A question was asked in the forum yesterday about what to do with a blog when it has run its course.
This was the inspiration to do something that I had been meaning to do for a long time, hack my UKSBD wordpress blog about to make it more of a stand alone site rather than a blog.
I made the suggestion to the person who asked the question, but didn’t have my blog set up good enough to use it as a demo or to be able to use it show clearly what I meant.
With this in mind I stripped it all down this afternoon and have hacked it and skinned it to get it set up as I want it.
The big mistake most people who use blogging systems make is just using it how it comes. Most blogs have headers, sidebars and footers which are used throughout the whole site.
The first thing I did was to decide on structure, WordPress effectively does this for us with 5 or 6 main pages; index, category, page, single post, search
Now rather than using the same header, sidebar, footer for these 5 pages, what I do is create a header, sidebar, footer for each.
I then create the categories for the category page and ensure that each category has a minimum of one post in it. After that I create the Pages for page; About, Contact, Privacy (I don’t bother with a resources or sitemap page at this stage, as this can be added to the foter at a later date)
With this done I edit all the sidebars to suit the content of the page they are used on. I tend to use the sidebar with the most info on the index, slightly less info on the category and page pages and when I get to the single post pages the sidebar is at a minimum.
I do the same with the header, rather than just using a standard header as most people appear to, I edit the headers to match the pages they are on.
Next comes the content, again I strip this right down to the minimum;
content, link to the post, link to the category. I do away with all comments, edits, dates of entry, author, etc. leaving a very basic page like this example
Anyone in the know, will see I haven’t set friendly URL’s up, but this is primarily due to the Windows hosting.
This was the inspiration to do something that I had been meaning to do for a long time, hack my UKSBD wordpress blog about to make it more of a stand alone site rather than a blog.
I made the suggestion to the person who asked the question, but didn’t have my blog set up good enough to use it as a demo or to be able to use it show clearly what I meant.
With this in mind I stripped it all down this afternoon and have hacked it and skinned it to get it set up as I want it.
The big mistake most people who use blogging systems make is just using it how it comes. Most blogs have headers, sidebars and footers which are used throughout the whole site.
The first thing I did was to decide on structure, WordPress effectively does this for us with 5 or 6 main pages; index, category, page, single post, search
Now rather than using the same header, sidebar, footer for these 5 pages, what I do is create a header, sidebar, footer for each.
I then create the categories for the category page and ensure that each category has a minimum of one post in it. After that I create the Pages for page; About, Contact, Privacy (I don’t bother with a resources or sitemap page at this stage, as this can be added to the foter at a later date)
With this done I edit all the sidebars to suit the content of the page they are used on. I tend to use the sidebar with the most info on the index, slightly less info on the category and page pages and when I get to the single post pages the sidebar is at a minimum.
I do the same with the header, rather than just using a standard header as most people appear to, I edit the headers to match the pages they are on.
Next comes the content, again I strip this right down to the minimum;
content, link to the post, link to the category. I do away with all comments, edits, dates of entry, author, etc. leaving a very basic page like this example
Anyone in the know, will see I haven’t set friendly URL’s up, but this is primarily due to the Windows hosting.