To think that saying it's so easy children can do it is crap

[loveisagirlnameddaisy]

Admittedly, posting here for traffic and ideas rather than an actual grievance, but I have spent the entire day trying to build a WordPress website and I'm almost in tears. PMT is not helping either.

I am just baffled by it all. I have tried about ten different themes and I find it impossible to make any of them look any better than a dog's dinner. The website builder options are hopeless as well. How the hell do start-ups do their own websites these days or am I a dunce?

Are you wedded to Wordpress for any reason? I have built plenty of simple websites and am not a fan of their interface - I use Yola, but there are plenty out there that are much easier to master IMO.

I am not wedded to anything right now other than a finished website! THe problem I'm having with Yola, Wix, GoDaddy, SiteBuilder etc (and I've tried them ALL today) is that I can't get their templates to look anything like decent with my colours/logo/images etc. Would very much appreciate any suggestions on what to do next.

The best ones I've found are Twenty Ten and Apostrophe, for different 'blogs. The Twenty Ten one is more "texty", while I wanted to make more, differentiated content available with my 'blog in Apostrophe.

HTH!

What doesn't look 'decent' about them? As far as I recall, there is an option in Yola to just have a plain colour as a background and to upload a logo into one of their templates rather than the stock images they offer (although it's been a while - you might have to upgrade to access those options) or similar which should solve most problems of clashing colours etc? How much functionality do you need? Are you wanting a transactional site or just for information?

I think I'm trying to create something very professional that just isn't possible unless you've got a decent theme and some knowledge of plug ins and how to adapt your theme.

Also, my logo is quite square and doesn't work in any of the header areas that a lot of themes offer. I know what I want but I just can't achieve it. Thanks for the comments though.

Make your header the logo with a block colour next to it to fill the banner space.

Wordpress is a fucking nightmare.

I've spent the day doing the same with "square space". Our logo is also square and you just add it as a pic.
We are print designers (with no experience of website design) and I've found it much easier than I thought it would be.
Try searching for a YouTube tutorial by Todd Pettee (sp?) he was great.

I use Wordpress a bit, have background in design/photography. Is your site live? Could you pm me a link and I could have a look?

In my experience the best themes are paid for ones. I use graphpaperpress because they are beautiful and have very good support for people like me, no coding clue!

I thought you were going to be complaining about the phrase.

"It's so easy children can do it" - how insulting to children, to suggest that they can only do easy things, my children can do some very difficult thingss actually!