Web Design is becoming an exceedingly complex and beautiful market.  When I first began doing Web Design, sites were boxy and straight forward.  The majority of Web Designers were focused on good coding, HTML standards, using table codes properly.

It seems pretty archaic now.

Now Web Design is an artform.  An exceeding amount of graphic designers have learned how to webdesign.  Programs like Adobe Dreamweaver removes the complex hand coding that dominated the problems of early web design, also the development of other programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop have made computer based graphic design out of this world.  Adobe Flash pumped the concept of graphically driven websites that are now being replicated and exceeded by sites that are based on PHP, AJAX, jQuery, Javascript, ASP.net, ColdFusion, and any other number of server side programming languages that create dynamic web sites.

So far, all the sites that I’ve designed have been purely blog driven, the most complex being REVMiami.com (I’m working on a project now that has me pulling my hair out).

But, I really wanted my webdesign site to combine the “new” standards for web design: a content driven site that incorporated strong graphic design elements.

I mainly use WordPress based websites.  The Wordpress Platform, which can be found on WordPress.org, is open source (meaning that you can edit it) PHP blogging software.  PHP is the considered the easiest server-side programming language to learn.  Most Hosting services offer PHP and Apache on their servers without an additional cost, plus most major web hosting services offer single-click Wordpress installation on sites.

One website that I draw a huge amount of inspiration from is WeLoveWP.com, a website dedicated to creative designs using the WordPress platform.

I took a lot of time searching through different designs, taking notes, and developing a plan.  After a week of brainstorming I still couldn’t develop a good idea, and it wasn’t until I was looking through art books that I finally developed the concept for the front page — which was where I wanted the graphic design elements to be strongest.

Everything you see can be created solely by using the Wordpress platform, and some simple uses of CSS and HTML.  I am glad to see the internet evolving creatively, and with even further developments, it should grow even further.

It’s the price to pay for having such an incredible host, and hopefully in the future I can get into a formal review of it.

But for now, I want to go over the steps for connecting one or more Wordpress Blogs to a Single MySQL Database.

There are several different ways to install WordPress, but seeing that the vast majority of hosts use One-Click installation processes, I’ll assume that you have already installed one Blog.

1. Open up the WP-Config.php file on your server.
2. Write down the different MySQL Settings, i.e. DB_NAME, DB_USER, etc.  Also, scroll a bit down and make note of the $table_prefix name.
3. Install your second WordPress Blog.
   * Thankfully Bluehost uses SimpleScripts to install WordPress Blogs automatically.  The second step of the installation process through SimpleScripts allows you to unselect “Automatically create a new database” and manually enter the information that you copied from WP-Config.php of the first blog.
   ** If you are using SimpleScripts to install your second site, make sure that you give the Table Prefix of your second blog a different name than the Table Prefix of the first blog.
4. If you manually install your blog, edit the WP-Config.php file of your second site and manually change the settings.  Again, put in the same DB_NAME, DB_USER, etc., and a different $table_prefix.

And that’s all there is to it.  To my understanding the amount of tables that a single MySQL database can hold is infinite.