Gabe Young

WP and BuddyPress will definitely work. Elgg is one of the better choices out there amongst the others (e.g. kickapps, ning, crowdvine, etc).

IMO, WP + BP will do just fine and will likely be the least expensive and be the easiest to start up.

1. Go to whois and find the hosting company.

2. Report the web scraper to the host since it violates their TOS.

Which pages? If they’re all created via blog post, for instance, then it’s possible it’s not a CSS issue.

Also, have you checked on other computers besides your own (or at least other browsers)?

IMO, if you’re already somewhat tech savvy, I suggest you just jump in and start using WP. You’ll find that it’s pretty intuitive and with your technical skills, you should be able to fine tune it to your needs without reading books.

I agree, there’s a lot going on there. I’m OK with most of it since most sites in that niche are pretty busy. The only part I would tone down is the “cool sites” area where it looks like the six ads have ADD.

There are many factors that go into performance. It could be high traffic but if the blog is somewhat new, then the culprit is more likely due to a large number of pics (or high res pics), pages are too big, too many ads, plugin issues, or cache issues.

Turning Akismet on will be more than enough for many blogs. Many newer sites won’t have that much spam early on but as it grows, that’s when you can decide to use additional tools.

Regardless, WP provides a solid framework but at the end of the day, this is your site. I’m just glad I have so many tools at my disposal.

1. Ipstenu is correct. I have buddypress without multisite on one of my sites.

3. In almost every case, you can easily get away with a shared host until you outgrow it.

I would contact GoDaddy directly. Their customer support is usually very good, one that you pay for anyway.

Although you can do it yourself through the control panel, one thing they can do for you is walk you through a restore from a date when you know things were working well. Once you’re back to where you were, you can then begin to troubleshoot.

Agreed! I think what you have is a nice start. You can actually get away with what you have for a long time since you’re really just building traction at this stage and your audience is relatively small. What you could do first is simply get a logo for your header, which will make a big difference.

Ditto on the excerpts. You don’t want posts being that long on your home page.

Lastly, I would clean up the posts a bit. Looks like they were scraped from other sites since the writing styles don’t match from article to article. Additionally, you have inconsistent paragraph spacing. Looks like copy and paste jobs.

As esmi stated, it’s a web based tool. As long as you have a compatible browser, it doesn’t matter what OS you’re on.

As you know, the font size isn’t the only thing that determines how readable a page is. The fact that you make good use of clean lines, few distractions, and percentage of white space in your real estate, they allow you to get away with smaller fonts if you want to.

I don’t see the word Blogs in my search results.

What’s the site name?

As a FrontPage user since the early days, I can honestly recommend for you to switch over to WP, you won’t regret it.

Many WP users leverage it as a CMS, not just a blog.