One last random question, pls: have you had to purchase a dedicated IP if using shared hosting? I think we may need to but before we go making this bigger without promise of it paying off, I thought I'd see if you maybe had run into this and how it may have turned out? Pls.

Thanks for taking time to follow up and I appreciate you and Ben offering help. I'll work with my designer and report back Cheers, Andrea

Dan, small world, indeed! Correct; we tried and ended up in an infinite loop with our Apache system and my web designer has been trying a plug in or two to see if there's a way to map the domain. We seem to be hitting all kinds of random hiccups and as none of us are network admin savvy, I thought this may be a good place for the road less traveled. Thanks for reaching out! Andrea.

And, if you are interested, here's a nice blog on it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

The advantage of the 301, although sometimes trickier to implement (my site can't handle canonicals, so I am used to everything being trickier!) is that with the 301, it tells Google that the page content has moved permanently from the old URL. Eventually then Google will un-index the old URL and it will essentially cease to exist.

If implemented properly you shouldn't be hurt as you're still telling Google where to go so they can follow.

Any time you change a URL you need a 301 redirect. If you set it up properly and go from a .html to a .com URL as your primary there shouldn't be too much fall out.

I wish - setting up an alias like that doesn't gel with how WP handles domain mapping. It broke all our links out.

We set up a WP blog that's hosted through GoDaddy. For various reasons, we purchased a URL to use to get through the technical build and set up and are trying to map that to a subdomain of our company website. (We can't host it on our own server, unfortunately).

My question is: for WP blogs hosted via WP you can buy a domain mapping upgrade and I'm trying to find a similar plugin that could offer the same thing that would apply to our GoDaddy hosting and point to our subdomain (GD apparently doesn't offer the domain mapping).

Anyone have any thoughts, please?

CodeAcademy also recently  introduced free online coding classes that you can check out - it may be a good way to apply the learnings from your readings.

It takes practice and dedication - and repetition - to learn coding. You have to train yourself to properly apply the code. HTML and CSS are the best places to start, then move onto PHP

http://www.codecademy.com/courses/html-one-o-one

I agree with Alan.

As for the sitemap, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "goes down on a regular basis" - as in # of pages indexed by Google? And if some of those URLs are part of the 500 error list, then it makes sense that the # of pages Google indexed would go down as if Google can't index a page then it doesn't matter if it's listed in the sitemap as it can't be crawled.