Wordpress experience / recommendations

I'm going to be redoing my website over the next few weeks in wordpress, I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for video tutorials/plugins/other miscellaneous advice.

I'm very interesting in recommendations for a good product catalog, I've been messing around with woocommerce and It not meeting my needs, I don't sell anything online, but I want to build a fairly nice searchable catalog for my products and services.

Are you too deep into wordpress to consider squarespace? They have a cleaner, better, and more naturally integrated system for selling products. With wordpress you will need plugins.

edit: waait. You don't sell anything? What do you want from your catalog exactly?

Have you used wordpress at all yet or are you brand new? Personally I think it's best just to jump in. No tutorials necessary.

For plugins just take the user compatibility score very seriously.

@geraltitude:

I sell and install fireplaces, not the type of thing you buy online, but definitely something customers research online.

Squarespace is great for a first website, but it's fairly limited when you get deep down into it, I didn't find it very good for seo purposes.

I actually spent a long time working on a Joomla site and ended up not liking where things were going and went back to scratch and decided on wordpress, I'd just do it in html, but I want a responsive site and I wouldn't even know where to start with that, getting a $70 template for wordpress is just easier.

ohhh, okay I see.

Actually having a hard time thinking what the best solution is. I would say maybe you should start with looking at Image Gallery plugins. They've come a long way recently. There should be many that give users a quick and easy way to look at different fireplaces (colours, rock type, fake wood type or whatever else lol I have no clue). The harder part is the searching aspect... In the past I recall a plugin which basically allowed you to tag images, text and pages. Then if you type anything into the search area it will return a list of images and pages with those tags. If you combine a cool gallery with this type of idea, you might have a solution for "quickly research fireplace options".

I'll be having a look at wordpress later this week for a client so who knows, maybe I will come back to you with some more info.

Have you tried out many templates yet?

If you are any good with html/css and want a responsive site yourself look at using Bootstrap. http://getbootstrap.com/

I liked this one and bought it, after I customized it, it looked terrible though, I have a bunch of free time coming up so hopefully I can getting it looking how I want. Themeforest seems like a pretty good spot, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking.

I'll check that out.

I am a big fan of WordPress as it's very user friendly and intuitive. What I've done in the past with WP sites is pick a basic theme and then make tweaks to it, but knowing CSS will be helpful in that case. You mentioned http://themeforest.net/ for themes and I've heard good things about it, but I haven't been shopping there.

There is also a wonderful array of plugins for WP, which you can go nutty with, although like GERALTITUDE mentioned you want to be careful with plugin conflicts. Their support forum is super helpful, too. Since it's a commerce site, if you go the WP route I would highly suggest the Google Analytics plugin so you can see what people are doing on your site.

We use bootstrap at work and it is wonderful for development. You will be hand-crafting your site more with that framework. So, it gives you more control than WP but it's also more development time.

Good luck with your site!