Give me some insight :-)

[RegionalGirl137]

I've had my website hosted in a few places over the last few years. It's been here for a few months

http://monkeemania.pcriot.com

and I run it on WordPress. I was thinking that perhaps I'd convert it into a Wiki or something but I have no experience in using any of that software. I'd like to make it easier to get around, show more information on the front page and that sort of thing but still be able to retain the content that's already there and most of the graphics set. A site that I was comparing to was www.modthesims2.com I like how there's lots of information available from the main page over there and I like the clean look of everything but I don't think I want mine to be quite that busy. Just generally the same thing going on.

Anyone have any ideas on this?

 

[essellar]

WordPress is more than capable of doing what you want; it's just a matter of finding or developing the right theme (that's WordPressese for "site template"). Your current theme is a very basic blog, which is great for a very basic blog... but not so great for anything other than a newest-first, listy kind of, well, diary sort of thing.

You no doubt want some mix of permanent content, featured content, news and friendly, sensible navigation on your front page. There are many free and paid templates that will provide that sort of functionality out of the box, and for many of them the most you'd need to do is add tags to some of your entries and set a configuration file to use your colour scheme and graphics. There are plenty of examples in the Graphics & Webdesign forum here, as well as over at Smashing Magazine's Wordpress site. Just choose the theme that comes closest to what you want, and customise/configure to suit. (Note that Smashing Magazine offers some great WP development and customisation information in addition to the freebie themes.)

(By the way, I really hope you were only pointing to that other site as an example of the kind of content you want to display, and not as an example of how you want your site to look.)

There is absolutely no sense in moving to a wiki format unless you want to open the site up to a least a limited-crowdsourced sort of thing. Not only would it mean converting all of your content, it would also mean giving up reasonable navigation. A wiki is a great place to get lost in if you want to wander around, but it's a horrible format for anything with a sort of narrative structure. (Or, really, anything with any sort of structure. It's really easy to create a lot of closed, independent loops that will take a user very close to, but never actually to, the information they're looking for.)