Create A Professional WordPress Website

WordPress.Com has become a great tool to create a great professional looking website on the cheap but you have to know how. Out of the box all WordPress themes look pretty generic but there are tricks to most themes to dress them up and make the look unique. We are going to learn how to do these customizations by build a site.

The site that we’re going to build is a copy of this Lou FOR Blog. To get started you must have a WordPress.Com account. Create or login to your account. If you’ve just created your account the wizard will prompt you to create a new site. If you already has an account go to “MY Sites” and then the “SWITCH SITES” button in the upper left corner of the page. At the bottom of the list click “ADD SITE”. This will start the wizard.

When you are finished with the wizard go to “My Sites”, “Settings”, scroll down to “Privacy” and click “Hidden”.

Inside the left sidebar click “Blog Posts” and remove the post by clicking “Trash”. Now click “Pages” in the sidebar and remove the pages you find there. You must also remove them from the trash.

Next we will download the content, text and images the make up the pages. DOWNLOAD FILE.

Now return to the home page, hover over “My Sites” in the upper left corner, go down to “Pages and click “Add”. In “Title” and type “Welcome”. In the site files you downloaded open “welcome.txt” in a text editor. Select and copy all of the text. Go back to the site editor. At the top of the page editor switch from “Visual” to “HTML”. Now paste the text in the editor. On the left click “Feature Image”, click “Set Featured Image”, and click “Add New”. Browse for and select the water.jpg and click “Select Featured Image”. Save and publish page.

Paste text and set the featured images for all these pages:

1. Forsooth Newspaper – newspaper.jpg
2. Third Thursday Lunches – meal.jpg
3. Donate – money.jpg
4. Aim higher  – los-cabos.jpg
5. FORward radio  – old-radio.jpg
6. Calendar – pen.jpg
7. Misc Posts  (No text for this page. Leave it blank.) – amazing.jpg

After editing that last page , above the page title click the “site title”. You will notice the page may have changed little accept there will be three new post. We will now customize the sites appearance.

Hover over my “My Sites” and click “Themes”. Over the theme chooser there is a bar with a magnifying glass that says “What kind of theme are you looking for? Type “panels”. Select the “Pique” theme. Click “Activate this design free”, and “Visit site”. You will se there’s a lotally new look but still not what we are looking for.

Hover over “My Sites” and click “Customize”. Click “Site Identity” and change the site title to “Fellowship of Reconciliation Louisville Chapter”. Skip the tagline and click “Add logo”. Click on “Media Library”, select “for-header-100.png” and click “Set as logo”. Uncheck “Display Site Title and Tagline”then click “Save & Publish”. Click the back arrow.

Click on “Header Image” and select the previously loaded image. Click “Save & Publish”. Click the back arrow.

We don’t want to see the post author and date when we view a post to chnage this click “Content Options” and uncheck “Display date, Display categories and Display tags”. Save and Publish. Click “BACK”.

Click “Static Front Page” and selct “A static page”. Select “Welcome” for the front page and “Misc Posts” for the posts page. Save and click back.

Clcik “Theme Options” and click “Menu Settings”. Select “Add an anchor menu to the front page.” Save and go back one click.

Click “Panel 1”. Under Panel Content select “Forsooth News Paper”. Save and back.

Do the same for the rest of the panels:

• Panel 2 – Third Thursday Lunches
• Panel 3 – Donate
• Panel 4 – Aim Higher
• Panel 5 – Forward Radio
• Panel 6  – Calendar
• Panel 7 – Misc Post

There are still a few other items to take care of but we’ll leave that for another day.