Howdy.
1. Yeah, Gift of Hope is a wordpress site, with the blog bits and pieces stripped out of the template for the main pages (you can have multiple templates though, so one of them could be a normal looking ‘blog’ page anyway).
2. Did I have any paid features: All the Wordpress stuff is free, I generated the graphics myself (you might like to use the free Stock imagery site Stock Xchange for free images to spice it up). The only thing was, I paid to host it myself on one of my servers.
CSS wise, that’s one of the easier things to play with, thanks to an Extension for Firefox called Web Developer Toolbar – because you can edit the CSS live in a sidebar and see the changes happen live, without overwriting anything – so it’s an easy way to hack about with someone else’s code to customise the look (CSS in WP generally just controls colours, typography and spacings). You can then save the resulting CSS file from this editing to your hard drive, save a copy of the existing one in WP, and paste the code in there to make the changes permanently… If you break anything while playing, you just exit the sidebar and start again.
To get started, I reckon try some of the basic tutorials on Webmonkey (and other such sites) and from there, learn about how CSS looks and acts (it’s actually quite easy to work with). Once you have some basic knowledge, have a look through the Themes available for Wordpress and see if you feel like getting into that as a platform.
A month or two down the line (when my freelance work eases up a bit) I might be able to help you with the initial hacking about of your Wordpress installation and how to plug in a donations module, if you can wait that long. At the moment I have a 39 hour week, 3 bands and 4 freelance projects to contend with, and that’s quite enough!
hello at benseven dot co dot uk