When CackBlabbath was originally set up 8 months ago everything was hand written, The advantage of this was that I could get the site looking exactly the way I wanted it to, and tweak the smallest detail to get everything just so. The big disadvantage was that adding any new content to the site was a manual process, with no way to make getting articles online any easier.
Clearly as the site expanded some sort of content management system was required, and by far the most popular one out there is WordPress. Now when I first started the site I deliberately stayed away from using this as, well, everyone else does and it means that there are an awful lot of very similar looking websites out there. But things change and the site was becoming too big to maintain easily, so about 3 months ago CackBlabbath joined the wonderful world of WordPress.
The initial setup of WordPress was fairly painless. You need a web host that gives you an SQL database and supports PHP scripting. Most do, although some charge you extra for these features. We use uk2 and, although it has a dodgy reputation, we have had no problems yet.
The general look and feel of a WordPress site is controlled by what they call Themes. When you first set up the site a rather dull one is installed by default, but once you reach this stage you are ready to start adding content. One of the beauties of the system is that you can change themes without losing all of your existing work. This is a godsend if it takes you a while to figure out exactly what one you want to use.
Picking the proper theme is the first important step in designing your site, especially if you want it to look a bit different. You quickly find out that there are thousands of alternatives, some of which are really very good and some of which are downright terrible. Good luck finding one that you like.
For the first three months on WordPress we used the really rather excellent Arras theme. This is pretty good ‘out the box’ for a music blog site although this does make it very popular, and thus very common. It has a number of nice features built in including a rather nifty featured posts slideshow and the ability to split the posts on your home page by category and also to attach a ‘featured image’ that shows up in the slideshow and in the links on the homepage.
Arras also comes with different colour schemes 
as standard so you can, for example, have it light (as shown above) or dark as shown here.
As a ‘get you up and running’ theme it’s difficult to fault Arras. Its popularity means that there is a load of support information available on the web and should you wish to stick with it there is a ‘child theme’ you can buy for $20 called Arras Dark Gamer which enhances some of the visual elements and tweaks the general look and feel.
The issue with an Arras themed site (in my opinion) is that it will always look like an Arras themed site unless you have the time and knowledge to carry out a lot of customisation. Still, if you’re happy with the way it looks it could be the only theme you’ll ever need.
After trying out literally dozens of themes I finally found one that seemed to suit the overall feel I had in mind for the site. The Albizia theme has a really nice look, a decent enough colour scheme out of the box and is also, for the moment at least, less common. There are some of the nice features of Arras (such as the featured content slide show) that are missing, but with the addition of some plugins (more on that later) and a bit of hacking about it isn’t too difficult to implement these missing features.
Out of interest, I almost didn’t go for this theme at first as the default menu bars colours just didn’t grab me, blue stripey naffness. Luckily it comes with a number of possible alternative colour schemes and after trying them I settled on the one you see on the site now. The metallic title bars and the mesh background to the theme is really cool. All it needed to set everything off was a decent background. The red checkerplate you see came from a clipart site somewhere or other and it enhances the look of the site considerably over the default black background.
In WordPress the additional boxes and functionality over the default theme are supplied by little software addons called Plugins. Now as with themes there are thousands of plugins available and they vary wildly in quality. Some of these install Widgets that can be really easily added to themes that support them (another advantage of Albizia over Arras is that you can customise the sidebar width easily, and also include widgets at the top and bottom of the main page).
Now not all plugins appear to work properly, and indeed some are so buggy that they can cause your site to crash. If you’re looking for some for your site I can recommend the following for the painless addition of new features…
Akismet – Keeps control of Spam in your post comments. 
And believe me you need it, you’ll be amazed how quickly your site starts to gather the attention of the spambots
All In One SEO Pack – Search Engine Optimisation helps web search engines index your site more easily (basically) Install this plugin and you’ll be sure that the key meta tags that they look for are present
Broken Link Checker – Broken links are unprofessional, end of story. This plugin checks to see if you have any and warns you if you have.
Facebook Likes It! – Adds a Facebook Like button to the bottom of each post. Good for your vanity I guess, assuming anyone ever clicks it.
Google Analytics For WordPress – Adds Google Analytics code to your pages so you can see how many (few) people are visiting and what they are doing.
Sexy Bookmarks – Eye candy, let people bookmark your site on social networks more easily. No one does but they look good.
WPMS Mobile Edition – This is a good one, it changes the theme to something ‘mobile screen friendly’ if someone visits from a smart phone.
You will notice that most of these plugins either do what they do in the background (like block spam) or are pretty much cosmetic (like sexy bookmarks), but they are all easy and virtually configuration free to install. So once you get your theme in and working you can install these and immediately have some enhancements over the default installation.
The good news is that for the most parts your plugins will keep working if you do decide to change themes.
Unfortunately if you have any sort of ambition for your site you will quickly realise that, oddly, although there are thousands of add-ons available for WordPress none of them do EXACTLY what you want them to. This is when you have to get into the guts of the software and start editing things…..
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