Very in Love with this site - but have lots of QUESTIONS

[K.Forte]

Hello everyone!

My name's K.Forte and I'm an artist, writer, and researcher (I do coding stuff strictly as a hobby and get paid to do everything else- so technically I can't use "web-dev" as anything official - also because I don't know nearly enough yet). The website I'm making right now is a, strictly, hobby website but it's basically what I work on every time I get any tiny bit of free time. It's my baby and one true love in life. (Not counting human or feline companions).



Basically, it's a little world that I completely illustrated myself and am trying to make livable via the internet. Every time I learn how to make something new, I make something that will work with the website and put it on there as proof of me understanding what it is I'm learning. It's too much crap to get into right now.

I've been wanting to add a virtual pet element to the website for some time now, and have everything else basically made in the background already (such as forums and chats etc -via wp-) but, being only a beginner in php, I wasn't sure how to do the rest of it. In comes my prolonged period of stalking the Mysidia website and script and finally decided to join.

I was wondering if anyone was able to get it working on wp using a different layout they had already created - essentially melting it into a pre-existing website. See, I'm not sure if my YouTube taught method of working is a bit backward or not. I wanted to make sure my layout was perfect before making it functional. Then I started working on its functionality. And now that I know that the layout works the way I want, I'm adding functionality to all of the elements I want working in there... before I even add any content. Because once I know that I have a pretty layout and framework, I feel like then I can add content.

So for now, my website is basically just an empty shell. Like a seashell that has no crab or clam inside of it... just something pretty to look at that washed up out of the ocean with no substance inside of it.

I want to add stuff to it now. And I was wondering how I should go about doing it with this script. Should I load the script as a whole into a little folder and then just cut some elements out of it, or should I just open it up and kinda just rummage through?

I don't even know where to start. I'm really scared I'm going to mess something up really bad, because I've already managed to get my website nonfunctioning and offline for a month because of some random mistake I made before.

Any and all help/advice you can give will be incredibly appreciated.
Thanks so much!! <3