Wordpress

If you're using Wordpress on your own site (not theirs), you absolutely have to stay abreast of the patches they issue, because Wordpress is sort of like IE: Not stupidly insecure, but so many people out there use it that it's a massive target for hackers and as soon as someone figures out a hack for it, every unpatched site is in danger.

If you installed Wordpress on that host, then you're going to have to keep up to date on the patches. If it comes with Wordpress pre-installed, then they have to keep up to date on the patches, and you should probably follow a blog dedicated to keeping track of Wordpress vulnerabilities so that you can make sure you're site's not at risk.

Wordpress is awesome. One thing you might want to consider is using a managed hosting service that specializes in Wordpress. The one I've heard the most about is WPEngine. They keep you up to date with upgrades, test your plugins for compatibility before updating, etc.

Yeah, WP is amazing for ease of use. The big gap comes right between an almost absolutely professional site and a truly professionally designed site; after a few weeks, you will always see the difference, and you will see it immediately with sites you haven't built yourself. So for me, I've found best worth for money is building the site myself, but paying a professional designer just once to give it a finished design, that I can then continue to work with.

Also, Tucker's absolutely right about updates.

I don't know if you're still messing around with themes or not, but I've heard good things about the Genesis Framework. I don't have experience with it myself, but Jon Loomer, a digital marketing guy I've come to respect, swears by it.

I haven't used WordPress for several years, but the main thing -- okay, two main problems I had with it were:

- Getting it to double-space or triple-space paragraphs the way I wanted I'm not even sure hard-coding hard returns worked.
- I couldn't figure out how to delete images from the list of potential banner images. If you've loaded several versions of the same image in an attempt to find out what does or doesn't work up there and then you want to go to a rotating banner image, you kinda don't want to have something stretched out of shape every fourth time someone looks at your blog.

Other than that, it is pretty easy to use.

CSS is a way for the bourgeosie to make webpages harder to create by giving them an excuse to "deprecate" easier HTML code to create a uniform look for a set of the pages on your site. It's like a subroutine in a program. You create a shiny.css file and fill it with all the formatting that you want uniform across that set. Then, in the HTML header for each page that is a member of that set, you write code to call shiny.css. Every time a browser loads the .html page, then, it will load the .css page for instructions on the default formatting for text and background in that page. Within the .html page, you can still override any particular formatting command with the usual HTML code.

I've never worked with CSS much, but that's the flow of information involved. The upside is that if you suddenly want to change, say, the font color on every page in that set, you only have to edit one file instead of many.

I wouldn't even worry, off the get go, about designing from scratch. Look at Genesis or Builder, find a template you like, and buy it. Customize from there.

Agreed. And there are so many good themes out there, many of them extremely customizable, that you can probably have a nice, non-generic-looking site without even having to dig into the CSS at all.

I have a dedicated server, with WHM, which manages cpanel for individual accounts. I have found that cpanel doesn't always push the updates right away (they're needed as much right away as they are later) or at all.

So, make sure to check that!

Also, make sure you write quality short posts that aren't pages - Google is really big on QDF right now (query deserves freshness), almost as much as they were around 2011 when it became humongo. Well written short posts will keep them coming back - and don't forget that +1, as annoying as it is, has been proven to cause Google to near-instantly index pages. Social media ques are big, so if your buddies like your writing, send them texts and make sure they +1 and tweet you.

The great news is that you're in a market that likes to circle jerk good material.

It's a good idea. Also look into the google authorship thing and make sure you do that. For "authority" algorithm sake.