Check out My Community Blog/Website

[CuriousSkeptic]

Hello everyone I am new to these forums have no proper training in web design but I decided to start a community blog. The purpose is to give people who don't have the means to make there own blog a way to share their insights and experiences.

The URL is [EDIT: moved to the URL box by TheGAME1264] and it looks really nice to me so far but I don't know where to take it from here. I have some friends working on it with me but none of them are skilled in web design a marketing. If any of you would like to check it out an give me feedback I would really appreciate it and if anyone wants to become an author or post an article or even become a member of my team I would be ecstatic.

[Ronald Roe]

I'm sure the creator of the Divi theme did a great job. Since that's probably not you, I'll give you the polite version of what you have coming. Go back to the drawing board, do the work yourself, and then ask people to review that. Uploading a theme and asking for a review pretty much amounts to trying to pass off someone else's work as your own, and that's heavily frowned upon.

[CuriousSkeptic]

Ok I'm sorry like I have said I have no training in web design I don't know how to do what your asking

[TheGAME1264]

Okay, I'm going to do something I very rarely do, I'm going to cut you some slack for two reasons:

1) I'm guessing that one of the two people in your avatar is you, and you look like you're a minor or at most borderline legal to slide up to a bar and order a drink.
2) You're apparently not doing this for money and you're doing it to learn. I don't see ads and I don't see anything that's an obvious attempt to make money, although I suppose membership could be.

So...with that said, what Ron was talking about was that you used the Divi theme. One of the most important and usually overlooked aspects of design is to be original in all areas, including layout. You're better off with an ugly original layout than a good-looking template since you would have done the work yourself and people respect that. You appear to have original content and some interesting deep-rooted philosophical stuff there, so I know you get the value of doing things yourself. You just have to extend it to your layout, that's all.

Whatever you decide for your layout, you'll probably want to skin phpBB to match rather than using the stock skin. Keep everything consistent.

I'm not sure who's in charge of security and patching things if they get hacked, but you've got two potential openings in phpBB (bot target, and bots can often break the captcha code) and WP itself. So you'll want to have someone who's really on the ball with PHP and with making sure servers and platforms are up-to-date.

As far as your idea goes, I have a question: what exactly are you offering that say wordpress.com and blogspot.com don't? Both are available for people who want to set up a blog and start blogging, so what are you doing that's any different? I don't see what that is, which is something you'll want to communicate.

[Ronald Roe]

I figured the photo was the OP's kids. Anyway, with as many of these that we get where they are actually trying to get us to review a theme as if they'd made it, it's hard not to jump right on that point. In fact, I've reached the point where that's the first thing I look for. That, or I'll run it thru WhatTheme.

[CuriousSkeptic]

Yes I am the boy in the photo and thank you for the feedback. One of the things I want to differentiate myself from other wordpress websites is the curious yet skeptical perspective on writing making sure that we at least put some thought into our work. I can tell you that one of the main things I was worrying about was how similar it was to the theme. If possible I would love to design my own, however I'm sure that takes a lot of expertise time and effort. I just wanted a way for the average joe to be able to become an established author quickly. I had hoped that I could eventually build a userbase of people so that people with great ideas could write an article an reach a ton of people rather than having to build that audience themselves

[CuriousSkeptic]

If anyone is skilled in php and would like to help out I would be very appreciative

[TheGAME1264]

There's one thing you'll ultimately want to consider down the road. PHP is a broken framework and the most skilled developers quite often run screaming from it.
PHP: a fractal of bad design - fuzzy notepad <-- this guy wrote an absolutely amazing piece on it and said a lot of things that I have for years (and about 50 I haven't).

This is one of the reasons I tell people that they should try to move away from PHP in general and WP specifically. We're very quietly reaching a point where the PHP framework will be so bloated (and by extension so will WP) that it will be ostensibly rendered useless and in about 5-10 years, people will be caught with their pants down because it's all they've ever known. WP "developers" in particular will be beyond lost.

[CuriousSkeptic]

Wp means wordpress right? And I am willing to change forum software if someone helps me

[TheGAME1264]

Yes, it does. And in your case, it's not just your blogging platform...it's your forum as well. You'd want to look at something...well, not driven by PHP. That's going to be very difficult to find.