To survive in the competitive business environment, you need to introduce the advanced techniques and bring innovation into your business. And, if we talk about the online world, then it becomes necessary for you to represent your official website in such a way that can leave a great impression on the visitors and clients.
In the Web development industry, WordPress is the most prevailing Content Management and blogging platform that allows millions of users to formulate and manage the top-notch websites and blogs.
In this post, we will try to learn how to customize a WordPress theme to make sure that it doesn’t look like a blog. The main purpose of this post is to allow you to create a WP site that has a flawless, compatible look.
With the help of the following tips, you can customize your WordPress theme and can make it unique. Also, confirm that a site does not look like a blog.
1. You Can Add “WP No Category Base” Plugin for Cleaner URLs:
If you want to customize the look of your blog’s URLs, then you need to use clean permalinks, instead of using the default query string driven URL structure.
However, it is impossible for the developer or blogger to remove the word “category” from links that describe the specific categories on your website. But, with the WP No Category Base plugin, you can remove the word “category” from your WordPress URLs by giving a much cleaner feel that can make your site more professional.
With the help of this plugin, you can completely take away the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from the category permalinks. It will also automatically formulate 301 redirections for all your old category links.
2. Alter the Default Display of the Title Bar Content:
You may have seen the header.php file in default theme of WordPress that has a title bar, which is coded like this:
<title><?php wp_title(‘«’, true, ‘right’); ?> <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>
You can replace the << character (which is greatly overused by the web developers) with different character. In fact, you can change the way the page title appears on the screen.
Well, you will see the wp-title function that contains 3 parameters including the << character. The third parameter asks WordPress where to show the post title, either to the left or to the right of your blog name.
To an addition, you have an option to clear the function that shows the name of your blog and then manually enter a keyword-friendly title.
3. Personalize Your Sidebar and Also Keep It Uniform:
The sidebar in WordPress has default titles such as “Blogroll”, “Archives” and “Categories”. You can change the text of these titles and also decide which section you want to display by editing the sidebar.php file in the theme directory.
In fact, WordPress shows a different sidebar that will depend on what page of the website you are on, which can be changed.
Well, it would be better to exhibit the same sidebar on all pages and try to keep it constant.
You can work on the WordPress efficiently without any PHP knowledge. As you know, WordPress code is developer-friendly, which makes their job easy and smooth. You can also customize the sidebar code if you have basic knowledge of the functions or know how to open or close if statements.
4. You Can Also Customize the Metadata for Individual Posts:
In WordPress, every post has ‘metadata’ comprised inside of paragraph tags at the bottom of a blog post. And, this data is created dynamically through the loop that fetches your content out of the database.
It allows you to easily delete, edit and change any of the pieces of data that are showcased with each entry that can be seen inside the index.php file in your theme directory. The metadata section will look like this:
<p class=”postmetadata”><?php the_tags(‘Tags: ‘, ‘, ‘, ‘<br />’); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> <?php comments_popup_link(‘No Comments »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?></p>
While editing the above code, you can select to display only comments and categories. You can also change the characters that are presented on the screen.
5. Avoid “Tags” or a “Tag Cloud”:
The “Tags” plays a significant role in the blogs and these tags are keywords that can be added to a post in your WP dashboard. They are same like the categories, but they provide a greater interrelationship between posts.
Tags that are associated with a particular post enable the user to click on certain keywords with an objective to see more entries that can simplify the keyword. They are also great for SEO, as they help Google to fetch the written tag and bring the title on the search engine pages.
Therefore, it is better to avoid tags from the website, if you want to keep the content at the top.
6. You Can Use the “Pages” Sidebar Section as Main Navigation:
We have already discussed the sidebar sections, now it is also important to tell you that the pages section of the sidebar can serve as your main navigation bar.
In the default WordPress theme, you can see the code that produces the “pages” section of sidebar, found in sidebar.php:
<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>’ ); ?>
You just need to place this code whenever you want your main navigation to show.
7. You Can Use “Nice Search” Plugin:
Nice Search is an easy to use plugin that makes searches carry out on your site look less “WordPress-y” and look more like a custom search engine activated on a site.
So, you can use this plugin to customize your site to make sure that it will not look like a “blog”.
Author Bio: Lucy Barret is a WordPress Developer at WPGeeks Ltd. She handles a team of experienced WordPress developers who are converting HTML to WordPress responsive theme and targeting 100% client satisfaction. She is a writer by hobby and regularly writes WordPress tutorials.