I am so confused by all of this. I have a custom site built on a WP platform one year ago. My designer told me that he had to do everything, including the updates, or I would risk crashing the site (after the fact).

I had worked (and built) Blogger and wp.com sites for ages and never had a problem but he made me afraid to do anything with this site. He made me dependent and charged me for every word we spoke.

Anyway I got so much traffic (1 Million visitors year one) I thought about making some changes, based on visitior feedback, like changing the color of the theme, modifying the header, doing whatever it takes to make the stories compatible with iPod technology, YouTube impressions, and etc., but when I approached the original designer he told me that such a modification would cost me $4500.

I asked him about premium themes and he told me that they would never work because he had custom built the site and it would crash if I tried to do anything like that.

He also told me that it would cost me $600 to transfer from Blue Host to Host Gator VPS 4, and to add MaxCDN. I looked into that and found out that Host Gator does that for free, and doing the MaxCDN thing was simple, as was the DNS thing. I did it and it cost me nothing. This guy (and you all know him) lied to me.

Bottom line: There are scoundrels out there. The guy I'm talking about is well known to everyone here, but I won't mention his name. At least not yet.

In conclusion, I need someone to work with me to put a new skin on my web magazine. I need to be able to reach out an touch someone, like on the phone or SKYPE. I don't know from codes. I know some HTML, but no codes. I need help.

Sorry for the rant. If anyone knows anyone who can do a simple background color change, and a header change, to perhaps something dynamic, please let me know. I hired a second guy in NZ who took my $500, developed a beautiful custom theme, and couldn't figure out how to implement it. I lost my $500. I'm exhausted.

I would leave a link to my site but that would be like spamming so I won't. I just need some help.

Mike