Give to your WordPress blog a website-looking feeling
Transform your present WordPress blog or start from scratch a WordPress site that looks and feels like a general website rather than a blog.
Contents
Pre-considerations
You may consider if a multi-site or even a mult-language installation is what you need. WordPress has special installations for those features.
The process
Once you have your WordPress site installed there are three general steps to transform it into a website that doesn't look like your typical blog:
- Modify general settings
- Choose an appropriate theme
- Play with the style and formatting
Modify general settings
On your WP Dashboard do the following changes for the Settings
Reading
Change the Front Page displays: option to Select a Static Page: and choose in the drop down menu the Sample Page that comes by default with the installation. More about this later.
With this step you are making a Page your front page, instead of the default list of posts.
Note: Posts appear "magically" on pages where you select (on one of the side boxes of the page editing window) the "Blog template" instead of the "Default template" or any other template.
Posts appear on the Home page by default because on Settings > Reading there is a default selection for the Front Page (Home) to display the posts.
One note here, pages are for static content, posts for dynamic-temporary content.
How does all the above applies in practice? Well, depends on what one wants to do ...
Let's say that we want to display posts on a new "A testing page". To do this one can change the template for the page to "Blog template". The result is that, similarly to the Home page, we will have ALL posts displaying now on "A testing page" as well.
Now, let's say that we want that a page displays specific posts, not all the posts. To achieve this, one can use Categories!
Discussion
In Article Settings: uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles With this your are saving yourself time, avoiding to have to manually remove comments sections on your future pages. Leave it check if you want comments for all the pages you create.
Permalinks
Change the Common Settings to a format of your link addresses that makes more sense for your website. For example, the Post name option is fine if you are not planning to have any blog posts at all or you don't mind if they are not organized by date.
Choose an appropriate theme
This is and important step for achieving the purpose of giving to your WP site a non-blog looking.
A good place where you can start your search of theme templates is within your Dashboard. Go to Appearance/Themes/Add New where you are giving Advanced options for a search of the different formats that the themes offer.
If you want a more thorough search and info of these same themes go to the WP Free Themes Directory. Other sites also offer Premium/Commercial Themes. In fact, some of the free themes can be upgraded to Premium by paying for a license.
A note of caution. A theme is not only worth it for its lookings. That is why, after installing a theme you should spend some time looking at the Theme Options, Widget, Background, Menus and Header sections of the Appearance to find out how user friendly and flexible the theme is for changes in the format.
Play with the style and formatting
Once you have made your choice of a theme you can start adding layout and content to it with the Pages and Menus sections of the Dasboard. As your website is taking shape you may have to play with the more intricate settings of the style and formatting.
Some themes include a section where you can add your own CSS code to do these changes but sometimes you may have to go to Appearance/Edit to change the .css and even the .php files of your site. A word of caution here. Developers may update their theme and these updates may override your manual changes into the above mentioned files. The solution to this is "Child Themes". You can find more info on the WP help website.
Hope you find the above helpful and good luck with your WP website transformation!
Checklist
Settings
General
- Review Title and set Tagline
- Change Timezone
Reading
- Change front page to a static page(if applicable. Use Sample Page if it's a new installation)
- Set Search Engine Visibility
Discussion
- Review Commenting options
Permalinks
- Review Permalinks options
Appearance
Themes
- Select theme or configure existent
