Traditionally WordPress.com has only been suggested as a low-budget option for those who can’t afford to upgrade to “proper” hosted setup, however for the Red Devils, we were able to meet all of their requirements without losing anything that they required in their site. We were also able to integrate their teams branding into an existing theme very quickly through some simple CSS upgrades.

The following is a common comment we receive from potential clients when suggesting using WordPress.com for their site.

But you can’t upload themes to WordPress.com and we need our own design

However, despite this, we had no trouble at all in redesigning a WordPress.com site for the Red Devils which suited their needs perfectly by using the “CSS upgrade” option. This costs a mere US$15 and allows you to totally modify the sites CSS. This gives huge power over how the site looks and behaves. We were able to use this to add a new background image, totally change the text colours, remove all remnants of the commenting feature of WordPress (even when comments are disabled their are still occasional bits of text mentioning the comments feature).

A good case study on WordPress as a website. This article focuses on modifying free WordPress.com sites — @ e1evation, we use the ‘hosted’ approach which has much more flexibility. Either way, WordPress is a compelling, dynamic alternative to traditional ‘brochureware’ websites…