learning HTML and CSS. However, updating a site that is written by hand is very time consuming, especially if I want to add a new page. And it’s hard to keep up with new technology – so many websites have fun widgets and things, just like blogs, and without learning javascript and PHP and who knows what other coding languages, modernizing a hand-coded site seemed nearly impossible.

Then I realized that with WordPress software, you can set a static page to be your homepage, rather than the blog itself, so you really can design a whole website using wordpress. And because I do know HTML and CSS, I figured there had to be a way to get a nice looking, simple but modern website template using wordpress.

So I went looking via google, and found a site that lets you make your own wordpress template by selecting various colors and other options, so I decided to give it a try. The auto-generated template didn’t do quite everything I wanted, but it was close enough that I was able to edit the files a bit and come up with something that will work for me as a complete website.

Since I already have a blog (right here, LOL) which gets a decent amount of traffic, the blog page of the new site will replace my old news page, and by disabling comments, I can use it much like a static page even though it is technically a blog.

I am totally inspired now to not only implement my new site, but also upgrade this blog to a 3-column custom template. I’m currently testing different options, but hopefully within a week or so I will have a new look for the old website, and a slightly updated look for this blog too!

Does your site need an upgrade? With wordpress software, use of an online theme generator, and a little coding knowledge you can create a custom site for yourself that looks pretty professional.