I'm not a web guy either, but let me see if I can explain what I did. Some of the stuff felt pretty counterintuitive to me, but I think I'm trying to make Wordpress do things it doesn't necessarily want to do. I basically just did everything (everything) the tutorial told me to do. Including the scrap paper drawings with little pictures of stick people or whatever. 'Cause I'm not a computer guy. And for all I know, the pictures of stick people might have helped.T-rex wrote:Also, I tried to hook up wordpress to bandcamp and failed miserably, but I am not a web guy. Any advice Judas?
I used the Twenty Ten theme. I tried a bunch of different themes, but this one seems like the best combination of features so far. It lets you run one customized menu, on which you can put at least 8 links (I know this because that's how many I have up there now. It may take more.)
The link for menus is under "Appearance" on the left-hand side of the dashboard, which took forever to get used to. Once you're on the menus dashboard, there's a box at the upper left that lets you set your custom menu. I'm not sure what the advantage is to having two potential menus, but there it is. If you're using the custom menu, you've got to have it selected under theme locations (top box on left). This cost me an afternoon of messing around (i.e., "dammit, why don't my custom links show up?" [messing around for 45 minutes] "Oh, duh. I don't have the custom menu selected." [Repeat 3x]).
The next box down is for the custom links that make up your custom menu. Enter the link (i.e. http://whatever.bandcamp.com), enter the title for the link (i.e. "music"), hit "add to menu" and it's in there. You can re-title all links, including the ones that send you to stock places offered by Wordpress.
I've got www.andysmash.com directed to bandcamp and wordpress (not sure how I did that) so if you go to my bandcamp page from my wordpress page it still says "www.andysmash.com." Sadly, there's no way to link back to the wordpress page from the bandcamp page, so people have to use their back arrows. Hopefully that's not a huge pain, but until Bandcamp installs menus with links that's just what folks'll have to do.
I set up another wordpress page for photos, and linked that to the main wordpress page in a similar fashion, using a custom link. Same for the blog. I then set a custom link to "home:" www.andysmash.com.
I made banners by making slides in Keynote (which is Mac's version of ... Powerpoint?), exporting them to my desktop, importing them into iPhoto and hacking them down to the proper size for uploading. Figuring out how to do this was another huge pain, and again I felt like I was swimming upstream the whole time... but they work. The artist who did our CD cover (Juni Moon http://worldofjunimoon.com/) also did a couple of banners for us. Had I had these from the get-go, they probably would have made life a lot easier. As it is, I wound up keeping the ones I made myself, 'cause after all that work I couldn't bring myself to pull them down again. Hopefully they don't burn your eyes out. Please let me know if they do.
Wordpress is pretty flexible overall, but like I said I got the feeling I was 'swimming upstream' with some of these things. You'll probably have to mess around quite a bit to get it to do something close to what you want, and you'll probably have to settle for second-best or third-best in a couple of options (like, for instance, I can't figure out how to set up a band calendar, and may not be able to do so). But it's free, which means you can't forget to make a payment and have the whole page disappear.
Best advice I can give is to block out a couple/three days just to play with the system until it starts to make sense. It's hard to commit to spending time learning how to use any particular website, because so many of them suck (koff-myspace-koff) but Worpress seems to be worth the time it takes to learn how to make it work.
BTW, T.Rex, bought a hi-hat cymbal off of you, didn't I? Still got it. Still use it. Still love it.
