WordPress Tips on Making your Blog Appear like a Website

Whatever industry you’re in, you’d certainly want to stand out and be unique, and not simply give the impression that your online presence is like that of the rest. Of course, if you’re depending on a pre-built content management framework like WordPress for the core of your blog or website, then that could prevent your online presence from truly standing out.

In this article, you’ll encounter some straightforward ways of a beginning developer or an aspiring blogger in customizing their wordpress themes in making sure that it’s not just a blog. Remember, that the goal here is not to hide the fact that a website is using WordPress — that’s quite difficult, if not impossible.

The primary goal is to aid your website in having a seamless, consistent, look and feel that doesn’t say, “WordPress-driven” from the home page that loads up.

NOTE: These tips are for beginning WP developers who are coding themes for their own site, or experimenting with theme development.

It’s likely that such tips wouldn’t apply to custom downloaded themes that are pre-built and have customizations.

-Sidebars should be kept consistent and customize.

The sidebars are an attraction to your visitors upon their visit to your site. The sidebar will have default titles like “Blogroll”, “Categories” and “Archives”. With it you can easily change the test of such titles in which the sections are displayed thru editing the sidebar. php file in the theme directory. WordPress also displays varied sidebars depending on what page you’re on, which can be changed.

It’s preferable to display virtually the same sidebar on all pages, keeping the site consistent. Even if you’re not familiar with PHP, WordPress code is very developer-friendly, and easy to work with. A simple knowledge of how functions are called and how to open and closeifstatements is often more than enough in helping you customize some sidebar codes.

Also, you can duplicate and customize some sidebars. Look at the sidebar here on Impressive Webs: You’ll notice there’s a list for “Articles” and “Tutorials”. This is done by copying ‘categories ‘section and controlling such categories are displayed using parameters within the function call for such particular section. Check out the WordPress Codex for further information on customizing category listings.