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Custom Wordpress Theme Design

A blog about freelancing, web design, blogging, Wordpress and pretty much everything related to making money online, from the comfort of your home.


8 Common Sense Tips For Writing Clean WordPress Blog PostsNovember 14 2008

I’ve been thinking about writing a post like this one for a long, long time, because it’s the kind of post that would make my life as a custom WordPress theme designer so much easier. These are not groundbreaking tips or anything, just 8 common sense tips for people who are not very familiar with how the WordPress editor works. If you’re an experienced WordPress user, you might as well skip this post.

If you’re a WordPress theme designer or a web designer using WordPress as CMS in your client projects, then I think you should really bookmark this post and keep it somewhere safe, because you’ll need it! It will be so much easier to give your clients the link and encourage them to read this post, rather than explaining why their blog posts look bad or why their WordPress theme breaks, even though the theme you designed works fine.

Table Of Contents

  1. The right way to use copy / paste in WordPress editor
  2. Using simple styling in your blog posts
  3. Adding images to your blog posts
7 Tips When Using WordPress As CMSOctober 12 2008

I promised a follow up on my tutorial on using WordPress as CMS, where I would put together some conclusions. While these tips are not rocket surgery by any means, I just thought it would be nice to have some closure on that three part tutorial. So here goes:

  1. Always use nice permalinks (/%postname%/ is probably the best for websites). Not only is this a must do for SEO, but it’s also common sense. An URL like http://mysite.com/about makes more sense than http://mysite.com/?page_id=142.
  2. Before starting to work on the WordPress theme implementation, think about what you’re trying to achieve and pick plugins accordingly. Just use what you need, don’t over do it!
  3. Add a main navigation (browse pages) to your header and if necessary add a secondary navigation (browse subpages) to your sidebar. You can even go crazy and create a dropdown menu as main navigation. I’ll show you how later. ;)
  4. Use breadcrumbs! Breadcrumbs are great for so many reasons: usability, SEO, etc. In terms of plugins, there are many options, but I recommend Yoast Breadcrumbs, because it’s easy to use and I really trust Joost’s expertise.
  5. When it comes to WordPre
10 More Great Website Designs Using WordPress As CMSSeptember 16 2008

When I posted the first roundup called 10 Great Website Designs Using WordPress As CMS, it received a lot of comments, being in fact one of the most commented blog posts. Some of you mentioned other great websites making use of WordPress as CMS, some of you mentioned you use WordPress in your own web design projects.

I also received a lot of requests recently, from people who wanted to convert their old websites to a WordPress driven website. So WordPress is clearly growing in popularity! That’s why I’ve put together this follow up of cool designs, using some of your suggestions, as well as some of my own finds. Enjoy:

1. Feedback Audio

2. fraai

3. Future Snowboarding Magazine

WordPress CMS Part 3: Finishing TouchesSeptember 11 2008

Hello, everyone! Long time no see. Sorry about the lack of activity on the blog, but I’m working on a couple of client projects and I’m also trying to put myself in action mode and kick start some of my own projects. Not to mention I took a couple of days off and went here. Anyway… don’t want to stray away too much from the topic of this post.

As you know, a while ago I started a three part series on using WordPress as CMS. And not only did I write about the whole process, but I also chose a real website as an example. A couple of days ago I managed to make the final tweaks to Sky Dental, so now I’ll tell you a bit about the final tweaks I had to make.

Making the switch

The initial website was build using static HTML files, so what I did was to move the files to a folder called “_old” and just create an index.html file with the logo and a message saying “We’re updating the website. Sorry for the inconvenience! Please come back in a couple of hours”. That’s right, an under construction page. Some people hate them, some say they’re so ‘90. I see no harm in using one, especially if you can indeed make the switch in a couple of hours.

So I installed the latest ve

WordPress CMS Part 2: Theme ImplementationAugust 25 2008

I finally found some time to implement the WordPress theme for Sky Dental and to write Part 2 of my WordPress as CMS tutorial. Like I said in Part 1, the WordPress theme that you begin with is not really that important. What’s important is that you use a theme that matches your layout as close as possible.

Since I already created the basic “header + 2 columns + footer” HTML structure when I built the initial website, using a two column WordPress theme like Corporate Sandbox will make this a simple copy / paste job and maybe a couple of small tweaks.

The theme structure

Below is the layout we’re using and I also highlighted the files we need to edit:

I will discuss the changes we need to make to each of these files, but I won’t go into specific details about the CSS. I will focus on the Worpdress code and HTML markup instead. Here’s the markup for this particular layout:

<div id="container"> <div id="top"> <div id="header">Logo and phone numbe