 This is my first WordCamp. Is this everybody's first WordCamp? Yes. Okay, so we're all in this together. Good. So I'm going to be talking about WordPress.com versus WordPress.org. And this is probably the first decision that you need to make when you're looking at WordPress. You need to recognize that there are two different ways to approach it. And you need to understand the pros and cons so you can make a good choice. If you're getting someone else to make the site for you, this is a conversation you need to have with the person who's making the site for you. What kind of site are we building? What are the pros and cons of what you're making for me? So Alex gave me a great introduction. There's not much I can add to that. As he said, I use a couple of sites right now. Some are.com, some are.org. On the one hand, that means I'm completely unbiased as to which is the better way to go. On the other hand, perhaps it means I haven't made up my mind yet. If you want to find out more about me, check out my website. It's www.coval.ca. So I'm going to start at the very beginning. When you're making a website, you need three things in addition to something to put on the site. But I'm assuming you already know what you're going to put on the site. First, you need some software to build the pages and to build the site for you. And the software we're looking at obviously today is WordPress. WordPress is about 60% of the market for software to run websites. The next biggest competitor is Joomla at just 6%. And after that, there are many other software companies that make software to build websites, but I'm probably not allowed to talk about them since this is a WordPress game. If you've got your software, the next thing you need is a host. And this is to make your pages available on the internet. A host is really just a special purpose computer that delivers the web pages. It's called a web server sometimes. And typically, you rent server space from a hosting company. The third thing you're going to need is a domain name. Domain names are how websites are identified. That's how they're found. So that's how they're searched. You can either buy a domain name or you can share one with the hosting company. Now, it's technically possible to make a website without any of these things, but that's really hard and it's not a good idea so we're just going to skip over that. So as I said, WordPress is your software for making websites. And before we talk about whether it's .com or .org, let's just look at what the software is. It builds your web pages. It makes your blog posts. It's user-friendly. If you can use a word processor, you can build a page in WordPress. If you know a little bit of HTML, you can use that to make your pages to make some little customizations to it. WordPress also organizes your site pages and your blog posts. It looks after things like setting your home page and building your menus so that people can navigate around your site. It also looks after comments for you. It allows comments if you want them and it can moderate your comments. It also sets the overall appearance of your site and it will modify that appearance for different devices and this is very important because people are going to look at your site on desktop computers with huge monitors. They're going to look at it on big screens. They're going to look at it on telephones, tablets, everything in between. WordPress takes care of the themes in WordPress. Take care of rearranging your site so that it's good to read on any device. WordPress also manages users. There might be more than one person working on your site. If you're setting up a site for a club or an organization, you want several people to have access and WordPress can control who has access, what level of access they have. It keeps track of who is making changes to pages. Finally, it organizes photos and other media that you might add to your site. You can do simple editing on the photos after they've been put into WordPress. It organizes where they appear on pages. Do we have any questions so far? Please don't hesitate to speak up at any time if you do have a question. Do we have an IA computer? No. It's entirely internet-based so that the work is all happening elsewhere. You just need to be able to log into the site. An older computer is fine and any operating system is fine. It's all browser-based. You can even operate it from the iPad. I wouldn't know how to do that, but I'm sure you can. When you say it sets the home page, I'm having trouble with someone else set up and I want to change the home page. Is that possible or does that come with the theme? No, that's possible. Different themes allow you to do different things, but most themes let you specify which page is your home page. That's something we can talk about later if you like, but yeah, it's generally possible. Just the organizing of the photos. Once things are uploaded, things are on the web and you can't access your computer or anything else unless you've uploaded your files, PDFs, and pictures. Yeah, it's once you upload it. Everything's accessed from there. There's no communication with your computer. 99.9% of the time. If you really want to run a website from your personal computer, you can do that, but it's a really bad idea. It's technically possible a bad idea. WordPress is your software, but what are you going to do for the other two components you need, your domain name and your hosting? Well, there are three ways that you can get WordPress. The first is WordPress.com. That's a complete solution. It's the software, it's a domain name that you can share, and it's hosting. It's very much like renting an apartment. If you open a lot of money, it's your only choice. You have the option of moving into somewhere fully furnished and maybe it's expensive so you share the bathroom, you share the kitchen, but hey, it's a place to live. You don't have a lot of responsibilities and if the stove breaks, well, it's the landlord's problem. And WordPress is a really good landlord. They will come and fix that stove right away, no problems. If you can afford it, you can rent a really nice place. By using rent a place, you can rent an apartment that is so nice nobody's going to know it's an apartment. Inside from the outside, it looks like a fabulous place. But it's not your place. You can't rip up the carpet and put down hardwood if that's what you want to do. You can't change the kitchen covers. You've got to be happy with what they give you. They can give you something really nice, but there's a limit to what you can do. WordPress.org, when we're talking about WordPress.org, we're talking about just the software. You must purchase hosting and you must purchase the domain name. It's a little bit like buying a condominium. Price-wise, maybe not much different than a nice apartment. It could actually be cheaper in the long run. And it's your place. You can do whatever you want. You can change the flooring, you can change the coverage, you can do the bathroom with purple fixtures if that's what you're into. The budget is entirely up to you. You can do all stainless steel in the kitchen or you can get cheap appliances. But if the stove breaks, that's your problem. Nobody's going to come fix it for you. Toilet backs up, that's your problem. And the third option is a WordPress multi-site. This is a complete web solution, but it's not supplied by WordPress. So it's a little bit like WordPress.com, but it's a little bit like WordPress.org. It's like renting somebody's condominium. You don't have the responsibilities of ownership. It could be a really nice place. But the rules and the costs are going to depend entirely on your landlord. You're not going to see WordPress multi-sites too often. If you're online and you're looking to set up a site, most of the offers that you're going to see are either directly from WordPress.com or there'll be companies that are selling hosting and when you sign up, you'll get WordPress.org. Where you might see a WordPress multi-site, you might see an app that says, we have WordPress sites, especially for stamp collectors. Sign up with us. We'll give you a free WordPress site and be preconfigured for everything you need for stamp collecting. Something like that. They serve niche groups. In most cases, you're going to be choosing between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. And each has advantages and disadvantages. If you have no money, or if you're working for an organization that has no money, well, your only choice is WordPress.com because you can set up your website absolutely free using WordPress.com. Otherwise, if you've got a little bit of money, you can go either way. WordPress.org is much more flexible than WordPress.com, but WordPress.com offers plans and services that will make it more powerful and flexible. One thing you may hear online is that you can't use WordPress.com if you're making a complicated site or a large site or that WordPress.com is only for lobbyists, only if you're not having your own domain name. And that's simply not true. All of the organizations on the slide there, other organizations as well, the National Post newspaper, those are all WordPress.com sites. Now, they use a special plan called VIP, and if you have to ask for that cost, you can't afford it, but it's not as simple as WordPress.com is blogs and simple sites and WordPress.org is complicated sites. WordPress.com can be used to make a fully featured, high-powered enterprise level site. If you wanted to make an online store with shopping, I would probably go with .org, simply because you've got the flexibility to install things like WooCommerce, but you can often install those things with WordPress.com as well if you pay extra money. So it comes down to comparing the features and the costs. I've just recently started my website, and so I've got PostGator as my post, and then I did the install through them. Yeah, so this would be a WordPress.org. And then I had a GoDaddy domain that I've had for a year that I was sort of holding on to to get to this point. So I'm obviously in the work. So with .org versus .com, I would have to pay for services with .org. I'm creating it essentially myself. In a lot of cases, yes. Now, can I purchase a theme and then add plugins through .org? Yes, you can. What we're going to do is we're going to go through a lot of details about how to choose your site, how to choose your site, pros and cons of different features. That's probably a simple question, but if you have a domain name that's about .com domain name, can you use it on a WordPress.org? Yes, you can. You can use it on both. If you are using WordPress.org, which means you're going through a hosting campaign, you have to have your own domain name. That's the only way to find the site. If you're using WordPress.com, you have the option of using your own domain name. We'll look at some of the details. Before I get into that, though, I want to stress the importance of knowing which one you have, both before you buy and after you're set up as well. There's an awful lot of online help for using WordPress, but some of it is addressed to WordPress.com, some of it is addressed to WordPress.org. Most of the time that's okay. The core software, WordPress software, is the same, regardless of whether you're looking at it through a .com organization or a .org type site. Features like adding a link, making a link open in a new tab, adding a page, and you're done the same way, regardless of what type of WordPress you have. When you start getting into more advanced features, there's different differences. For example, an image map. This is a picture where if you click in different areas of the picture, different things happen, different links open. If you're using WordPress.org, you would probably do that with a plugin. If you're using WordPress.com, and you can't get a plugin to do that, you have to do it with HTML. There's instructions online to help you both ways, but you have to know whether you're working with .com or .org to get the right set of instructions. When you're looking for online help, know whether you're looking for help for .com or .org, and know whether the instructions that are there apply to WordPress.org or WordPress.com. Same thing if you're talking to someone here. If you have a WordPress.com site, let them know. That way they can give you advice specific to that type of WordPress. So let's look at the various aspects of both of them in more detail. Well, the first thing is the software. When you're using WordPress.com, all of the software, the core software, updates automatically. You don't need to do anything. You'll log into your site, it'll tell you it's updated to software. And there are no modifications or plugins. You can't make any, none are going to be made. Now, although WordPress.com doesn't allow you at the basic level to add plugins, it does have some features that are like plugins. And if you're willing to purchase some plans, you do have the option to add plugins. With WordPress.org, they give you the software that you are responsible for updating your site. It's not hard to do, but it's very important to stay on top of this. Because security is often an important consideration. You have to keep your site up-to-date to keep it secure. If you're using WordPress.org, you can modify the core files that make the site offering. That gives you incredible flexibility. But if you make a mistake and the site stops working, you'll have to fix that. Or hire someone or find someone to fix it for you. With WordPress.org, you can install any plugins you want. You can even create your own plugins. Again, if you have the coding skill to do that or if you hire someone to do that for you. But just as you are responsible for the security and the maintenance of the core software, you're also responsible for the security and the maintenance of any modifications and any plugins that are made. One benefit of having the software on its own is that you can install it locally. You can actually install WordPress software on your own computer, and you can run a WordPress site from there. You should not do that to make your site available to the public. But it can be used for testing. If you're working with a large organization and it's critical that the site be tested before it goes live with WordPress.org, you can have a copy of it on your computer. It's completely local. You can do your testing and make sure it works the way you want it to. Can we talk later about how to do that? Because I don't want to be live, because I'm working in progress, trying to do better. But I did set up the SSL and everything on there. So I am live, but there's nothing there other than my menus. And I changed the image of my front page. And I just said under construction we'll be back later kind of thing. But I really don't want them seeing my content because when I unveil it to social media, I want it to be a surprise. Right. You have other options besides a staging server that may be simpler. What you can do is restrict the visibility of the pages so that it's only visible if you log in. And that way you can have one public page that sits right under construction. You don't have any menu buttons on that page just out of the standalone page coming soon or whatever you like on that page. And the rest of the site can be entirely private. It'll be visible to you, but no one else. And under what heading do I go in to do that? It's somewhere under settings. I have to fish around to be sure. Under settings? Yeah, we can talk about that later. For what you're looking for, that may be a simpler alternative to making a local version. So I mentioned that WordPress.com includes hosting. It's free up to 3 gigabytes. And 3 gigabytes is actually a lot of space as long as you're not putting videos there and you can't get 3 WordPress. You can have sites that are hundreds of pages within that 3-gigabyte space. If you need more space, you can increase that with a payment. There's also no traffic restrictions. Most of us don't have to worry about too much traffic for our website, but if that's a concern, there's no traffic restriction with free WordPress. And they do include statistics so that you can see who's coming to your site, what they're reading, how long they stay and so on. When you're using WordPress.org, you're buying the hosting separately. So what you're going to get is going to vary depends on how much you spend usually. There may or may not be limits on your traffic. Again, for most of us, that's not a big concern. One thing that can be an important concern is that if you are purchasing your own hosting, you have the option to specify where that computer is physically located. And this is important for some companies. There are some companies that want their website to be in Canada. The server, where all the data for that website is stored, to be in Canada. If you need to make that kind of decision, you'll have to go with WordPress.org, purchase hosting from a hosting company that says our servers are located in Canada. It may apply to other countries as well. Again, if you need to serve to be in a particular area, you'll probably have to purchase a host that can make sure the server is in that area. The mention of WordPress.com includes statistics. If you purchase hosting, most likely you're going to get statistics from your hosting company. That's a wash. If you really like the WordPress.com statistics package, you can actually add that to a WordPress.com site. The Jetpack service, which is a big part of WordPress.com, a lot of the extra features, is also available for WordPress.org. Any questions on hosting? And as I mentioned before, the third thing you need to make a website work is a domain name. With WordPress.com, a domain name is not required. You can create a site with them, and it will have the address, whatever you want, within reason. WordPress.com. If you want to use your own domain name with a WordPress.com site, you can do that. Your own domain name is always a good idea. It looks more professional, and it's generally $10 to $20 a year. But if money's tight, you can share your domain name. If you're going to purchase a domain name, you can purchase it from WordPress.com, right within WordPress. There's no need to deal with a separate company for the name, and they'll do the work of associating the domain name with your site. It's not terribly complicated, but I'll look after it for you. If, on the other hand, you bought your domain name from a separate company, a domain name registrar, or some other company that had a good deal on domain names, you can still connect that to your WordPress.com site for a small fee. Now, with WordPress.org, you must buy a domain name, but you're already buying posting, and a lot of posting companies include a domain name already. So, again, it's a bit of a wash. Any questions on domain names? Something else we need to talk about is email. WordPress.com is website software. It does not look after email. Email is handled separately. There are, just as there are web servers that deal with websites, there are email servers that deal with email. WordPress does not include a mail server. Now, if you're using Gmail for your email address or another online mail service, you don't need a mail server. So it doesn't matter to you. You only need a mail server if you have a domain name and you want to send and receive email that uses that domain name. For example, you purchased the domain name HalifaxPuppies.ca, and you want to be able to send and receive email using the email address sarahathalifaxpuppies.ca. To do that, you're going to need a mail server. If you only want to receive email using a custom domain name, WordPress.com can handle that for you. You've got a custom domain name. WordPress.com will take up to five email addresses with that domain name and forward them to another account. So suppose you've got your email address sarahathalifaxpuppies, that can be used. You'll receive email. WordPress will send it to your Gmail account. Then you can reply to it using your regular Gmail account sarahatgmail. Does that come with a regular free WordPress.com listing? Or is that involving upgrade? This would be if you purchased a package that includes a domain name with your site. If you're not using a domain name with your site, you wouldn't be able to use a custom email address. Unless you had your own registered redirected domain. But through WordPress, what's the monthly cost of that? Do you have a rough idea? The plans start, I believe, five or six a month, depending how you pay. And you can add a domain name without going through a plan. I believe at $17, but I don't know if that's still available. Either way, once you pay to use a custom domain name with your WordPress.com site, that email forwarding is available. The drawback of that email forwarding is you cannot send using the different custom domain email. For that, you need a mail server. There's a couple of options. WordPress.com is also able to forward email to a separate email server. For example, when you purchased your domain name, depending who you bought it from and how much you spent, it actually may include an email server. So what happens is somebody wants to see your site using the custom domain name. It goes to WordPress. WordPress shows in your site. Somebody wants to send you email using the custom domain name. WordPress looks at it and says, okay, this is email. I don't deal with this. I'm going to send it off to this company, which has a mail server. And then you can send it and receive your email using your Sarah at healthxpuppies.ca. So if your mail hosting is included with your domain name, all you need is WordPress.com to forward it, and you have your mail hosting. If you don't have mail hosting included with your domain name, there is an option to purchase it. WordPress.com has an arrangement with G Suite. It lets you use Gmail with a custom domain name. So there are ways around this. One way or another, you can get email with WordPress.com. There's a couple of different options. Now, if you're going with WordPress.org, well, again, you don't have email because email is not part of WordPress. But if you have purchase hosting, most of the time, your hosting plan is going to include a mail server as part of that. And typically, even the most basic plan would include, say, up to 100 email addresses. So if that's the case, if you're using WordPress.org in a hosting company, your email is handled entirely through the hosting company. WordPress has nothing to do with it. So a lot of different options on email. The main thing to be aware of here is which way you go. WordPress isn't handling your email completely, but WordPress can forward your email to look after that. The different options. If your domain registration includes an email address or a couple of email addresses, for example, I have one package where my domain registration includes one email address. I only need one email address, so I can have WordPress forward the emails to my domain registrar, which is where my mail server is. Ideal depends how many email addresses you have as part of it. And you may already have G Suite through another organization for another reason, in which case you can take advantage of that. What is G Suite? G Suite is a package of features that's basically a premium version of the Google services. For example, you can have Gmail for free, but you have to use an email address that includes Gmail.com. Whereas if you pay them a little extra money, they'll let you use their mail service but with your own name. So if you can have a custom domain name, Gmail can still do all the heavy lifting of storing and sending the emails, but with your own domain name. It's up to they to do that. Yeah? I'm not sure how that would work, to be honest. I can say with some degree of confidence that you're unlikely to outgrow a WordPress but it's certainly easier to get everything from one company. There are advantages to getting your hosting from one company and getting your domain name from another company. Even if you're using WordPress, there are sometimes still benefits to getting your domain name from another company. It's more convenient to get everything from one supplier but you are kind of more committed to that supplier for future changes. As a general rule, if you have your domain name registered with one company, you can change it to another company and I would assume that applies to your domain name away from WordPress as a registrar as well. There's usually quite a few moves to jump through because everybody in fault wants to make sure that the transfer of the name is legitimate because people don't like their domain names getting stolen. But yeah, you could probably arrange to transfer the domain name to a new registrar and it would be the same to export it from WordPress.com as from any other registrar. So it's back and forth. Yep, it's trickier and certainly trickier if a site's become abandoned and you're not sure who's looking after it now. Another thing to consider is backups with WordPress.com you don't need to make backups. If you want the data is yours, you can export it at any time there's a function for that and if you want to be extra careful you can purchase a backup service. For WordPress.org you are completely responsible for the site. If it goes down it's up to you to restore it. I mentioned that you have to do your own software upgrades. You should take backups before you do a software upgrade when you're using WordPress.org. Now the good thing is that if you purchase posting there's a good chance that posting includes some backup provisions. There's another question on the security it just went over there. Sure. I have a WordPress.org site that has passwords protection but it's being hit by a whole bunch of spots looking to log in and it just shuts down their IP address. Is the only protection I have is strong password. That's actually not something I can just do with sorry. If you talk to one of the folks at the happiness party they know a lot more about that than me. When it comes to user accounts if you're going to create a WordPress.com site you'll need a WordPress.com account that becomes your login. One account can access many sites. If you find yourself looking after 304 WordPress.com sites you can use one account to access all of them. With WordPress.org well you don't need a WordPress.com account. You might still want to get one though to take advantage of some of the features such as jetpack. And you will need a separate account for each website that you set up through web hosting. Themes as we mentioned before themes control the appearance of your site. With WordPress.com there are 153 themes and another 200 that you can purchase. And if you purchase a plan that opens up a few more themes. Most themes have a limited amount of easy customization you can change the font you might be able to change a few colors of a colored scheme. If you've got deep pockets unlimited customization can be purchased. With WordPress.org the web host usually supplies a few themes but there are thousands available for free and there are thousands that can be purchased. You can make your own. Some of them have easy customization and that depends entirely on the theme but there is essentially unlimited customization. Ultimately you can have any appearance you want with any version if you've got enough money. When it comes to support with WordPress.com and WordPress.org there's a large community folks here today online support know which version you have. If you purchase a plan from WordPress.com that's going to include email and chat support at any time you can send somebody a question and say how do I make this feature work. That's not available with WordPress.org. You're relying on the community you might be able to get some assistance from your web host if there's something with the site not working but they may not be able to help you with WordPress specific questions. There is lots of help available but if you want the convenience of being able to send off a chat note and say how do I make a picture smaller that's available with WordPress.com if you purchase a plan. Something else to consider is advertising. If you've got free WordPress.com WordPress is going to place ads on your site and there's going to the branding there. If you have tons and tons of traffic there's revenue share available but for most of us that's not an issue and you cannot run your own ads you are allowed to do self promotion if you're a lawyer you can tell everyone that you're a lawyer and you have services available and you can put affiliate links up within reason but you can't actually run ads you can't make a lot of money running Google ads or something like that. If you purchase plans you have the option to run ads and remove the branding With WordPress.org there's no advertising the branding can be removed you can run your own ads you can do whatever you want you can even run WordPress.com ads and make money also if you have enough traffic it's the same either way there's advertising to bring people to your site that's separate from advertising on your site if it's a WordPress.com site it has to be a legitimate site that has content it can't just be pages of ads Is that a question on the time? Alex? We're just wrapping it up now we can do Q&A We're just at 9.30? Yes, it was half hour I thought I had 45 Nope Take another 5 minutes We'll go through a little picture here Yeah, I'll wrap it up as quick as I can An issue on content because there's more to your site than I have hopefully If you're using WordPress.com mature content must be identified and certain types of content and certain types of links are prohibited so read your terms of service basically if you're going to put anything up that you're not sure about it's probably not allowed Now I have some seen some online warnings that say don't use WordPress.com they will pull your site if it violates the terms of service Well, yes, they will Now with WordPress.org as far as WordPress is concerned you can put whatever you want on your site but the hosting company is going to have restrictions so again, read the terms of service Good rule of thumb if it's not allowed on WordPress.com it's probably not going to be allowed on the hosting company site either Now I haven't talked much about multi-sites most of the time using a WordPress multi-site is a lot like using a WordPress.com site but just remember that the terms, conditions, and costs are all set by the owner and operator of that site For most people a multi-site doesn't have much advantage over a WordPress.com site but if you're setting up sites if you're setting up a site for a franchise or real estate office or some other situation where people might have their own sub-sites then you'd be looking at a WordPress multi-site and you must use WordPress.org to set up a multi-site Big question for a lot of people what's it going to cost? Well, WordPress.com starts at 3 and it goes up to 390.60 a year for the basic plans A good place to start is a plan that is $60 a year that will remove ads it will get you one domain name doesn't include email service but if you need that you can get it from G Suite for another $60 a year you may not need it WordPress.org the software itself is free but you need to purchase hosting and hosting generally starts around $60 a year that's going to usually include one domain name and email server it might not include a security certificate security certificates generally start around $40 a year so there's not a lot of difference in cost depends a lot on your requirements yep, that's a monthly charge and those are based on annual payments for monthly charges what about if I created it myself as your cloud employer do I have to... renew anything? whatever you're using for WordPress you have to renew annually so how are you going to make your decision WordPress.com is easier to set up and maintain no question there WordPress.org is more flexible it allows more features and more parents options if you want one stop shopping and support you probably want to go with WordPress.com if you want to set up multiple sites you need to go with WordPress.org if you don't have any money you need to go with WordPress.com if you need to know your server location or choose your server location you're going to have to go with WordPress.org and purchase hosting where you know the server location if you're not sure go with WordPress.com set it up for free, get started for free you can add paid services and add features later and WordPress.com very easily migrates to WordPress.org if you decide you need the full feature and flexibility of that approach we've had a few questions but I've got time now for more yes sir when you say affiliate marketing there's going to be a lot of links there yeah basically people click on the link and do some blockchain and I'm not sure about what the best theme for that is so whether it's a certain theme that's going to be set up a template for me that would be installed because right now I'm just having a bunch of blogs and I'm going to fix that out today with the links if you have too many links on there you may run afoul of www.wordtrend.com content rules on linking the way it works with affiliate links let's suppose for example that you run a book review site so each post is a book review and you have a link to that book on Amazon and it's an affiliate link you'll get the funds if someone makes a purchase that's allowed but if you try and run an online bookstore where you have a page which is my favorite books this month and then the rest of it is links to Amazon and they're all affiliate links that's probably going to run a follow-up to your content so if you're going to have a lot of links you might be looking at .org we're putting an affiliate link in your blog let's say how does that affect the I'm trying to figure out with all the gdpr stuff and whatnot do you have to put a disclaimer on your website to save if you have links in your blog that are affiliate links I'm not familiar with all of the gdpr requirements but if you're using wordpress.com they will give you the options to automatically add the disclaimers that you need for gdpr as far as privacy policy and cookies and so on if you're using wordpress.org you're a little more on your own there now will wordpress.com do it automatically or do you have to ask them to do it what I've seen with wordpress.com in the last couple weeks they've been popping up a little note that says something to the effect of you may need this gdpr banner if your site is visible in Europe like here if your site is only visible in North America you wouldn't need it but in most cases your site is going to be visible worldwide so it's kind of a good idea to have that European banner on and the gdpr on if you have time for wordpress absolutely sir I was just wondering if you have received a website that has a particular theme and I believe we're using gdpr is it difficult to switch over to another theme if you decide oh yeah this is it's actually very easy to switch you can preview themes in a lot of cases I often tell people don't settle on a theme until you've got your content in because you often can't determine exactly what the site is going to look like until you've got your content there then pull up and see how it looks in the theme see if the menu is where you want it to be and if it isn't just select a different theme it's usually just a matter of minutes now what would happen another maybe one theme supports three menus and the next theme only supports two menus if you see one of your menus disappear but really the only way to get a theme that you're happy with is to have content in your site apply the theme see what it looks like see what the modifications and settings for that theme are then be happy with that one or try a different one yeah yeah the themes are small number of themes that are supplied by your post the rest of them you can obtain from WordPress or from third party suppliers so where in WordPress do I go you'd actually go to the WordPress.org site and fish down that way the best way to do it is to talk to one of the folks who are happy with this part they can show you where their treatment is from WordPress has some themes there's other themes that for whatever reason are not available through their site but available separately there's lots of companies out there that make themes so you may be able to just Google search word themes but talking to one of the folks at the happiness bar about the best way to do it there's a tab that says themes and things I've never looked for one there that's where I go to start looking that's why I say talk to those folks I stay away from custom themes that's my personal thing just one other question gentleman in the back have a question yeah that can be tricky sometimes if you're using complex themes so again myself I stay away from complex themes I like it simple is there I was just wondering is wix better than WordPress or is it because I hear wix is so easy you know also is that a good hosting site okay I gotta be careful when I say we don't have the hosting conversation here we did have a conversation a couple like a couple months ago now hosting is a very sensitive conversation we do have a lot of different sponsors so I would like to table that if you wanna ask people's opinion separately everybody will have a different opinion and different experience we don't talk about hosting it's a heated controversial it's like talking about Trump there are two things there are two rules to word camp we don't talk about Trump we don't talk about hosting just to answer your question about one of WordPress's competitors again there's not a lot I can say there but there's no denying that WordPress has a little bit of learning curve but in my experience I recommend WordPress I recommend it you recommend WordPress I switched to WordPress in 2012 as I mentioned I turned up with no patch decades ago I learned Greenweaver and more complex tools like that I found them more than I needed I've always been a web hobbyist not a developer I use the internet I'm not into websites so I went with Microsoft front page with serious web developers and then expression web when Microsoft stopped supporting expression web I switched to WordPress and not looking back very happy with it one of the question on the page if you have two things about it would you switch from one page to another if it's already a site full of content like you said some of the content maybe the menus are missing if you switch back that you still reappear not necessarily no you'd be very impressed you're not going to lose any of the content that you've created your pages, your photos none of that will be touched but how they display and some of the navigational language may be affected you can do one previews too you don't actually have to commit there's a preview option when you're testing a different theme all right