WordPress Blog to Business Website

Dear Christina,
I have a wordpress theme that is normally used for a blog but I am changing it to become a website.

Do you have any resources you can suggest which will help me to make as many changes so that the theme looks more like a website and less like a blog. I don’t write CSS.

Do you know what changes I should make in my WP dashboard which will aid in creating a website rather than a blog?

Thank you for your help!

Janine -Your Virtual Wizard

****This is only a general outline of my personal experience with the themes I am familiar with. Read your theme documentation or hire a professional, if none of the following applies to your theme or if you do not understand code.

Dear Janine,

I’m so glad you asked.  I run into people all the time who don’t understand how a “blog” can look less like a blog and more like a professional website. My daily job is explaining it to them and showing examples.

This site, Dear Christina, is a blog. It’s a blog template, it has all the features of a blog and it allows commenting.

My company site is a Professional website. It’s a blog template with all of the “bloggy” things removed &  no comments allowed.

To change a blog template into a more professional looking Business site you need to start with your Dashboard.

-You won’t be using “posts”, only “pages” (be sure to add a new page before you continue)

Change the following under “Settings”:

1. under “reading” click dot next to “static page” and choose what page you want as your home page. Save blog setting for when you are ready to incorporate a blog.
2. Under “permalinks” click “custom” and enter “/%pagename%/” in the box (this shows your URL as www.yourdomain.com/contact instead of www.yourdomain.com/pg=4)

- Install the following plug-ins to make it easier to maintain your site (links are to explanations, grab plugin by searching in “add new plugins”):

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Contact Form 7
3. WP Google Analytics
4. Google XML Sitemaps

I also like to have these:

1. Exclude Pages from Navigation
2. pageMash
3. WP Post Columns

Now, once those are all installed, it’s time to dive into your code files.

Don’t be scared, repeat after me:

“We always take precautions before touching code!”

and again

“WE ALWAYS TAKE PRECAUTIONS BEFORE TOUCHING CODE!”

Thank you, now save your original template/theme files somewhere on your computer so you have them to refer back to, or if there is need to reinstall clean.

First, we want to remove the meta data on each page/post. That’s the little area where author, date, comments, etc is shown under heading or at the bottom of the content. Only blogs need that info.

Each theme is different as to where you will find the exact code but check each php file to find all instances of these:

Once you find them you can (if you are brave) delete them.

I recommend the other method of “commenting out” the offending code.

To do that, you would add an asterisk (*) and backslash (/) at the beginning and end of the piece of code like this:

*/ <?php the_category() ?> */

simple.

That way if you ever want any of it to show, you can just remove the */ and the code is active again.

If you don’t want the page name to show above your content (as it does with blog posts) you’ll be removing this code from your php files as well: */   <?php the_title(); ?> */

If you are uncomfortable messing with your code please ask someone who knows what they are doing to help you. Without looking at each individual theme and it’s coding it’s hard to say 100% that all of my suggestions will work.

~Christina