Beginner - Hosting / WordPress / Workflow

[sleepyhead]

I've decided to put my photos and other things on one website, but I am a super beginner. Basically, I got peeved a few people ripped photos from my flickr account and used them in their websites.

The hosting summary as a sticky was pretty awesome, so I've settled on QiQ. They are a little pricey, but there are quite a few good testimonials on there. Not actually paid yet. My plan is not to have sites with loads of sub directories (like www. example.com/bananas), but to use sub domains (like bananas.example.com). QiQ is quite expensive when it comes to that...

Now, I know NOTHING about building a simple site/blog so I was going to get WordPress and create something offline, and when I get it how I want it to look and content then upload it to the hosting site. There is no reason for choosing wordpress other than I've used it online for a couple of blogs and it's simple, so I assume it's going to be a similar experience building a site using the WP package. I also don't know how well WP works with sub domains. I don't have the time, patience or skill to build something from scratch. If there are better/more viable alternatives, I am open to any and all suggestions.

Since messing around with photos in LR, I've become very "workflow" aware and it's common sense to do work offline then upload it to the hosting site. However, starting, I was thinking of actually making it offline first and when ready, get my domain name and hosting package. Any help/suggestions with workflow would be really useful.

The long and the short of it, is that I can't "wing it" and I don't want to rush off to get a hosting package and domain name.

Any help is much appreciated.

P.S. In my head I have the idea of a simple landing/about page using example.com and then going to different aspects of "my site" through apples.example.com, bananas.example.com etc.

[Splash]

Sounds like you want a LAMP/WAMP server for your offline build, and it really depends on how in depth you want to go with it: Turnkey Linux do some great preconfigured VMs including a LAMP stack, a preconfigured Wordpress VM and also similar setups for Drupal and Joomla if you want to try out some of the alternatives that you can import into pretty much any hypervisor (VirtualBox too, so you can do it all without spending cash) if you want to go down that route. Alternatively you can install something like PHPTriad (not an endorsement - I've not used it for many years now) which is essentially a preconfigured suite of PHP, Apache and MySQL that you can install under Windows.

[spoon_]

This is probably the link you want to be clicking if you're on Windows - http://www.microsoft.com/web/wordpress

[Splash]

Didn't realise it was prepackaged: nice spot (and bookmarked)!

[sleepyhead]

Thank you for your advice Splash, but that tech talk was WAY over my head. ^^

Spoon, thanks for the link. I"ll give it a shot later on tonight. The only thing I'm wary of is running a "development" site on my PC which doesn't have a hardware firewall between it and the web. Of course I know I want one, but the fibre optic lump I have is pretty unique to me so far. Fibre in, LAN out. This is probably a separate question for a separate thread, but I can do my research on that later.

Anyhow, is there any "settings" I should be aware of when it comes to Windows Firewall to prevent any bad things happening when I run such web development applications?

[Splash]

Do you need the development site to be available on the internet? You should just be able to connect to localhost and browse the site on your local machine using what Spoon linked.

[stilkun]

I had Microsoft WebMatrix + Wordpress installed before, it set up your site for you and installed necessary component required to run local site. The site is setup under localhost and will assigned a random port number so that you access site with the port number. For example: http://localhost:3065.

No one should be able to access your test localhost site from the internet as localhost is 127.0.0.1 which is loopback address for your computer.

[sleepyhead]

Do you need the development site to be available on the internet? You should just be able to connect to localhost and browse the site on your local machine using what Spoon linked.

Nope. Don't need to access the development site on the internet. I just want to get the pages the way I want to look, ready to deploy once I have a hosting package.

[oldboy47]

I have used QiQ (following original recommendation from Hexus) for a number of years and have found their hosting to be first class and (at £24.99 pa) IMO not too expensive. I have not used their tools to build my sites but usually have pre-assembled in Dreamweaver (using supplied templates) then uploaded all the pages & contents as necessary. I have been told that other 'free' packages are available and work pretty much the same.

Hope this helps.