Thanks for the good questions. We will be covering some of what you are asking about at the next Nightstand. A custom design in WordPress is done by essentially creating a custom “Theme.” This entails creating all the necessary files in .PHP and .CSS and putting them in a folder within the “/wp-content/themes/” folder of WordPress. Once you do that, the custom theme shows up in the “Design” area of WordPress administration, and you can apply it to your site. You can also edit the theme from within WordPress Admin.

You can also use Dreamweaver to connect to the server and to edit your Theme files. At Headstand, we use both methods of creating and editing custom themes… sometimes using Dreamweaver, and sometimes the built-in “Design>Themes” area of WordPress Admin. I think this will become clearer for you on the 31st. See you then!

I’ve been exploring Wordpress and successfully set it up on my web server. However, I wanted to throw out my two big questions that I’d be happy to see you touch on at the meeting:

1. How to give the site a custom design.
2. How the edit and test the site within Dreamweaver or something similar. (For example, Wordpress uses PHP and a database, so dreamweaver is telling me I need to set up a testing server to preview files in a browser. I’m having some trouble with that part.)

Thanks!