Unblogging With WordPress

June 24th, 2008Blogging

Your WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like a blog. Many creative WordPress users make their installation look like a static site. I call this “unblogging.” Here’s how I did one at:

http://bizaddy.com

It’s easy to do with Wordpress 2.5’s new widgets and a few tricks in the control panel:

  • Change the front of the blog to a static page.
  • Use the posts widget to display plans (left sidebar.)
  • One post for each plan.
  • Set the posts shown in the widget to however many you want. In this case 5 plans, 5 posts.
  • Re-title the Pages and Posts widgets.
  • Write pages as you need them and use the pages widget to show them (left sidebar.)
  • Use the text widget to add the picture and sales message (right sidebar.)

Notice that I didn’t have to buy a special template or system. Everything needed is in the WordPress 2.5 control panel. As always, your comments are appreciated.

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4 Responses to “Unblogging With WordPress”

  1. Dulcita Love Says:
    July 2nd, 2008 at 5:49 pm

    Thanks Lowell! Short and sweet. Like the term unblogging. I’m sure I’ll be setting some of these static Wordpress sites up soon. Dulcita Love

  2. Stefaan Lesage Says:
    July 3rd, 2008 at 12:58 am

    Hi,

    I followed this link through Twitter, and I like the idea. It is indeed a great idea, and the result doesn’t look like a Blog anymore.

    Regards from Belgium,

    Stefaan

  3. Amy Flynn (Amy~AllAboutEnergy) Says:
    July 3rd, 2008 at 1:46 am

    Hi Lowell,

    I followed this from twitter too and love this idea. I sent you a LONG email from the other site. I currently do this with one of my sites on Typepad, the other is a blog with static pages.

    I “get” typepad, put have never easily gotten WP with it’s PHP interface!.

    Question - do the static WP pages have the same favored indexing in Google as the WP active blogs do? I know Google indexes all active blogs favorably and quickly.

    I also know that Matt has desinged WP to ping the search engines when blog updates are posted. How does all this work with a static page?

    You can add this reply to the other questions I submitted to you on the other site!

    Thank you so much!

    In Joy and Appreciation,

    Amy

  4. Lowell Rieger Says:
    July 3rd, 2008 at 7:40 am

    Amy -

    WP “pages” are not pinged when posted, to my understanding. However, internal linking on the site and external linking seems to take care of this problem, so i don’t worry about it.

    I use Ultimate Plugins’ Smart Update Pinger to manually ping the Bizaddy site every week or so. I also blog about it elsewhere, so the link love also gets the spiders in.

    If you google bizaddy.com, you’ll see the static page is listed first, as it should be. The static page has only been live a couple of weeks so they picked it up pretty quickly.

    Lowell

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