Wordpress - how do YOU make it look like a site and not a blog?

I understand what you're going after here. First of all use pages and not posts. Then, in the Widgits section just include your pages. I use the flexi-pages plugin. That will get rid of all the other blog-like junk that comes up in the sidebar.

I think one of the issues I've read is that the wordpress rss feed puts in posts and not pages. There may be however a plug-in that will do this (not sure). I've heard that is why posts may be better for seo than pages so you can take advantage of the rss exposure.

Debbie

Wow this is my favorite!
I mean to use Wordpress for Niche sites instead of just blogs.

Well you have to do many small tweaks to make it look like Pro site:

1. First of all you may focus only Pages, and no posts...
this way you can control what aprears at what page.

So if you have 10 pages site, about page, contact page, products, services...
everything will be just at its on page...

2. Create a page and set it as Static homepage, from wordpress admin panel,
this way you will have nicely crafted homepage, it can be your salesletter...

3. Also remove any stuff in sidebar, and just keep Pages and Recent Pages widgets.

> Also change their titles from "Pages" to "Site Menu" (or something like that!)
also change title of "Recent Pages" to "Recently Updated" (or something like that!)

4. You also need to get a theme which compliment your Niche site style and
just do not make it look like a blog.

To make a general theme not look like a blog...you can do this:

a. Remove all dates, and written by stuff from the home.php, single.php,
archive.php and category.php pages of theme

b. You may also remove Comments Form section

c. You may also remove code related to Post Meta stuff, where it says, this
post was posted when and filed in what category and so on...


In short you by tweaking your theme, you can remove all blog related stuff,
and make it look like a Site....

let me know if you have any specific question in this regard, I will try to answer that..

Regards,
Mohsin

1. Change the permalink title to "custom" and write: %postname%

2. Use pages, like everyone else have said.
3. Find a good theme. - I purchased a professional theme for my business site, and it really looks like a static site, but it has a blog as well. You can see it at Gratisweb.No (It's in Norwegian, and not a self-promo:p)

The theme is called "Wp remix" and costs $75.

4. The plugin to include your pages in the rss feed is called "RSS Includes Pages"

I hope that helps
- Preben

When you use pages they don't automatically appear in the RSS feed.

Use this plugin to have your pages appear in the RSS feed:

RSS Includes Pages

Lots of good advice here, and I do this all the time. I use a dateless theme and a static magazine style front page.

One cool thing you can do with a static site built on Wordpress though is take advantage of the RSS and pinging capabilities. Once you're set up with a dateless theme and have set your permalinks to not have dates, use a plugin called "Old Post Promoter" and you can have what appears to be a static site actually have a very dynamic RSS feed, so that your site seems to have constantly updated content for RSS aggregators to grab.

You could even go nuts and make your excerpts have randomizing elements with something like Random Stray Quotes plugin, so that it would actually appear to be a different little snippet each time.

Damn, I should actually try that out on a few sites. I bet it would work killer.

Anyway, hope that helps.

#1 Tip: Take the time to find a Template that is designed to be used as a CMS.

you can actually leave your side bar widgets in and still use a graphical background for the side by using the graphic as the background, and html links over it. That way you still have the ability to use the additional functions that widgets can provide.

The optin box on the top right uses this technique but you can make it as long as you want to accommodate a full menu:
http://clickhereforgrantsforwomen.com/

WP is so flexible - you can do almost anything with it! just keep an untouched copy of your theme files - that way anytime you screw up the code - you just upload the 'clean' file and start over:-)

Very important when you are working with a premium theme!

melody

go get a theme and redesign it.

Add pages not posts.

get a plugins to help with seo structure.

write write write.

www and .html will never make a site less blog-like. It is the design (theme) that you use.
- www is not really necessary on any site because technically i is obsolete;
- there are millions of site made in .php, .asp, .cfm, yet they are not blogs.

The www at the beginning and the file extension shouldn't define what kind of site you have. It is defined by the functionality, structure and design.

The rest is just myth and misconception.

I Use Artisteer so I can create any blog theme I want rather than hunting and tweaking free themes.

It is especially useful when creating business sites and creating customer sites.

It is a one time cost and you can then make as many themes as you like in pretty well any combination, color theme etc.

Artisteer 2 the new way to design Wordpress Themes | The Internet Marketers Club

Quentin

Great thread, cheers guys.

Can anyone recommend a free Wordpress theme that is well suited to being used a CMS?

Also, does anyone know of a plugin to enable drop down menus?

Thanks again

@Netcel
Just got these themes from Google. I hope you will find them useful.
9 Free WordPress CMS Theme (Free Wordpress Magazine Theme) | Dobeweb
Also if you are using any advance theme, free or paid there is no need of any plugin. Dropdown menus are already available in most of themes. So you have not to worry about any plugin.

Paid ones also often have ready-made page templates that looks great.

They also quite often give a more "professional feel" to the entire site.
They are usually CSS optimized, more colours to choose from, more sidebars, theme functions,easier to customize, and in general easier to get good response with etc.

However, it's also possible to customize a free one as well, to make it look more professional. But if you're new to wordpress and webdesign, you should stick to a premium one.

I wonder if there has been any studies done on whether this issue is even relevant to the majority of users? Some of the crappiest looking websites still do fantastic - it seems more true for blogs, which I guess is a format that people expect it to look amateurish. After many years of being online and always seeking to craft the perfect website, I'm beginning to think that a lot of time I could do just as well with a white sheet with black text on the screen - as long as the content is of interest.

I use myself as my sample set though. When I see an amateurish looking site, or a site which clearly uses a template, I usually bail out because I can't take them seriously.

There's something to be said for using premium themes. If you can then take it and mess around with the styling and change it up to be your own unique sort of looking site, you're good to go.

Think of wordpress themes in general as a framework. You can infinitely expand on it to fit your vision. The difference with a premium theme though is that they give you more tools out of the box to work with. For example, most if not all premium themes have their own options page built in that lets you control specific elements.

As far as making a blog look like a regular site, a lot of this will have to do with the theme that you use to start with. You should use pages instead of posts, and keep posts for the 'blog' portion of your site (which I think all sites should have for a variety of reasons).

You may want to check out themeforest.net . They have a lot of CMS looking themes that are fairly inexpensive but look great. I warn you though if you're a novice with wordpress, while most if not all of these themes come with their own set up instructions, they can seem overwhelming at first.

As far as free themes, check out where sites such as smashingmagazine.com have to offer. Another great place is weblogtoolscollection.com - there you will find a lot of free themes posted every few days. Some look like crap of course, but sometimes you will find a real gem.

For premium themes you can check out premiumwp.com (a ridiculously awesome affiliate site I have to say) which lists all the major premium themes as they come out. There is also WordPress › Free WordPress Themes which lists all of the GPL premium theme providers.

Good luck, and try not to get overwhelmed!

I feel the same way Preben, but it's important to keep in mind that it's true when they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

People have lots of different aesthetic tastes. The most important part of a website is to make sure that content is displayed prominently and that the message you are trying to get across is delivered effectively. The rest is just eye candy.

Professionalism in my opinion is more then just how a site looks.

Well yeah, but I have a few examples...

Take... Ryan Air for example... A HUGE company, selling for billions each year.(At least hundreds of millions) ryanair.com . That site looks quite 97'ish in my opinion. I was SCEPTICAL when I booked my flights there, but I still did it.

On the other hand, we have stompernet. They have the "Design professionalism" I'm talking about.

Everything they do looks extremely professional and appealing. They look BIG, in other words. (And they are, but still. Ryan air is bigger, yet looks "smaller")

You get where I'm heading at?
I think there are a few key design elements everyone will agree looks professional. They might not "love" the design themselves, but they are quickly able to tell if it's professional. Whether they like it or not.

Depends on what you want your wp site to look like, all my sites, including sales pages, squeeze pages, landing pages & even membership sites (across all my niches) are all wp.

Use a professional looking free theme, which is quite easy to find, I tend to favor those with right sidebar or no sidebar.

First, you want to remove those distracting links on the sidebar, you can do that by editing your widgets, not much html knowledge needed.

Also, you want to remove all the dates so that it looks like a regular website. You can do that by editing the theme, it requires a bit of php knowledge. You might want to use 1 of your pages as your front page.

If you're not sure how to do it, just pay someone to do that, since these tasks are simple, it's easy to find people who can do it & it won't cost much.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any question.

Removing the date is also good for blogs if they rarely gets updated.

@MacFreddie - I agree that every site could be done using wordpress. I'm going to convert my business website to WP very soon. And what you say about stompernet is right. I always use this principle when I build important websites. - Make it look "big", serious, and professional. It will give your visitors an instant credibility boost, and they are more likely to take any action.

I take a non-wordpress theme then drop the "loop" into it where I want the content to appear. I then add a little php code to the sidebar, header, and footer that can be controlled in wordpress.

Using a page or post gets the same result the way I do it. I normally just use posts.

Basically it's just an issue of getting your content to show up in the places on your chosen theme just like you would with an html editor or whatnot.

I use Affiliate Theme... None of my sites look remotely like blogs. If you want it to look like a blog, you can do that too.

To be honest I hate those WP themes that come "free" but have a bunch of unrelated ads in the bottom footer (like the one you are using).

If the 3-sectioned fotter part (random posts, recent comments etc.) is really a widget area, then putting there an empty text widget should hide/remove all the others. However, you would end up with a big empty space there...

I assume, the sidebar is also widgetized... Now, when you don't use any widgets in a widget-area WP will show what is hand-coded into the file (sidebar.php in this case). As soon, as you activate at least ONE widget, all the hand-coded stuff disappears (i.e. it is not displayed anymore), and your active widgets will be displayed instead.

There are several free premium themes..just Google it.

Use Magazine themes, they look like sites

Anybody ever have problems with their wordpress site being slow?

I use the free Arthemia theme (doboweb.com) on the majority of my sites. I find it helpful to pick a theme and learn how to customize it, rather than skip from one theme to another. Arthemia works really well for me. I have some sites where I've designated a page as the front page, others where I've used the "headline" feature to highlight products for sale, others where I delete the headline and featured sections altogether. It's really easy to customize and looks nice, regardless (unless you really hack it up, but that's on you!).

I've saved the various customizations locally and I just upload the theme version I want when I install the site.

a lot of good ideas,thank you!

We are swithching from a Cold Fusion based site to a WordPress based site. The problem is that there are a large number of backlinks established in cyberspace that lead back to one of our .cfm pages, and we don't want to lose that connectivity in the new site. Does anyone know how to get WordPress to deal with an address that has a .cfm suffix?