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How To Make WordPress Look Like a Website

Filed Under: WordPress Themes August 21, 2016

WordPress has come a long way since its beginning, it was created as a blogging platform but is now way beyond that. You can easily make WordPress look like a website with just a few configuration and theme options.

With the latest versions, especially version 3.0 where the custom menu feature was introduced you can use it for any kind of website.

Using WordPress custom menu's you can really create a good navigation for your website.

So how do you get from this:

Basic WordPress Theme

To something like this?

Make WordPress look like a website theme configuration

WordPress Theme Layout

If you have your WordPress website installed, it's now time to have it look like a regular website.

The first impression people will get when they visit your website is essential. They will either see a blog, or a website.

The way you make WordPress look like a website determined by the theme you choose and how you configured it.

Do you use a standard theme or a theme that has a special homepage layout?

Do you have a static homepage or do you show the most recent posts?

There are several options for choosing a special theme for your WordPress website.

You can search the free WordPress theme repository right from within your own WordPress installation. Go to Appearance -> Themes (aff). It opens with a search function that lets you select some search criteria. Upload your own, select one of the other options like Featured, Newest or Recently Updated.

Installing a WordPress Theme

The featured themes (aff) currently show:

Featured WordPress Themes

There are themes like:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/responsive

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/suffusion

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/eclipse

http://demo.onedesigns.com/pinboard/

http://demo.onedesigns.com/esplanade

Or you can go for a, very affordable, premium theme from ThemeForest.net, ElegantThemes.com or my personal favorite, but more expensive, themes from StudioPress.com.

Most of these themes will start with a featured image or an image slider on the frontpage, make sure you capture your visitors and keep them on your site.

Some of these themes require an extra plugin to show a slider on your homepage. Those plugins could be wp-cycle or http://www.featuredcontentgallery.com/

There are several others, and you can find a good selection at http://speckyboy.com/2010/06/30/top-10-content-slider-plugins-for-wordpress/

Static Frontpage or Blog Posts

If you want to use a regular theme, you can still make you WordPress site look like a website.

The first thing you need to do is to create a page that will become your homepage.

Just one small warning, do NOT call this Home! If you call it Home it will create a permalink /home/ and that could become a problem.

If you ever want to switch to a theme that does work with a special homepage layout. They will use a theme file called home.php and that might cause you real problems.

And please, don't call this page Welcome or start with Welcome to my website! That is such a waste of your homepage function.

I might have searched the web and found your website, it might have been mentioned in an advertisement or was referred to my by a friend. So, unless you blocked your site for normal visitors, I know I am welcome.

Just give your visitor really good information about you, your service or your interest, tell them what your website is all about. Lead them into your site and show them where your most valuable content is.

Tell them what you want to tell them!

And don't forget to show some good images, a good picture can make a difference. Your website visitors are more attracted to images than text. If they scan your website to get a first impression an image can help to keep them on that page so they start reading.

Your theme might show the option to get comments on that page, in that situation you need to un-check the comments and trackback functions. Look for these options.

WordPress Discussion Settings

If you don't see those options active the Discussion and Comments checkbox in the screen display options (upper-right corner of your edit screen, just above the Publish option).

WordPress Screen Display Options

Once you created that page, you need to make a separate one that will be used to show your posts. You don't need to use posts, but it is a good thing to have your setup ready in case you want to start writing posts.

You can call this page anything you like. You can call it Blog or News or something that might add value to your website. Ramblings, Thoughts, Special Articles it doesn't matter what you want to call it. Just name it so you can use it if you want to start using posts.

Now here is the best thing about this page: Give it the Title you want and publish the page. Do not write anything on that page! Leave it blank.

WordPress Page Creation

If you get those two pages done it's time to configure WordPress so it will show your homepage and it knows where to show your posts (if any).

In your Dashboard go to Settings -> Reading and chose Front page displays option A Static page.

The static homepage settings to make WordPress look a website

You can select the page you just created via a drop down menu when you click the left arrows.

Save your settings and check your website, you should see the intro page you created as the Frontpage of your website.

If you don't see the new version, try to refresh your browser via Ctrl+F5. That will get the latest version of your site instead of the cached one that your browser might show.

Getting Your Sidebar in Shape

Once you get your site's basic layout ready it's now time to look at your sidebar.

Your default sidebar is very likely to show things like Recent Posts, Archives, and Meta or it says Primary Widget Area. It all depends on the theme that is active on your site.

Page with Image and Sidebar

Now Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, Archives and Meta are a dead give away that this is a WordPress blog. You need to get rid of those widgets and replace theme with a good navigational menu.

You can read How To Use WordPress Custom Menu's and create a good menu that will show the basic navigation items for your website.

Place that Custom menu in your primary sidebar via Appearance -> Widgets and drag the Custom Menu widget into your Primary Sidebar screen.

You can see below that it will warn you if you don't have a menu yet and guide you to get one done. If you have one, you can select it.

Primary Sidebar Custom Menu Widget

The best part of these custom menus is that you can have several of them. I like to split my menu's in two separate ones. The first one will contain the navigation into the meat of my sites and the second one contains informational links like the About page, a Sitemap, Contact page and a Privacy Statement page.

Where I want to show these menus depends on the layout or the theme. You want your primary navigation menu in the most prominent place in your website. It should be the first thing your visitor can see if they want to browse through your website.

The second menu should not be hidden away in some obscure place, but it should be less prominent.

Once you placed this widget in your primary sidebar, the other widgets will disappear. Those widgets were there to act as placeholders to show you where your sidebar is located. There might be some widgets already in the sidebar, simply delete the ones you don't want. Search might be one to leave active.

Your theme choice will also determine if your primary sidebar is located on the left side of your screen or on the right side.

Choosing Your Website Theme

For a blog, it is most likely to show the sidebar on the right side, if your theme has that option to switch it to the left, use that. It will also make your WordPress site look more like a normal website.

If your theme does not support it via an option, your might need to change it in the index.php file or in its style sheet.

How you can change that is a completely different subject, the best option to get to know how to change that is to ask in the support forum of your theme.

For the website shown above I used the new default Twenty Twelve theme from WordPress with the plugins One Click Child Theme to make sure my customizations will stick after a Twenty Twelve theme upgrade. I also used a Custom Headers plugin because with this new theme, there is no custom header function for pages.

So now it's up to you to get the layout that makes your WordPress website look like a website instead of a blog.

Affiliate Link Disclosures

By Herbert-Jan van Dinther Filed Under: WordPress Themes Tagged With: CMS, theme, website, wordpress 11 Comments

From Static HTML to WordPress Website

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Setup May 16, 2015

This is a question I get on a regular base: How can I convert my Static HTML to WordPress based website?

Let me give you a warning in advance, a WordPress website needs to be kept updated!
A static HTML site can run for years without you ever touching it for things like security updates or new versions. Just to make you aware of the need for updates!

Another thing that needs really close attention is to make sure that your rankings in Google and other search engines stay intact.
That means you need to make sure that the URLs of your old site will stay the same with your new WordPress based website.

Luckily this can be done and for those few links you want to change you can redirect them via your .htaccess file.

Convert Static HTML to WordPress

But first things first, the conversion of your website.

First, what do you need:

  • good hosting (aff) that support php
  • a mysql database: databasename, username for that database and the password for that useraccount
  • the possibility to use a .htaccess file

If you are not sure about the above mentioned items, ask your website hosting (aff) provider!

Installing WordPress in a Subfolder

The first thing you will do is to install WordPress into a Subfolder like /cms .

After you finished the installation you have to set the Privacy setting so that Search Engines are not allowed to visit and index your site (Settings -> Reading) so your new URLs are not getting into the search engine indexes until you are ready with your conversion.

Now you can start building your WordPress website next to your current site, that site will stay active while you build a new one.

Keeping Old URLs

Like a mentioned before, it is very important that you keep the URLs for the new site the same as the old one!

That is why you need to set the Permalinks to custom with the value /%postname%.html this will result in Posts links with the extension .html.

During the development of your new site the urls will be like /cms/page-url.html , but after the final steps this will become /page-url.html , that same as the old site.
Make sure that the “slugs” are the same as the old site, and there is a plugin that you will need which is “.html on pages” . I take it you will have some pages that use the extension .html

You can now start to convert your old pages to WordPress by copying the text or the HTML code of the content from the old website into the HTML code screen of WordPress.

Your page URL is created by the Title of your page, but you can change them by editing the Slug permalink.

There is a plugin that could help you convert old pages: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/import-html-pages/ Attention! For this plugin to work you really need  PHP5! Ask your hosting provider if you are not sure.

Website Layout

The conversion from your old static HTML to WordPress based site with the same layout is a completely different exercise than what I am describing here, to do that your will have to get a complete custom Theme / Layout.

But why not take this opportunity and change the look of your site together with the conversion? Choose a nice premium or free theme  that will fit you company / website topic and customize it to your needs.

If you are happy with the look and feel and the content of your site you can follow these step to get it “live”:

1. delete or rename the index.html file in the root of your old site.
2. copy the index.php and .htaccess file from the /cms folder to the root of your site
3. change one rule in the index.php file into require(‘./cms/wp-blog-header.php’); (only with the index.php file in the root, not in the folder  /cms!!)
4. change only the Site address (URL) in the general setting (Setting -> General) into the domain (aff) name. (remove the /cms part)

Change Site Address Only!
Change Site Address Only!

5. remove or rename the old  .html files.
6. change the privacy settings so the Search Engines can access and index the site again.

If you handle the change over it this manner, than your old site is not reachable during the 5 minutes you need to rename the index.html so the index.php takes over and if you kept your URLs you are not loosing any visitors from the search engines like Google.

And of course you have taken a complete Back-Up of your old static website so you can restore your old side if you should encounter any unexpected error(s).

If you want new URLs for your pages than you can redirect the old URLs to the news ones in two ways:

  • use a plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
  • via the .htaccess file in which you have to write a rule per url you want to forward:  redirect 301 /olde-url.html http://www.example.com/new-url.html

However if you change your URLs, even with a 301 redirect you could loose some credit and backlinks that are pointing to your site.

Good luck and if you still have some questions, please use the contact form.

If you have other tips and additions that might help others, please write them in the comments section below.

One last question: Is there a need to have this information in an even more detailed form like a pdf manual with screen shots and tips? if so, please leave a comment.

Update: You asked for it and now it's finally here… From Static HTML To WordPress version 1.0

You can share the PDF with friends, post it on you website but you cannot sell it or change anything in it! If you find any language or grammatical errors please let me know so I can correct them.

From Static HTML to WordPress Website

Affiliate Link Disclosures

By Herbert-Jan van Dinther Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Setup Tagged With: Build, CMS, How to, HTML, website, wordpress 32 Comments

Classic WordPress Website Theme – Magazine by StudioPress Brain Gardner

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Themes July 17, 2013

Brian Gardner is showing off the redesign of his Magazine Theme, which is already a classic.

WordPress Magazine Theme
The most recent version of the Magazine Theme for WordPress

If you look at the new features in the header, you can see why this is going was a great theme to use for Building a website with WordPress. (I now switched to Metro Theme)

The tabs at the top are great for extra pages, and the category links will make it easy to “theme” your site.

In Brian's post, he also shows the new configuration panel that will make it a lot easier to work with for the not-so-technical WordPress website builders.

With this theme, just like the Thesis theme, there are extra fields in the posting panel to give writers a simpler method for adding images to a post and have them show up in the correct positions.

I suppose that the new automatic thumbnail creation that is now implemented in a lot of  Studiopress themes (aff) will also be part of this theme…

WordPress Magazine Theme
The Old Magazine Theme Design

To be honest with you, there is one thing I don't like about this theme…. the colors used for the links and headers. As you can tell from my new website theme, I prefer blue!

The new version of Magazine now offers 7 colos styles, including blue. It is now also build as a responsive theme so you can look good on all kinds of mobile and other devices!

Affiliate Link Disclosures

By Herbert-Jan van Dinther Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Themes Tagged With: CMS, theme, website, wordpress 3 Comments

Building a Website with WordPress as Content Management System

Filed Under: Weblog News, WordPress CMS October 5, 2008


I am setting this website up as an example on how to use WordPress as a Content Managment System, and will be posting about the things I find and work with.

The Site will have three Silos to work with:

WordPress Setup:
The Configuration settings to use WordPress as a Content Management System with a static Frontpage

WordPress Plugins:
An overview and Manuals on how to use the Plugins that complete the CMS part of WordPress and makes it easier to work with.
You will also get some tips on Plugins you can use to further Optimize your site for Search Engines.

WordPress Themes:
Some themes (aff) just work better for Building a Website with WordPress, you can read about them here with tips and trics how to use and improve them to suite your needs.

Enjoy the ride ride with me and scubscribe to the RSS Feed or the E-mail version.

[techtags:WordPress, CMS, Website, Building]
Affiliate Link Disclosures

By Herbert-Jan van Dinther Filed Under: Weblog News, WordPress CMS Tagged With: Build, CMS, How to, website, wordpress 5 Comments

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