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Start With The Right Theme

The first thing you need to do is change the default theme that comes with WP, or if you’re really talented at design and CSS, create one yourself.

I am neither overly talented in design or CSS so I chose to pick one from the many hundreds of free themes for WP. I chose one from Hoofei.

I looked for a theme that…

1. had navigation broken into 2 different parts (horizontal menu and sidebar). This makes it easier to distinguish a difference between content sections of your site. Some content is what the user has come for (posts, articles, news, reviews, etc…) and some content is just related to your site or your business (FAQ’s, links, contact info, etc…).
2. didn’t require too much editing to actually get it to function correctly. A lot of themes don’t even hold up if you ad a sub-category or child page.
3. doesn’t look like someone’s personal blog. No one wants to come to your web site and wonder if you are a legitimate company or organization because your site looks like a personal web journal.

Here are some places to find some free themes:

• http://themes.wordpress.net/
• http://playwith.wpthemes.info/
• http://www.inmypad.com/works/wordpress-themes/

Get Rid of the Bloggy Stuff

Now that you have installed your new theme, let’s get rid of some of the bloggy stuff. This includes calendars, archives, meta info and any other info that your web site doesn’t need.

Most of these things can be found in the sidebar.php file and you can either comment them out or delete them entirely.

My goal, when creating a website from WP is to eliminate the bloggy stuff and also separate the content into 2 categories: good content & necessary content. As I mentioned in the first step, the good content is why the visitor is there and the necessary content is the stuff that should be there. I also like to keep these things separate from one another.

With WP you have Posts & Pages. Each can be nested in categories and subcategories. If you have a “brochure” site with about 4-8 pages that don’t really change that often and the content in them is not nested in sub-categories, I would choose to keep that content in Pages. If you have a lot of content and your content tends to be organized in more complex manners and is updated more often and added to more often, I would store that content in Posts.

Now that you have thought about the structure and hierarchy of your site, it’s time to start using some plugins to accomplish some very specific tasks.

The BreadCrumb Menu

OK, most CMS sites and forums have some sort of breadcrumb menu system so you can find your way back from where you came. Breadcrumb menus keep your visitors from getting lost on your site if they start diving into the deep depths of your site.

Example: Home > Projects > The Future
No worries, there’s a fantastic plugin available: BreadCrumb Navigation XT

By adding a small snippet of code to your header file, this will place the breadcrumb menu on every page of your site. Configuration is done on the php file itself so this can be a little intimidating but it’s well worth it.

Controlling the Post Category Menu

Now let’s take care of our Post menu. Usually an installation of WP will show only parent categories or all parent categories and sub-categories but there is no option to only show the sub-categories of the parent category you are in and just the parent categories of the categories you are not in. Have no fear!

Introducing the Fold Category List

This plugin replaces the wp_list_cats() function and shows only the sub-categories of the parent category you are in and keeps the other sub-categories hidden. Very logical and usable.

If you are using Pages to display your content, the same makers of the Fold Category List plugin also make the Fold Page List plugin.

I did have one problem with the Fold Category List plugin. When you are viewing a single Post from a category, the category list would collapse and just show the parent categories even if you were in a sub-category. I wanted all the sub-categories of the parent category I was in to still appear “expanded” so I modified the code a little.

If you want to modify this plugin, open the fold_category_list.php file and go to about line number 245. There you should see something like this:

if (is_category()) {
	$current_cat = $wp_query->get_queried_object_id();
	$all_ancestors = _wswwpx_category_get_ancestor_ids($current_cat);
} else {
	//
	//	Default to zero for all other cases.
	//
	$all_ancestors[] = 0;
}

You want to replace that code with the following code. Remember to backup the file first!

if (is_category()) {
	$current_cat = $wp_query->get_queried_object_id();
	$all_ancestors = _wswwpx_category_get_ancestor_ids($current_cat);
} elseif (is_single()) {
	//
	//	Default to zero for all other cases.
	//
	//$all_ancestors[] = 0;
	// This stuff is a little over the top but whatever
	//if (is_single()) {
	$cat = get_the_category();
	$cat = $cat[0];
	$cat_ID = get_cat_ID($cat_name=$cat->cat_name);
	// get category ID for given category name
	$current_cat = $cat_ID;
	$all_ancestors = _wswwpx_category_get_ancestor_ids($current_cat);
	//}
} else {
	$all_ancestors[] = 0;
}

That will keep the category list expanded when you are viewing a single post within a sub-category.

A Links Page

Now that we’ve deleted most of the content in the sidebar to help clean the site up, you might have noticed that something is missing. You link list is gone. No problem. We have just moved the links to a less prominent place. We don’t want our visitors leaving so quickly.

The great thing about the next plugin is that it moves all your links to a separate page and it doesn’t require any extra coding or additional php files.

The Categorical Links Page plugin from Alucinari puts all your links into a single Page. Just create a new page, name it “Links” or whatever you choose and place the following snippet of code into the page (remove all the spaces):

< ! - - catlinkspage - ->

Now all your links are all on a single page sorted into their appropriate categories. Also, you’ve help clean up your navigation structure without losing any of your content!

A FAQ Page

No website is complete without a thorough set of FAQs. OK, that’s not always the case but if you need an FAQ section on your site to address commonly asked questions about your services, products or philosphy you can do that with WP and plugins, too.

The FAQ plugin from VaamYob will answer all your questions, and by questions I mean needs…

The usage of this plugin is similar to the Category Links Page plugin in that you just create a page, name it FAQs and then insert the following code (remove all the spaces):

The FAQ plugin doesn’t stop there, though. You can modify settings in the Admin CP to allow your visitors to ask questions of which you can answer and then have it appear on the site. It’s a brilliant idea and one I’ve never seen implemented before.

With a little tweaking of your CSS file you can really get the layout of the FAQ questions and answers just right. View the bottom of my stylesheet to see some of the styling I applied to mine.

If the FAQ page is not your cup o’ tea or you want to give your users an additional way to contact you, install a contact form

I’ve tried a few different contact forms out there and they all have their own features and they all seem to do the trick.

A Contact Form

Having a hard time deciding between all the contact forms to choose from, I went with the eye candy. A self proclaimed “… warm and fuzzy Web 2.0 contact form By John Wyles” is a very stylish contact form that uses AJAX to validate the contact form fields as well as shows a live preview of your message so you can preview it before you send it.

If that contact form doesn’t float your boat, here are a few others:

• Accessible and Secure PHP contact form
• Contact Form ][
• PXS Mail Me Contact Form
• WP-ContactForm

Search All Posts & Pages

One feature that the default version of WP lacks is the ability to search Pages. Using the built-in search function, WP will only search the Posts.

Have no fear, Search Everything is here!

Search Everything allows you to do just that, Search Everything. Search Pages, drafts, attachments, etc… This is especially helpful if a lot of your important content is stored in Pages, not Posts.

This is a little extra but it can really help to spice up a site as well as make identifying the subject of the content easier.

Category Icons

Category Icons

This will assign an icon to each category. It’s really easy to use and just helps the user navigate your site a little faster.

With a little tweaking you can have the category icons scattered throughout your site so your visitors always know what category or section of you website they are in. Plus, I like associate them with the main images on my homepage. Which brings us to the all-mighty…

The Homepage

And last but definitely not least, the homepage. While you can leave the homepage as is and just let it show the most recent posts, a lot of websites do something a bit more inviting and captivating on their homepage. This is your main landing page so why not change it up a little bit to capture your visitor’s attention?

Filosofo Home-Page Control allows you to select a Page and set it as your homepage. So when your visitor goes to your main index page, they will see the Page that you have selected to show them.

One drawback (though necessary) is that you must change the URL structure of your site. Now you’ll have to prefix the URLs on your site with a word. I chose the word “main” therefore it would change site.com/articles/id to site.com/main/articles/id. This is not a big deal UNLESS you already have a bunch of pages indexed in the search engines. If that’s the case, using mod_rewrite to redirect URL requests might be necessary but you’re on your own there…

In this article I outlined a few techniques to turn your default WordPress website into a slick looking, fully functioning CMS website like this example.

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