Up until this point, I had been building the entire website on a test server running on my computer... actually putting getting the site online was quite an ordeal.
In terms of what service I should use for actually hosting my site, Wordpress.org had a few suggestions in their forums. I chose Bluehost, a service which marketed itself as fully compatible with and seeming geared towards hosting Wordpress blogs. So, I paid my money down (about $9/month) and got myself an account and my new domain name.
Then, I got very, very confused. I logged in and was faced with a page that was totally alien. A whole lot of icons, with not a ton of explanation.
Luckily, Lynda.com come in handy again when I found a chapter specifically on how to upload your site from the local drive to the Internet using Dreamweaver. It took me a bit of time and a whole lot of trial and error, but eventually I got a really nice setup going.
Although I had to manually recreate individual blog posts on the new site, I got everything else to sync automatically. My design, preferences, and basically all the behind-the-scenes stuff transferred perfectly after a bit of tinkering. Now, if I want to make a layout change, I can modify the test site on my computer, make sure it works and does everything I want to, then hit "synchronize" in Dreamweaver, and everything is automatically updated online.
It was at this point that I really started to feel like the initial stages of this project were starting to pay off. It really had been a TON of work... I think I met the assignment's 15-hour requirement in the first two weeks of the semester, and didn't significantly slow down until I hit this point. Now that I had the site up and fully operational, any changes would be simple to make... the large-scale trial and error that had characterized my workflow thus far was, for the most part over. Plus, the fact that I could point anybody to my website that I designed and show them my work was incredibly gratifying.
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