SMASHING: WordPress Themes: MAKING WORDPRESS BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER 7

A SEMI-STATIC THEME

THE EASE OF use that WordPress offers means that the platform is more often used as a traditional (yet modern) CMS. WordPress works perfectly well in this context, whether you intend to build a big newspaper site, or just a corporate or product site. The development team understands this. After all, the default tagline isn't "Just another WordPress blog" anymore, but "Just another WordPress site," which is closer to the truth in most cases. After all, blogs are often not really blogs as we tend to think of them, but Web sites with a bloggish format. Then again, wasn't that the case all along?

In this chapter, you use WordPress to build a simple, yet easily modifiable, semi-static Web site, which means that some of the content is meant to be somewhat static whereas other parts mimic the traditional news section. You can use this theme for a corporate site, a political campaign, or just about any project where your focus is on static content. If you like the format, you could also use it as a blog or news site, but that is not the focus.

So, let's get started!

WORDPRESS AND SEMI-STATIC WEB SITES

Before we begin, I want to clarify semi-static here. You'll be building a theme meant for (but not limited to) sites consisting mostly of Pages. These Pages could contain a corporate bio, contact information, a list of services, or something like that. When you update static content (Pages), you overwrite the old content and replace it with new information, or ...