Visser Labs: WordPress

Wordpress is not optimised out of the box for commercial deployment, the potential is certainly there but on the surface it’s just a blogging platform. For that reason it makes sense that the home page for all default Wordpress sites is a list of recent posts in chronological order.

The needs of commercial sites differ vastly from bloggers by requiring a customised home page and the ability to sink the company blog or Media releases functionality into the back of the visitors experience. Generating sales conversions through well-directed user prompts is one of the most important goal of commercial sites, blogs appearing on the home page only dilute this experience.

For starters we’ll create a new page called ‘Home page’, another new page called ‘Media releases’ then modify options through Wordpress’s Options section to enable our custom home page, finally we’ll create a new theme template called ‘Home page’.

Creating a new page called ‘Home page’

1. Open your Wordpress administration
2. Click Write
3. Click the sub-menu Page
4. Set the following page details as follows.
   • Title to ‘Home page’
   • Slug to ‘home’
5. Publish the page

Creating a new page called ‘Media releases’

1. Open your Wordpress administration
2. Click Write
3. Click the sub-menu Page
4. Set the following page details as follows.
   • Title to ‘Media releases’
   • Slug to ‘blog’
5. Publish the page

Editing Wordpress Options

1. Open your Wordpress administration
2. Click Settings
3. Click the sub-menu Reading
4. Change the radio button for Front page displays to ‘A static page’
5. Using the drop-down in Front page displays set the Front page to ‘Home page’ and Posts page to ‘Media releases’
6. Save changes

Creating a new ‘Home page’ theme template

This aspect requires an FTP client to connect, create and modify files on your web server. If you do not have access or privileges to create new .php files within your Wordpress site then contact your Site administrator.

1. Using your FTP client connect to your Wordpress web server
2. Navigate to your current Wordpress theme directory (eg. /public_html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/Kubrick/)
3. Create a new file called home.php
4. Edit home.php with your favourite plain text-editor
5. Create your template header by declaring the files template name, you can paste the snippet provided at the bottom of this page into home.php
6. Save changes

Updating the Home page page template

1. Open your Wordpress administration
2. Click Manage
3. Click the sub-menu Pages
4. Edit Home page
5. Set the page detail Page Template to ‘Home page’

That’s it! Visit the site again and you should see a blank page, you can now put whatever you like here by adding content to your page template called ‘Home page’ located in your theme directory as home.php. What other customisations do you deploy on commercial sites? Have some great ideas for the home page? Speak your mind in the comments below.

PHP snippet for home.php

<?php
/*
Template Name: Home page
*/
?>