I spent a week looking at themes to modify for my new Connexius website before settling on Unisphere Corporate from Themeforest.net. I trolled for days looking for a free theme that I liked before giving up and deciding to pay for something nice. The total cost of my selection, $27. For that money I got a well written, multi-page theme with multiple skins, a nifty slider, and support across all major browsers. However, all of that is secondary to the primary value for my $27. What I really got was a developer that stood behind their product and quickly responded to email questions. I got a response back on a technical question faster than it takes for me to connect with GoDaddy or AT&T technical support. Themeforest lets you look at all of the comments that users leave on the 100s of themes in their database. This makes it easy to see which themes work and which ones have developers that stand behind their product.

So the moral of the blog is when looking for corporate themes, check the support the developer provides.

In my last post I mentioned the reason for using WordPress for a new corporate web site was the numerous and rich 3rd partry applications that support their websites and blogs. Somehow in the post I failed to mention the most important plugin, database backup. I learned this the hard way when I mistakenly uploaded my new Connexius.com MySQL database to my live chrispoer.com MySQL database. I host both websites on the same account at GoDaddy and I selected the wrong database when loading the new Connexius website. I have religously backed up the HTML files, but somehow I never thought about backing up the database which is the heart of WordPress.

So which is the best backup plugin? I did a search on “DB backup” and selected “DB Cron Backup” based solely on the WP recommendations provided. I can say that it is easy to install, configure, and operate and indeed backup files are being created when I asked them to be created. Hopefully they are good files and in the event of another failure they will restore my system. I actually have not been brave enough to test it and do a restore.

I almost titles this blog why I am going to leave GoDaddy as my website hosting provider. While I admit the DB failure is 100% my fault, I would expect that GoDaddy has a reasonable backup and restoration system. The good news is that they can restore the system to any day and time you request. The bad news is that it costs $150 and they said it would take 7-10 business days to manually pull the files off their offsite storage facility. Does that sound right to you?

A couple of people asked me why I would use WordPress as the basis for the new Connexius LLC website. WordPress is well known as a blogging tool, but a web site? The answer is the same as why I use the iPhone (and suffer with AT&T), the apps! The WordPress development community is huge turning out useful plugins every day. There are plugins for traffic analysis, social networking integration, SEO tools, and much much more. As an added bonus I was able to create a panel that allows other people to modify the text within the website without having to change the actual website code. This is especially helpful when you want different people responsible for different pages of the website.

While I noted in Part I, developing using WordPress is not trivial, the long term benefits are well worth the investment.

I started programming in high school in the 80s and wrote my last piece of code in 1992. I was tired of hardware and software development and decided to move in to business. I have wanted to learn website development for years but never had the time to figure it out. I used the formation of Connexius LLC as the opportunity to learn HTML/CSS. While the final result worked and had lots of cool features, it just did not look right. I took the lessons learned from the exercise and working from a template built iSupport Services’s website in about 1/5th the time. Using WordPress, Chrispoer.com was complete in under a day though in all fairness it is just a template with a few very minor changes.

So when it came time to redo Connexius.com I decided to use WordPress. So based on the pattern that had been established with my last three websites, my expectations were that this endeavor would not prove too difficult. I knew I needed to learn PHP and MySQL to get the website to work right but I did not believe that would provide too much of a challenge after working with HTML/CSS over the last 6 months. While not complete, the final result is up “HERE” working basically as I had envisioned. However, the lesson learned and the whole purpose of this BLOG is to warn casual/new developers like myself to respect the technology that goes in to WordPress. Selecting a theme and importing it is trivial. If you select a good theme, adding new web pages is also very straightforward. However, if on the other hand you want to make wholesale changes to the theme, be very careful and at least double the expected development time. The WordPress loop is not trivial and understanding all of the functions and databases well enough to build a fresh website is not for the faint of heart.

The moral of the story, if you want to use WordPress and cannot find a theme that is a perfect fit, hire an expert. Trust me, it is well worth the money in the long run.

SEOMoz, my favorite SEO tool site, is having an open house today to show off their capabilitiies. Being on a budget, I only use their free tools which are very helpful. If you care about SEO and do not subscribe to a full service system, I highly recommend you take part in their trial. I have used it to check up on all of my sites and my competitors sites. To access this free service, go to opensiteexplorer.org.

This is available today only.