I hope I can be excused if my question sounds ridiculous but seriously, I am totally new to websites. I have no knowledge of html, css, php, blogs and everything.
Anyway, I had my website done on Microsoft Frontpage with shared borders, etc. I have added in phplist which is a mailing list fro my newsletter and I thank the guys from their forums who were very kind and helpful in guiding me on having the phplist customised into my website.
http://www.thaivisitor.org
Now I want to add in a blog and after reading generally about the different blogs which are Word Press, Nucleus, pMachine Free and b2evolution, I would like to install b2evolution. But before I do that, I need to ask a few questions which I hope I can get the answers from here.
I would like to have a blog which I am the only person who "writes" so I don't need multiple blogs, etc. My readers, can of course put in their comments which I think the function is already there. I do not need any readers to register so the blog is "open" to all to see and comment, unless someone here advises me otherwise.
Now, I think the "default" design suits me fine. But I like to know whether it is possible, or easy to have my own header and footer which is my shared borders of my website. If you take a look at my website, the header ends just after the 5 images (one with Tiger Beer).
Also, the blog will replace my homepage so on my right panel, is it easy to insert my Flash images and my newsletter subscription form? I can resize it to fit the left panel of the blog page if necessary.
I hope I can get some help here for my newbie questions.
Thanking you guys in advance.
Cheers
Tee Vee
General Support
You might be surprised how nice it is for a single author to have multiple blogs. For example your links can (and should) be their own blog - called a linkblog. You might also find yourself writing about touristy stuff and local stuff, so those could easily be two blogs.
So you can always make the content of your MSFP shared borders be part of your blog, but don't think of it as shared borders anymore. In fact throw out FP and get into doing a bit of learning and coding. It's not hard and you'll have a better web as a result. Basically what you'll want to do is edit a skin to have your 'shared border' content be a sidebar and/or a header and/or a footer. All of that can be done in your skin. Same thing with tucking in flash or javascript or *whatever*. If it can be coded for a webpage it can be part of your b2evolution skin.
A skin, by the way, defines what content you want on your page, where it goes, and how it looks.
You will have to learn some stuff about html and php, but it's not like you have to magically know it all immediately. There are lots of comments in the code and most of the functions have names that sort of explain what it does for you, so a bit of reading and head-scratching gets you customizing in no time.