How To Create A Regular Website With WordPress
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WordPress is a system conceived to create blogs. Nevertheless, it does not mean that it should only be used for creating blogs. WordPress has all the features to maintain and create a regular website.
When using WordPress without its blog enabilities, it’s used in a mode CMS (Content Management System) only. I recently created a website from an old blog. Here are the actions I took for this switch :
Turning A Blog Into A Regular Website
- A blog has posts. A website has pages. So the first thing I did is to paste the content of all posts into pages.
- In the admin WordPress > Option / Reading, I ticked to have a static page for the front page display and I choose one of the post to become the homepage of the website.
- At this point, all the pages appeared in tabs (a real mess). To avoid that, I created a new page called “all articles”, and I changed all the pages created in 1. to have “all articles” page as a page parent. That solved the problem.
- I removed all widgets concerning archiving, rss feeds, comments etc…
- I added the widget “Pages” which displays all the pages of the website.
- I changed the permalinks setting and choose some pattern without the dates in the URLs.
- I added permanent redirects (301) lines in the .htaccess file for each of the old URLs (mode blog) to the new URLs (mode CMS).
Each line was like :redirect 301 /old/old http://www.thesite.com/new
Notes About The Above
- The website will probably lose some traffic for a while. In this case, the blog was transformed to a website because it was not updated often and had low traffic.
- It would be nice to have the possibility to change a post to a page and the opposite. Maybe a future release of WordPress ;).
Comments
Have you ever used WordPress has a regular website? Any plugins that you found interesting to use? Don’t hesitate to comment on any experience you had with WordPress mode CMS. Thanks.
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October 18th, 2007 at 4:57 am
Any idea how to sell an ebook from a WP site? I just started a self healing blog and I want to sell my book on how to do adjustments on yourself on it.
You did give me some ideas with this article though, so many thanks for that!
October 18th, 2007 at 7:48 am
Hi Kalidasa,
Thanks for visiting my blog.
Do you have the ebook already written ? If so, just create a sale page for the ebook, a picture… and a paypal button I guess. Get paid first, and then send the ebook.
Gook luck with your site.
Fab
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:04 am
You’re doing great so far for a blog that’s approximately a month old. I subscribed earlier today and enjoy your comment. I’ll be linking to this post in my next roundup, this upcoming weekend. Keep up the fantastic word, and never change your blog’s design (I love it too much)!
October 26th, 2007 at 5:37 am
[…] How To Create A Regular Website With Wordpress: “WordPress is system conceived to create blogs. Nevertheless, it does not mean that it should only be used for creating blogs. WordPress has all the features to maintain and create a regular website. …” […]
November 6th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Why not just leave those posts as posts instead of making them pages? I guess what I am asking is what advantage are you planning to receive now that they are pages and not posts?
Would you have been better off from an SEO point of view with keeping the posts as posts and then creating pages that are linked to from those posts?
November 6th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
@James : I agree that making a website with posts could work. It’s just a matter of tweaking a bit, maybe some small coding as well.
It’s just that posts are normally of temporary nature… meaning that if desired they get displayed on the main page (through the loop) and get archived at some point.
For a regular website, I was not planning in using archiving, or showing lists of posts. It will be reserved for when there is a need to create a blog as a section of the regular website.
I preferred to use Pages then which are more static. Also pages can be built in a hierarchical way, they can have a parent page, children pages.
Thanks for your comment.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
[…] my article “How To Create A Regular Website With WordPress“, I was trying to give some general ideas on how to make your blog look like a […]