Useful Articles

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Change Your Blog into Website, But How?
by: Manish Rawat

In a realm where having a website is more than a necessity; many people are taking the help of CMS. Using a CMS for blog is what every one will find very common over the Internet but using it for a website does not give you a professional feeling. But what can a novice do when he does not have enough money to build up a website? The most common CMS used is Wordpress and many try to work out their website through it only. People have started using WP as their website. Not only freelancers and individuals even many companies setup their online presence through WP only.

There are few tips which can help you to make few changes in your WP to give it a website look & feel. There will be some simple and straight working tips which a blogger or develop can apply to ensure that his website doesn’t look like a blog. Before starting we must keep this in mind that it is difficult to hide your website appearance as a WP blog but we can work on to minimize it’s such an appearance.

Customize the side bar and keep it consistent
You can change the titles of the sidebar which is a big give away from WP. The default titles of the sidebar such as ‘Blogroll’, Archive’ etc. can be changed according to the requirement. The text of the title and which title is to be displayed can be changed from the file sidebar.php in theme directory.

Even if you do not have any knowledge of the codes the WP codes are very simple. You just need to know the basics of how functions are called and how to open and close the IF statement to help you customize the codes.

Use “De-categorizer” Plugins for clean URLs
The URLs which could give the website more look like a blog. Clean the permalinks from querystring driven url and use custom urls which can be done easily through the WP dashboard. You can use De-categorizer which can strip off the category from the url that points to the specific categories on your site.

Don’t Use “Tags” or a “Tag Cloud”
“Tags” are those keywords that you add to individual posts in your Wordpress dashboard. They are similar to categories, but provide a wider interrelationship between posts.

Tags are the keywords which allow the user to see posts related to that keyword, while clicking on them. Tags also provide SEO benefits, as they help Google and blog directories properly categorize your blog’s pages. So inspite of such a potent relationship with Google I will not suggest you to include it in your web page. But you can use it in blog section of your website.

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