Once upon a time, websites were only built in a static way, which meant that site owners had zero control over updating and managing their own websites. They had to request changes from their service providers, pay for the changes and then wait for the updates to be done – all very tedious and not terribly efficient.

Thankfully, things have changed.

Now days, it’s all about dynamic websites and the use of content management systems (CMS).

With a good content management system, you can update your site yourself, saving you money in the long run, the time waiting for changes to be done and the stress of having to rely on someone else to update your website. Many new content management systems also offer the potential for valuable additional functionality such a blog or news feed (Why do you need a blog?), which is an extremely powerful engagement and marketing tool.

There are a number of great content management systems available such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Expression Engine, to name but a few. The Forge Web Creations’ CMS of choice is WordPress, for reasons we’ve outlined in a previous blog post.

With the increased awareness and interest in content management systems, the need to “skin” or use a theme to dress up the CMS, so that the website looks attractive, has also increased.

In some cases, site owners require a unique design solution to reflect their branding and incorporate custom functionality. In other cases, a template theme that offers a number of simple customization options is more than adequate.

Whichever option you may decide on for your WordPress site, we can help:

1. Our sister company, eFrog Digital Design (which is also built on WordPress) is a Premium WordPress theme shop that sells high quality WordPress themes with great features that you can easily customize to suit your requirements.
2. Through The Forge Web Creations, we also service a number of clients with custom WordPress themes, specifically tailored to enhance the brands represented and meet the website’s unique functional requirements.

We’ve recently launched two new custom WordPress sites for Clients who needed unique design and functionality, along with the control of updating and managing the sites themselves.

1. Legal & Commercial Solutions

2. The Dot Spot

We can do the same for you.

If you’re looking for a unique website that runs on a content management system, The Forge Web Creations can help! Please pop us an email and we’ll contact you to chat about your requirements.

And if you’re looking for a gorgeous, high quality WordPress theme to use on your website, head on over to eFrog Digital Design.

This has led to a frequently asked question – How do I setup WordPress?

Fortunately, WordPress has one of the easiest setup processes; however, there are still a few things that need to be understood before you get to it. Some of the tasks you’ll be required to perform are:

1. Organising a hosting account
2. Setting up a database
3. Updating files
4. Using File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Before you can do anything, you need to have a hosting account and domain name – The domain name is your http://www.yourname.com, which points to your hosting account where all your files are stored on the Internet. Hosting accounts are available through a number of service providers – we recommend Hetzner and their affordable package called “Basic”. Once you’ve arranged the hosting package, we’re ready to look at creating a database.

With most hosting companies, you will receive access to a Control Panel or Konsole, or some sort of administrative area which allows you to manage your hosting account. Inside the Control Panel will be a tool that allows you to create a MySQL database. When creating a database, make sure that you write down the host name, database name, username and password, as you’ll be using these again when installing WordPress.

Your next step is to download a copy of WordPress and you can do so by clicking here. Once you have downloaded WordPress, you will need to unzip the files and look for a file called wp-config-sample.php – This file needs to be opened, you can do this with Notepad (Win) or Textedit (Mac). Once the file is opened, the following lines need to be changed to match the host name, database name, username and password you wrote down in the previous step:

/** The name of the database for WordPress */

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘database_name_here’);

/** MySQL database username */

define(’DB_USER’, ‘username_here’);

/** MySQL database password */

define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password_here’);

/** MySQL hostname */

define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

Once you have made these changes, save the file, close it and rename it to wp-config.php.

The next step is to make use of an FTP program to upload your files to your host. A free FTP program called FileZilla can be downloaded here. If you aren’t sure on how to use an FTP client, click here to read a comprehensive guide about uploading your files to your host or have a watch of this video tutorial:

At this point, you should have uploaded all the WordPress files that came in the .zip file that you downloaded to your host.

All that is left now is to navigate to your domain, for example, http://www.yourname.com and follow the instructions given to you on screen.

If you get stuck, please click here and read a more comprehensive guide to installing WordPress.

After many months of lovingly planning, designing and building our innovative Premium WordPress Theme website, we are thrilled to finally announce the launch of our fresh new company, eFrog Digital Design, into the World Wide Web today.

To kick things off, a stylish new eFrog Premium WordPress Theme called “Parallax” is on offer, designed especially for photographers and other folk wanting to showcase a digital portfolio.

Parallax has been specifically developed for WordPress 3.0 and makes fantastic use of custom post types, archive and navigation menus to create a flexible and elegant portfolio solution.

As an added bonus, eFrog Digital Design is celebrating its launch by offering a 10% discount on the Parallax theme until 10 September 2010.

Our team is rather proud of what we’ve achieved and hope you’ll enjoy the themes we have on offer at eFrog, as well as all the great designs we’re working on for future release.

As featured on:

• Web Designish – Fresh and Best CSS Web Designs of 2011

Wordpress enables you to run your website efficiently and effortlessly.

1. Open Source

WordPress is built on an open source platform and is, itself, open source. This means that it is free to use for any purpose (personal or commercial). This is, naturally, of huge benefit for any small business or not-for-profit organisation that has a limited budget and resources but, requires the ability to manage their own website. Also, it is simple to learn and quick to keep your site fresh and updated, so you are able to eliminate both the cost of possible expensive training and extra staff capacity.

2. Flexible

Wordpress has a global, buzzing community backing it which offers its users a wealth of information from tutorials to add-ons. With these resources so freely available, it is easy to manipulate Wordpress to cater for any website requirements.

3. SEO

Wordpress has been built with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. Websites built on Wordpress have an immediate head start when it comes to being searchable in search engines. An abundance of SEO plugins (add-ons) exist for free, which easily plug into the website to increase the sites visibility in search engines.

4. User friendly

Wordpress is one of the easiest web management tools available. In just a few hours, anyone can master the basics of what Wordpress has to offer. The administration area is laid out logically and focuses on easy navigation for all users.

5. Standards Compliant

Web standards are the use of correct web coding standards as laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The web standards which are of most concern to modern business are XHTML and CSS coding practices. The idea behind a standards compliant website is that the look of the website is separated from the content on the website. This results in a website loading quickly as well as easily working across the various browsers different people use, such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

6. Self Managed / Low Maintenance

Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) which provides the owner of the website with the ability to maintain the content on the website, without contacting a web designer to make changes. If a website has been built correctly, and runs on Wordpress, there is very little upkeep for the owner.

7. Low running costs

Wordpress is a light-weight CMS which doesn’t require expensive web hosting and updates to Wordpress are released free of charge.

8. Adapt to design/brand

With Wordpress being a light-weight, open source framework, adapting the look of a brand to the design of the website is possible, regardless of the nature of the brand.

9. Community Support

The incredible community following that Wordpress has, also means that fans and users are able to active release tips and tricks daily. This support system provides website owners with easy, instant access to necessary information for any situation.

10. Feature Rich

Part of Wordpress flexibility is the fact that there are thousands of plug-ins freely available on the Internet. These plug-ins cater for a variety of functions including, displaying latest news posts, enhancing the SEO of the website and increasing the speed at which the website loads. These plug-ins allow for a static website to become dynamic and encourage true interaction between visitors.

11. Easy Media Management

With Wordpress, the publishing of photographs, videos, podcasts and other media becomes incredibly easy for the website owner. In most cases, no third-party or externally hosted applications are required.

12. Advertisement Management

For website owners who want the ability to run advertisements on their website, a Wordpress plug-in can cater for this. The plug-in will provide statistics on clicks and impressions and provide the ability to limit advertisements to certain pages or certain duration of time, amongst other things.

13. Spam-free Contact Forms

When it comes to having a form on your website for people to contact you via your website or subscribe to a mailing list, spam can become a huge problem. Wordpress has built-in spam protection functionality and will prevent you from receiving all those unwanted emails.

14 Automatic RSS generation

RSS Feeds are another way of distributing information on a website each time a new piece of information is published on the website, everyone who is subscribed to the RSS feed will receive the updates either in an RSS reader or via email.

15. Easy Integration with Social Media Applications

Wordpress has functionality which makes it easy to integrate with the most popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. This is incredibly useful if marketing is taking place on one of the social networks and the campaign needs to incorporate a website.

The Forge Web Creations has produced a variety of customized Wordpress websites for our clients, including Cape Villa Collection (http://www.capevillacollection.com/) and the Cape Stay Blog (http://www.capestayblog.co.za/)

Should you be interested in letting The Forge work their magic with a Wordpress site for you, please contact us by clicking here.

The Cape Stay Blog has been created to supplement our popular and highly successful online accommodation directory for Cape Town and the Western Cape, South Africa – the Cape Stay Accommodation Guide.

Our new website, powered by WordPress, will keep visitors and subscribers up to date with the latest holiday and business accommodation news through regular blog postings that will also feed through to both our Facebook Fan page and our Twitter stream.

It’s been a tremendous learning curve for us to build this site from the ground up and our team has had great fun pulling together to make the Cape Stay Blog happen. We’ve spent nearly 4 months developing the site and creating valuable content to help visitors find their perfect accommodation in our beautiful province.

We are very pleased with the final result and thrilled that the Cape Stay Blog is now LIVE!