I have written many blog posts about the power of Wordpress and the ability to build any type of web site. This blog post focuses on some free and low-cost resources when developing Wordpress websites.
Wordpress Themes, Plugins, and Widgets
Wordpress is a free open-source software solution. You will need a web hosting account, but otherwise there is no charge. You can even find free hosting services in a variety of places (e.g. wordpress.com).
The Wordpress.org site has many other free software features to research and use in your site. Plugins are snippets of code written for specific purposes. For example, a developer has already written the code to display an email contact form on your web site (Contact Form 7). Simply go to the "Extend" section of the Wordpress site and enter keywords for the feature you want on your site. You can also search from the plugins section on the backend administrator control panel of your site.
Themes control the appearance of your site. There are thousands of free themes available for Wordpress. The biggest advantage of a pre-built theme is that someone else has already programmed a basic look and feel of the site. Colors, fonts, and styling has been programmed by someone else.
If you really want to control all aspects of site design yourself, you may want to pick a "configurable" theme. Thesis and Atahualpa are two themes that can be configured from the administrator control panel. Thesis has a cost and Atahualpa is free on the Wordpress.org site.
Website Color Palettes
Picking a coordinated set of colors for your web site is often a challenge. Adobe has a community site (kuler.adobe.com) where users upload palettes that they like. The site provides all of the underlying CSS color codes for a huge variety of palettes.
Photography and Clip Art
Nothing spices up your site like an image. Free clip art and photos are available at the Microsoft Office web site. A great source for low-cost web photography is Istockphoto.com. Rights to use pictures on the site can be purchased for as little as $1.50.
When using photography on your website, be careful about using pictures from other sites. In many cases the pictures are copyrighted. Using iStockPhoto reduces your chances of running into problems with copyright infringement.
Pictures should be cropped and resized to the desired size before using them on your website. You should also save the pictures in a low resolution format (dots per inch) to improve the download time of the image.
Videos and Movies
Generally I recommend posting your videos and movies to YouTube and then referencing them on your Wordpress site. You get the extra benefit of a link from YouTube back to your web site. Wordpress plugins already exist to incorporate YouTube videos into your Wordpress site.
