How to Install and Customize a Thesis Site in a Weekend (Part 1)

My husband and I created a new website on the weekend, Middle Path Marketing. I coded, he made design and colour decisions, we bounced off each other regarding layout, functionality and usability. After two days on and off we had a new Thesis powered WordPress site.

This series of posts is how we did it. I’ll take it slowly for newbies, so skim ahead if you need to.

What You Need to Know

To put it in context, about 2 years ago I had never touched code apart from the odd ‘go-to’ loop in high school back in 1987. Now I can customize my own Thesis Theme in a weekend in between doing family things.

I am self-taught.  I have a great book called, funnily enough, HTML XHTML & CSS, Sixth Edition – Visual Quickstart Guide by Elizabeth Castro.

It is absolutely fantastic for newbies to code and also those novice apprentices out there that can’t always remember the code.

• It is very well indexed with lots of examples and pictures.
• You can work your way through it and follow their examples to have a ‘play’ or you can refer to it when you need to, e.g. remembering the order of padding TRBL (top, right, bottom, left).
• It has a great fold-out color code guide as well with swatches of colors and the hexadecimal values, e.g. White #FFFFFF.

Code Snippets

I collect code snippets from tutorials around the place and have a swipe file ready to use, depending on what I want to do. I also regularly Google “thesis+tutorial” to see what is about and add the word I am specifically looking for e.g. thesis+tutorial+sidebar.

Thesis: Standard to Unique

If you want to make your Thesis site unique, you will need to copy and paste code from different websites and the Thesis Forum into one of two files: custom.css or custom_function.php.

Birth of an Idea

I’ve had the idea for our new site for about a year now, but only registered the domain name in February 2010.

From here on I will talk to you…

Register a Domain Name

Preferably register a top-level – that is a .com – domain name.

• Some say do not register your domain name with the same company you purchase your hosting with because if you have problems with your hosting package (payment issues mostly), you may jeopardise your domain name.
• I personally like to register the name and hosting together with the same organisation to same money and make renewal more convenient.

Buy Your Web Hosting

10 quick considerations when choosing a web host

1. You don’t need anything too huge to start with. Go with shared hosting (your site’s files are on a computer – like the one you have at home – with other bloggers). When you get BIG, then you can look at other options – but have your credit card ready.
2. I would recommend making sure you can download a zip file of your site in a transferable format like .tar.gz. I read that one person couldn’t move from GoDaddy because GoDaddy didn’t keep all of her files on the one server and she couldn’t get the files to transfer.
3. Check if you get a statistics program for the price of the hosting or if it is additional. Some people swear by Google Analytics (and it is great), but AWstats gives you a simple overview – good for beginners.
4. Once you reach about 1,000 unique visitors a day your WordPress site will need extra grunt (cpu usage).
5. If you can get a shared hosting package with extra grunt (additional resources, e.g 1/4, 1/3 or 1/2 of average use) at the start for a good price and you intend to grow to that amount of traffic within 12 months, consider grabbing it while the special is on. If this is your first site, you probably won’t need a lot of power in the first month as you burn through some months in research and design mode.
6. You can always upgrade but you may not be able to downgrade.
7. Consider if you want to get into a 12 month or more contract with your host – perhaps try them out first.
8. Make sure you have 24/7 support that covers your country and that they also have email/online ticketing support.
9. Make sure you disable your automatic billing if you do not want to continue with your host beyond your term, e.g. 3 months, a year.
10. Make sure you have File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access to your files so you can get a copy of everything and do partial backups without having to know about coding, hardware and hi-tech other stuff. This lets you put files and get files to and from your server with Dreamweaver or other free programs such as Filezilla (Firefox add on).

My Hosting Recommendations

• I use Webcity hosting in Australia because I try and buy local and their prices are great for the technology and service you get. You can get a business package (includes Fantastico scripts so you can run WordPress and Awstats – for not extra cost – from $7.95 a month in Aussie dollars. That’s a bargain for US dollar spenders.

I had to purchase AWstats separately with MidPhase Hosting and they wanted $15 everytime they did something for me; things that I have the ability to do myself with Webcity – for free. So needless to say I don’t recommend MidPhase. They also never paid me $85 USD for an affiliate commission earned in May 2009, despite nearly a dozen attempts on my behalf to get paid. If they treat their affiliates like crap and charge their customers through the nose I don’t want to give them my money. My personal opinion only, others do recommend them.

• I recommend HostGator in the United States, after reading lots of different reviews on GoDaddy and BlueHost. Check out another Thesis site, Blue Host Sucks to see what I mean.
• Registering domain names with GoDaddy is simple and cheap. I often register with GoDaddy and then change the Domain Name Servers (DNS) via my account area to those of my host. Google GoDaddy + coupon and you can get domain names for less than $8.

When you buy your hosting, make sure you get Fantastico scripts so you can install WordPress quickly and easily.

Install WordPress in less than 3 minutes

Below is a screenshot of the cpanel dashboard. I have roughly circled the 4 functions you will use most often:

Backup Wizard - where you go to generate site backups to download to your computer in a few clicks.

File Manager - where you will spend most of your time when you upload files, make changes to permissions, etc.

Awstats - a simple website statistics area that shows you traffic, links and other information for your site since its creation for a day, a month, a year, etc.

Fantastico De Luxe - the place to go to load WordPress. Click on this icon to start setting up your WordPress site.

After logging into your hosting account via the cpanel, go straight to Fantastico and install WordPress in less than 3 minutes.

After you click on the Fantastico icon, you will have a variety of options for additional scripts to add to your site. Select WordPress under Blogs. You will then see something like the image below.

Choose whether or not you are going to use WordPress to power your entire site

If you are installing WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS) and are not publishing html pages (like a traditional website), then leave the Install on domain as your url.com and leave the Install in directory blank.

• This choice is the most common. If you want to change it later you can.
• This will make your home page the WordPress blog.

If you want to have an html website or even just an html homepage then install WordPress in a folder called blog. Do this by typing blog in the Install in directory field.

• This will create a folder called blog on your server and place all WordPress files in this folder.
• The url of your site (WordPress pages) will start with url.com/blog …

Under the Admin access data select an admin username and password.

• This will be used by you to login to your WordPress account to manage your content.

Under Base Configuration select an admin nickname. This will be seen by others when you comment (when logged in) or when you publish posts if you display author details.

• Anything you enter in this section can be changed later in your WordPress dashboard area – so don’t stress about the words, just get through the step to Install WordPress.
• Add your admin email address, site name e.g. My Blog and a brief description e.g. All about me for everyone to see.

Hit the Install WordPress button to Install WordPress. In a few more clicks you will be given a chance to email set up details to yourself and view your site.

Click to view site and you will be taken to your website with the default Kubrick WordPress theme, like in the screenshot below.

Choosing a Theme for your WordPress Site

The next step is to select a WordPress theme to give your site a different appearance, different colours, choose the number of columns, etc.

You can use a free theme or a premium theme (a theme that you purchase).

Part II of How to Install and Customize a Thesis Site in a Weekend will cover:

• free and premium themes (including Thesis Theme)
• selecting a WordPress theme
• installing and activating a WordPress theme
• next steps…leading into Part III – which will include customizing Thesis Theme to get from the above default Kubrick to something bold, bright or beautiful… like we have done at Middle Path Marketing below.

• In future parts of this series, I will provide code snippets and explain how I transformed Middle Path Marketing from the default Kubrick, to the default Thesis Theme to a uniquely customized Thesis site as seen in the above screenshot.
• I will explain how to make a unique background, header, feature box, multimedia rotator boxes with ads or images or links to pages on your site, fonts, colours, sidebars, gravatars, favicons and many other elements that make your site unique.

Middle Path Marketing.com is currently in our treasure trove of future projects - because we were spreading ourselves too thin. Therefore the links to Middle Path Marketing have been disabled.

If you are interested at seeing what the home page looked like in its entirety, a jpg is here.