How to make a Website from WordPress

This time the target was to work out a complete website out of WordPress and although I had seen many websites based on WordPress, but I was not been into details ever and neither in any more touch with all HTML, CSS etc now days. More than the information itself, it was all about imagination. Even if, I was having sort of a view about what I am trying to make, the challenge was to map the same with the restrictive environment of WordPress.

I am not expecting anyone to learn from this article that “How to make A Website out of WordPress” by this website, as my approach was kind of naïve and nursery kid’s learning, but still for someone starter like me, it might be a good idea to know things easily rather than searching and going through many themes and templates etc.

The requirement was a stylish enough, but simple, lightweight and corporate kind of looking view. A header having customized pictures, customized favicon for the site, a marquee logo, header with pages names, few pages of course, a three column theme holding static messages at left side and dynamic messages on right side and along with all these requirements, one was required to keep it looking clean enough means no sign of wordpress itself.

I guess anyone would require the same from any novice website in a free cost without need of web designing experts. Don’t know, my approach served all the requirement or not, but for the starter, I found a particular theme named atahualpa came out to be a life saviour. I am not going to describe that how it works and how to make it work in your ways, but trust me, it works like a charm. I managed to match most of the requirements of mine and I don’t feel that I could not add more and more customizations in it on my own in easy ways. Have a look over my implementation template as of now.

First level menus on the header are actual pages, from which I deliberately have hided posts page. All the second level menus are actually categories and in this way, I found a way to provide many departments a blog of their own. Moreover, by hiding some of the categories, I succeeded in keeping MD’s page and Exe. MD’s page in background (although still there are categories only, but I am not allowing all post pages here). The next task remained is to restrict particular authors to fixed categories only. Let’s see, what I could do.

The top has a marquee logo here and left and right portion is having messages through Text Widgets. Header images as you know are self changing with our control over them. I guess enough hints till here for how to go for one of your own wordpress hosting.

Although till now, I am not able to find the version to suit the web version WordPress.com for some obvious reasons neither did I am finished with the complete design of the site as I am hardly getting any time out of work for the same, but I guess soon I will be back with the complete details and fully working site based on WordPress.

Edited on 16^th October 2009: Finally I found a plugin named Role Scoper, which was claiming to have the similar functionality means restriction over users etc. Got it installed on my server, although yet to figure out about its working and more will come out, when users will start using it actually. But I hope, I got a way to accomplish the final remaining task.

One more remaining target is handling Dynamic updates in more managed way means Widgets like Company Headlines or News in same marquee style but getting their entries from some MySQL or some XML file. Although Environment of WordPress is very much restrictive, but I guess, I could find a way around it as well.

Next Article:

My next article might be around Windows Deployment Services Server. Not posting right now as I am struggling enough with it and sometimes its frustrating. That’s why I wish to come out with a clean walkthrough for the same implementation for rest of the world.