I can't help you with the website design or wordpress stuff but if you're having trouble with the Dreamhost panel... What do you specifically want to know? :)
When you click 'add a new domain/subdomain', each of the seperate 'forms' that it lists is a seperate command you can do. For a redirect, you'll have to scroll down to make one. Simply tell it where you want it to redirect to. (Or, you can choose 'mirrored' or 'cloaked' depending on your need.)
To have a subdomain a 'seperate' site, so to speak, you'll need the topmost 'form' on the add a new subdomain page. Here it asks you the following:
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- The full location of the subdomain. (say, objection.mrdictionary.net)
- Do you want the www? You get a choice of forcing it in if it's omitted, forcing it out if it's present, or not caring. (I force it out, so people going to
http://www.objection.mrdictionary.net are redirected to objection.mrdictionary.net)
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- The user to which the website will belong. In addition to your super admin dreamhost account, you have to create smaller users to 'own' websites. If you wanted, you could create a seperate user that controls a seperate set of the websites on your space. Usually, for a single site, you'll want a single user (you) to have control over all of your own sites. (You can split it up if you want to try and be more secure.)
- Web directory. This will be a Linux style directory in the form /home/username/[something] When you log into FTP (or the shell), you'll be in /home/username/. You don't need to worry about creating the directory yourself beforehand: it will be made for you. If you made your subdomain.domain.com web directory at /home/username/subdomain.domain.com/, all the files you place in there will appear on your subdomain.domain.com website. It is possible to have one website's home directory as a subdirectory of another.
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- Web options. Ignore these, most of them will be greyed out. If you're using Passenger, then you'll need to worry about the python and ruby on rails stuff, but that's not likely. DH recommend that if you're using a ruby application as an
aside from your website, you should leave this option unchecked and use some different shell commands later on to allow Ruby to work.
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- Google stuff. You can choose to have Google handle some of the services related to the subdomain if you want.
This topmost form is used for both subdomains and domains. If you wanted to add nirejhenge-is-awesome.com to your DH webspace account later, then add it through the form. Give it a web directory like /home/nirejhenge/nia-site/, and upload your files through FTP. (Don't forget that you have to configure your domain registration seperately too... unless you used DH for that too.)