How Do I Customize Wordpress to look like an ordinary website

[threesix 0]

how do i? nuff said

Edited April 16, 2007 by threesix (see edit history)

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

Well, there are a lot of themes to choose from not to mention the huge array of plugins for wordpress.

Wordpress Themes: https://wordpress.org/themes/
Wordpress Plugins: https://wordpress.org/plugins/

You might as well want to create your own theme to add that personal touch to your blog. Check out https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development for details on how to do it.

[Vue 0]

Hello there!

 

With FTP, you upload your folder to /wp-content/themes. In your Wordpress dashboard, you go Presentation and voila!

 

You will then select theme you want. Personally, I would do select the theme, see what I want to change to it, and do so offline. Then re-upload the folder.

 

Simple, eh? Wait, no, not that simple but the simple thing is switching between themes.

Edited April 16, 2007 by Vue (see edit history)

[threesix 0]

thats not what i asked i asked how do i make it like a normal website. no meta. no pages. i want to be able to link to my forum in the pages section without using blogroll. etc. and i want the posts to be called updates.

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

thats not what i asked i asked how do i make it like a normal website. no meta. no pages. i want to be able to link to my forum in the pages section without using blogroll. etc. and i want the posts to be called updates.

To do that you have to edit the template files (header.php, index.php, footer.php, siderbar.php) for the theme. It might be a bit tricky to get started, but by experimenting with small modifications on your local host, you should be able to easily do whatever you like. Edited April 19, 2007 by turbopowerdmaxsteel (see edit history)

[delivi 0]

You can easily convert Wordpress into a CMS to manage simple websites, if you are an expert you can even create a portal based on Wordpress.

 

If you want a normal website based on Wordpress as CMS, you have to create a new Theme for Wordpress that will meet your needs and you can use the posts and pages in wordpress for contents in your website. You can also categorize them. If you want to what can be accomplished with Wordpress, just head over to my site http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ . This is a open source and free software directory running on Wordpress with a custom designed Theme.

 

You can add extra features to you Wordpress site like Polls, stats, Adsense, tagging etc. with a huge collection of plugins available online.

 

To begin with a new theme for wordpress, you can start by modifying the default Kubric theme of Wordpress.

 

It is better to head over to the Wordpress Codex, https://codex.wordpress.org/ and learn the basic tags and formats of Wordpress queries and functions.

 

Test the theme you develop in Wordpress installed in your local machine using EasyPHP or WAMP.

 

If need any help I'd be glad to help you.

 

Currently I'm developing a Wordpress Site for my professional website, it will be up within 2 weeks.

[pyost 0]

Just one friendly advice. If you really want to do some hard-core customizing, don't. Even though WordPress has a rather simple syntax, there will always be something to mess with your idea. Something so small, yet so annoying, just because you can't find a way to fix it. It might even be easire to create your own Content Management System or WebLog (a.k.a. Blog). I am saying this from personl experience, since I'm dealing with such problems right now

[imjjss 0]

A nice theme is a good start

Pick a nice theme that suits your needs as a start. Some WordPress themes are simple and everything is in place, you get what you see and ready to post. I guess that's why you complain their "blog lookings". If you search carefully, you will find some themes are more flexible for re-design, or maybe we should say "customizing", depends on how much you would change.

 

Get warmed up

Try to play around several themes, you will start to get some basic idea on how wordpress works. As pyost said, better not to attack WordPress core, but there are a lot you can do without diving into the core.

 

Choose the one suits your needs best

If you have some experience on php codes, html and css, you can just browse through all the thems and pick the one you feel good, then, cusomize it as you wish;

If you are not familiar to those stuffs, you can choose a theme comes with more theme options. Those thmes provide very detailed Option page, you can set your blog structures and styles without any coding experience.

 

For example,

Atahualpa is the most popular theme in the line of theme options--around 263 choices;

sufussion is in the same category but more flexiable, its options available is not less than Atahualpa but takes a bit of time to read through the option page;

hybrid is another great theme for heavy customizing with rich theme options.

 

Remove stuffs you don't want

The meta and blogroll are in widget area. Widgets are very convinient tools that comes with theme you choose, and after active the theme, you can go Darshboard / Apperence / Widget to add or remove widgets.

After you remove the widgets, you will see your sidebar area is nearly empty, it's up to you to put whatever else there.

As for the post page you dislike-- you can do it this way:

1. Go to Dashboard / Pages , create a new page, name is whatever title you like, let's say "Greatest Shop";

2. Create another page, let's say... "Company News"

For the 2 pages, uncheck the "Allow comments", uncheck the "Allow pinback, trackback";

3. Go to Dashboard / Settings / Reading , Front Page displays, choose "A Static Page", then, choose "Greatest Shop" as front page, and "Company News" as post page; Then, save changes.

Now, go to view your site, the front page is empty, no post. This is the very first step for CMS front page.

If you want completely hide the posting page, you can go to your themes's menu setting, remove the "Company News" from the menu list, and you will see no post showing up on your site unless you manually type in url "mydomain.com/company-news"

Now your site is empty, it's up to you to create...

The template

Template is the structure of the page. Most of the thems provides more than several template. With the option rich themes, you might find several template that best suit your idea. If that's not enough, you will need to create your own.

The style

You can use Firefox extension "Firebug" to observe your theme's css, then, change the css to your like.

for example, if the theme shows in Firebug <div id="pagetitle"> bla bla</div>, you can change it in your style.css, something like this: #pagetitle {display:none} , then, your page title become invisible.

The Child theme

Better create a child theme to do all the editing. Because, once the theme updated, all your cusomizing job will be lost if you edit the original theme.

 

The suggestions above just meant to providing a starting point for a CMS site. Hope it helps

Edited November 29, 2010 by imjjss (see edit history)