Defining your own "Home Page" in WordPress

You may currently have two "Home" pages on your WordPress site.  This is because WordPress creates a homepage and uses your latest posts to generate content on that page.  To change this:

1. Go into your WordPress Administration
2. Navigate to "Settings" > "Reading" in the side-menu
3. Under "Front page displays" select the radio-button for a "static page"
4. Next, select the home page that you would like to use from the drop-down list labeled "front page"

I hope this helps, I've included a screen shot. 

http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page

The Googlebot

For those of you who don't know what a googlebot is, it crawls your site and indexes the content for google searches.  

As I develop I want to make sure that my half-finished product does not appear in any search results, so it's important that googlebot knows to ignore my site.  Here are some sources explaining how the googlebot works, and how to have it ignore your site.

Googlebot,
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182072

rel=“nofollow”,
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

telling the googlebot no,
http://www.mattwaite.com/posts/2009/apr/12/telling-google-bot-no/

The Grid Layout

This is what I can offer to teach the class.  

http://960.gs/
http://www.thegridsystem.org/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/04/14/designing-with-grid-based-approach/

Comparing BigCommerce to GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart

I should start by saying that I have not been impressed by the usability of GoDaddy in the past.  I find their site to be overwhelmingly crowded with content making it almost impossible to find what you’re looking for.  

Prices
GoDaddy → $10/ month with no transaction fee (Economy plan)
http://www.godaddy.com/ecommerce/shopping-cart.aspx?ci=42933
BigCommerce → $25/ month with no transaction fee (Bronze plan)
http://www.bigcommerce.com/plans.php

Features
GoDaddy → Gives you 10 products at the $10 price
BigCommerce → Gives you 100 products at the $25 price, GoDaddy would cost you $30/ month for the same 100 product package (w/ Deluxe plan).  

Conclusion
For the site that I am building, where my client will be selling only two different products, I will be going with GoDaddy to handle my eCommerce needs.  Another factor influencing my decision is that my client already handles their sites online purchasing with GoDaddy, this means that they are already familiar with the product and will thusly require no/ little training. 

Open-Source Databases

I am using WordPress as the CMS for my website.  WordPress uses a combination of PHP and MySQL, but here are a variety of other options for open-source databases. 

MariaDB,
http://mariadb.org/

Cassandra,
http://cassandra.apache.org/

PostgreSQL,
http://www.postgresql.org/

Reddit
https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/Install-guide

Creating a Mailing List

Constant contact - mailing list
http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp