16 Free Responsive WordPress Themes for 2013

More and more WordPress themes are going responsive with fluid page layouts that work across a range of devices. Here are some of the best free ones currently available:

1. Panoramica

This is one of my favourite free options at present with some nice basic customisations and the option to go full screen. From CPO Themes.

‘Panoramica is built with the intent of adapting to as many window sizes as possible. It has a fully fluid layout that gives it tremendous flexibility, allowing you to cater to both large and small screens alike. Its polished portfolio heavily emphasizes the use of images, displaying a clean slideshow in every portfolio item. And of course, you can customize its appearance through its extensive options panel’.

2. Pytheas

Pytheas is another good free option with enough basic customisations available to help create a decent site. From WP Explorer, who have a number of good free themes available on their site.

3. Classica

Classica, from DX Themes, is another clean and elegant solution for portfolio based sites.

‘Classica is powerful and professional WordPress theme based on TurboFrameworks 3 page composer’.

4. Suffusion

Suffusion, by Sanyontan Sinha, describes itself as  the best, most versatile and totally free WordPress Theme’ and has been a popular free choice for a while. It is now responsive. Packed with a remarkable range of options and features, it’s a solid theme that is almost too good to be free, but free it is! There is not a good theme preview available so I’ve used one of my own sites instead..

‘An elegant, responsive and versatile theme with a power-packed set of options and semantic HTML5-based markup. It supports Mega-Menus, custom layout templates, advanced support for custom post types, customizable drop-down menus, featured sliders, tabbed sidebars, a magazine layout and lots of enhanced widgets for Twitter, Flickr, Google etc. It has 19 widget areas, one-column, two-column and three-column responsive, fixed-width and flexible-width layouts, 9 pre-defined templates and 19 pre-defined color schemes. Responsive capabilities are switched on by a single click’.

5. Photo

Photo is another of WP Explorer’s free themes and another good free option.

‘Photo is a responsive gallery and photography WordPress theme. This is a simple theme perfect for photography, web designs, graphic art, or any other collection of projects that you’d like to share with the world. The sleek and clean layout brings visitor’s attention to your work, and the bold header emphasizes your logo or brand. All in all, this theme is a great option for a personal or professional portfolio’.

6. Skeleton

Skeleton is a very simple theme form Simple Themes, and none the worse for that!

‘Skeleton is a WordPress theme aimed at helping you build simple, uncluttered, useable, and mobile-friendly WordPress sites’.

7. Tetris

Tetris is another good WP Explorer free theme but with a Tumblr feel below the home page slider.

‘Tetris is a responsive Tumblog style WordPress theme created by AJ Clarke from WPExplorer.com. The theme features a masonry style homepage and archive pages to showcase your posts in a modern fashion and makes use of WordPress post formats so sharing different media types is extremely easy. Included are standard, gallery, audio, video, link and image post formats so whether you are a photographer or a video producer the theme will cater to your needs’.

8. Simple Grid

Simple Grid by Dessign offers a grid like design.

‘Simple Grid Theme Responsive is a WordPress Theme with mobile and tablet responsive design. Grid like design Theme is perfect for any creative agency to showcase their portfolio. Inspired by the works of El-Studio creative graphic design studio’.

9.iMag Mag

iMag Mag is a clean magazine type theme from Theme Pacific.

‘iMag Mag is a Premium WordPress News Magazine Theme for free.It is Fully Responsive WordPress Theme. It Includes much more options and highly customizable. It is Magazine Style Responsive layout with unlimited sections. You can create many sections by adding magazine homepage widget’.

10. Mixfolio

Mixfolio, by Graph Paper Press, is another portfolio theme but grid based

‘Mixfolio is a responsive HTML5 portfolio theme … Use it to build your portfolio or your online brand. Create image, gallery, video or standard posts using Mixfolio’s post format feature’

11. Zenith

Zenith is an attractive theme by DevPress.

‘A responsive theme designed for blogs and magazines that aren’t about fluff. Zenith has multiple layout options, custom menus, integrated Gravity Form styles, and custom page templates’.

12. Clean Retina

Clean Retina by Theme Horse is another clean theme, also available with more features in a paid-for Pro version.

‘Clean Retina is a Simple, Clean and Beautiful Free Responsive Retina Ready WordPress Theme’.

13. Auto Focus

Auto Focus is a clean grid based portfolio theme with good portfolio pages by Vandelay Design.

‘Auto Focus is a free WordPress theme created with photographers in mind. It uses a responsive layout and includes a variety of features that make it a great choice for photographers who need an attractive and effective web presence’.

14. Lensa

A lovely full screen responsive theme for photographers from Themeshaker.

‘Lensa is a free WordPress theme for photographer websites, model resumes, designers and other creatives who wish to present their photographs in the most effective manner. It gives you all the tools you need to build an impressive online photo gallery. There are 5 gallery templates to choose from, specially made for different photo sources, such as Instagram, Flickr, uploads, Pinterest or Picasa’.

15. Appollo

Appollo is a free responsive theme from the just launched Authentic Themes for good options for custom designed blogs.

‘Apollo is a minimal Free WordPress Theme created with bloggers in mind. The 2 column grid layout for your archives is great for showcasing all sorts of content’.

16. Book Lite

Inspired by old classic novels, Book Lite is a one column theme from WPshoppe.

‘One column classic book style blog theme. Fully responsive, large fonts and very easy to read. Clean and Minimalist design with focus entirely on content — Content First’.

 

Booking Systems for Small UK Hotel Websites

One important factor highlighted in my last article, Web Design for Small Hotels, is the basic functionality or ease of use for customers checking availability and booking a room. This article takes a deeper look at the options out there for small hotel owners, and is drawn from investigating the systems in use amongst Brighton hotels. I did a little  investigation and had a look at what systems and software they were using (where it was possible to tell), but firstly, let’s consider a few key factors to a successful system:

Ease of Making bookings

This is the most fundamental consideration. For the customer, it’s essential that there is a smooth booking process without irritations. Most systems use a grid based system to enable customers to view availability and make bookings. Most also provide a basic booking widget to put on your own website to enable customers to check dates and availability.

Ease of Managing Bookings and Channel Management

Firstly, you will want to know that it is easy to manage bookings made through your own website, but the best systems and software offer easy integration with other booking websites (channels) such as booking.com, Laterooms, Expedia etc, so you do not need to keep updating endless websites. You will have to decide how important it is for you to be on how many of these sites. A good system will automatically update the information across a number of sites saving a lot of work and potential confusion over bookings. This usually costs extra. Not every channel is covered by every system so check to see which
ones are included. For example, many are not integrated with the booking systems of local tourist information sites.

Price and Commission Costs

Prices are charged on a variety of basis. Some charge an upfront fee, some a monthly fee and some charge a commission per booking and some do not. It’s important to look closely and work out what is best for you.

As previously mentioned, a great benefit of using these  booking systems  is the capability to update your booking pages and information across a number of booking websites, but pricing varies for this service. A major consideration therefore will be how many of these other booking websites are linked in to the system you choose and what you pay for this.

Other Features

There may be other features that are important to you such as multiple language capabilities.

What Systems and Software are available?

There are a wide range of options out there and even within Brighton and Hove, there are a wide variety of systems being used. By far the most popular system in use with hotels in Brighton and Hove though is Eviio. It is being used by at least a dozen hotels including traditional guest houses and boutique hotels alike.

Eviivo
(
http://www.eviivo.com/
)

Eviivo serves over 5000 businesses across the UK offering a total of 50,000 rooms a night and since starting out in 2005 has grown rapidly. It seems to be the default choice for hotels and is very comprehensive. The booking pages are almost a website in themselves. Its charges are reasonable if you are seeking a system with channel management. There’s a set up fee of £95 plus VAT for hotels with 9 rooms or under, and up to £250 plus VAT for 20 rooms upwards, and then there’s an additional 6% service fee per booking from your own website, and a higher one for other channels). For this though you get good quality booking webpages available in 12 languages which can be easily integrated into your website.

These pages are also linked into their partner distribution websites which include most of the main booking site players such as Laterooms, Expedia , Hotels.com and Visit Britain (though booking.com seems to be conspicuously absent), meaning both web pages and bookings are updated simultaneously.

To compare to other systems, you will probably need to work out how much that service charge will come to each month, as this comment on the Visit Britain Accommodation Know How Marketing and Booking Forum makes clear:

‘I think that Eviivo Frontdesk has been the gold standard for guest house booking systems up to now. If you have little IT skills, you can just open the box and it will set you up with PMS (property management system) online booking and channel management. I would recommend it to anyone starting up a guest house as the easiest way to get going online. But Frontdesk does have its faults, it is expensive typically costing £500 a year per room, it sells your rooms to channels but it sells all your rooms this way even in high season (a hotel would never do this) and its pricing model is very discount orientated’.

On the other hand, another user commented:

‘If you really are convinced that the local TIC and your own website cannot generate sufficient business and you really do want to be out in the internet. Then do look at Eviivo. They provide a first rate booking system for smaller users which is easy to use and has great reach into all sorts of useful channels at pretty low cost. For instance to sign up with lastminute.com for me is 20% commission but through Eviivo it is only around 12%. But all these bells and whistles do cost you 6% on all bookings taken through your own site plus commission on sales through other sites. But Eviivo does get the business for you and they have around 4,000 B&Bs on their books’.

(all comments in this article are from the same forum)

The Booking Button
(www.thebookingbutton.com/)

Provided by Australian company, Siteminder, The Booking Button, with multi language capability, is probably the next most popular system and is in use by a number of the more boutique type of hotels. It charges a monthly fee but takes no commissions, and integrates into your website to enable you to take online bookings. It has easy customisation features to help it blend in with your own site, which may explain its popularity with boutique hotels, where image and style has increased emphasis. This basic services costs £19 plus VAT a month for 1-20 rooms, and £49 for 21-50 rooms. To integrate your bookings across all the main booking sites, however, you will also need Channel Manager. This looks to be extremely comprehensive but ups the price substantially – to £59 per month plus VAT for 1-20 rooms and £109 for 21-50. If you are small and can get enough visits to your own site, the Booking Button may provide a good option. Its booking pages are clean and clear.

Guestlink
(
http://www.guestlink.co.uk
)

Guestlink is another popular option, and is being used by several hotels. There are options to integrate with many other sites so again there is only the need for a single update. There are a variety of packages available but its Starter ‘pay-as-you-go’ package charges just 2.5% on bookings through your own site. This rises to 5% through iKnow and 10% through your local TIC, both of which are Guestlink powered. Indeed, Guestlink is very strong for its links with tourism sites so if this is important to you, this may be a factor. For the major channels, such as booking.com and Expedia, it’s 3% on top of their own charges. If you want to just stick with bookings through your own site, there’s also an option to pay £195 plus VAT a year.

‘I have used GuestLink now for some 10 years or so – for my sins I beta-tested the original system. Would not be without it – I do not use the invoice/email/confirmation systems involved, since I prefer to use my own formats, but as far as diary/bookings and getting my availability on the web via regional TB’s and VisitBritain nothing beats it!’

The Guestlink booking page is quite basic but very clear.

Easy Bookings
(
http://easy-bookings.co.uk/
)

Several hotels are using Easy Bookings, which is immediately let down by having a slightly outdated website itself. It’s a smaller set up though and its prices are competitive. There are no commission charges, just a monthly fee. For small hotels of 1-5 rooms, it’s a modest £12.50 a month or for 6-10 rooms, it’s £17.50. This rises to £37 for 21-40 rooms. It’s slightly cheaper to pay annually. For channel integration, it’s an extra £10 a month, but there’s very little information on their website so it’s not clear what this gets you. The booking system is basic and not very attractive so overall not a convincing choice.

MyUK.travel
(
http://www.myuk.travel/
)

In use by a couple of hotels, MyUKTravel’s pricing is comparable to Easy Bookings, and based on number of rooms, and charged annually or six-monthly. For a hotel with 5 rooms its £129 a year, for 10 £199 and for 40, it’s £499. There are no commission fees. Channel management (which looks fairly comprehensive) is only available as part of their wider Property Management System (PMS) which for 5 rooms works out at £428 a year including the booking engine, £598 for 10 rooms and £1,198 for 40.

‘We have a 6 room B&B that we opened in August 2008. We were unsure how the business was going to take off and were persuaded to contract for the Eviivo online booking/PMS system by the local Tourist Board. Within a few months we found we were paying commissions of over £500 per month to Eviivo and were not, in fact, receiving the balance of deposits until the guests’ stay was completed ….. we cancelled the contract with Eviivo and re-contracted for a very similar service with MyUKTravel. They operate on a NO COMMISSION, very reasonable flat rate fee basis and offer very good support. We have been with MyUKTravel for over 2 years now and can highly recommend their service’

Q-Book
(
http://www.queensboroughgroup.co.uk/
)

Q-book from the UK based Queensborough Group provide a commission free online booking system with free channel management. It links into major channels such as booking.com and Expedia as well as TripAdvisor. It also integrates with Guestlink powered UK tourist sites such as visitsussex.com and visitscotland.com. There are some channels missing such as hotels.com and laterooms.com but the price is only £149 a year plus VAT which does not seem too bad, especially for larger hotels. The initial booking interface is not too attractive but improves at the individual rooms stage.

Keep Me Booked
(
http://www.keepmebooked.com/

Relative newcomer, Keep Me Booked provides some nice interfaces and widgets with a contemporary feel so might appeal to those focussing more on style. Consequently, it is similarly priced to the Booking Button at £19 per month for a 1-5 rooms hotel which rises to £32 if channel management is required (provided by SiteMinder who also provide this comprehensive option for the Booking Button too). For 6-10 rooms its £25 and £38 respectively. They have also developed a booking plug-in for WordPress.

A few other providers

US based Beds24.com offers good value with a slightly unconventional pricing approach. For example, the booking engine for a 10 room hotel would be less than £5 a month, with prices from $1 per room extra for their channel synchronizer which integrates with most of the major international channels.

Freetobook is another potential option providing, as the name suggests, a free booking engine with no commission and no costs. It looks pretty good. The reason they offer a free engine is to make money from their extras but these are still good value. The main one of interest is of course the Channel Manager. This has a set up fee of £49 plus VAT, and then £1 per booking with a monthly maximum of £49, but is limited to booking.com, and laterooms.com.

There are plenty of other systems out there including Infotel, Staah, Seekom, AngelFish, and full PMS systems with booking engines such as Elina (with a nice booking function) and Guestline.

The Best System?

The system you choose will depend on your requirements. Can you sell your rooms via a good booking engine on your own site or do you need to sell through other channels? Are you best going for a commission-based system or a monthly/annual payment one? And what systems do you best like the look and feel of? With most people now looking to find and book a hotel online, every hotel owner will need to decide.

I’d be interested to hear from any users of these systems and what your thoughts are on how good they are.

Web Design for Small Hotels

Living in a popular seaside town/city by the sea, I was curious to have a look at the websites of some of the small to medium hotels, B&B’s and guest houses of Brighton and Hove to see what they were like. It’s a mixed bunch, some that were never good, some that are dating badly, many that are moderate and a few that are quite contemporary and stylish (typically belonging to boutique hotels).

An attractive well-designed website with compelling content is essential for hotels these days. More and more customers expect to be able to book their hotel accommodation online and it’s a must that your website meets the expectations of your customers. The majority of guests will judge your hotel on their first impressions of your website, discovered through search engines. This is great if your hotel has a good website but not so great if your website is outdated or poorly designed.

This article focuses on hotels in Brighton, on the south coast of England, a popular, historic and bustling seaside town with plenty of attractions, good nightlife, and a wide range of restaurants. The South Downs National Park, an area of whale-backed hills, is on its doorstep. People come to the town for weekend breaks or a few nights away, conferences, stag and hen do’s, business, and it’s a big winner with the pink pound. There are a lot of hotels in the town, ranging from the basic to the boutique. Whilst many of the latter have put considerable effort to develop attractive elegant websites, many hotels
have outdated or poorly designed sites and seem to overlook the importance of their website. Of course, not every hotel will want a boutique look – the website must attract your target customers – but it’s important that every hotel has a good look and feel that will entice bookings.

The Marina House Hotel and George IV Guesthouse offer two of the better designed websites, but in general, the quality of sites is low.

What makes a successful hotel website?

Good content

The content of your site should be a balance between attractive imagery and concise descriptive content. This applies throughout your site, but most importantly, make sure your homepage lives up to this. Information about the hotel should be succinct and relevant, and should highlight what makes your hotel special. Start by describing its location, the convenience of the location and what nearby attractions there are. Bear in mind that most people will not want to read too much but will want to know the essentials with options to delve deeper.

Good use of Photos

A picture paints a thousand words and first impressions count. Hotels are at an advantage over many businesses because there is much more photographic potential in showing off a hotel and its location than there is in a firm of lawyers or accountants. There’s lots of potential – front page slideshows, galleries and background image or graphics – can all be used to good effect, with options for photos of hotel facades, rooms, grounds, facilities and the local area. Photos should be professional and optimised for the web to load quickly.

Two hotels,  A Room with a View and Sea Breeze –  go for a Brighton based look and feel utilising bright seaside images.

Look and Feel

Your website’s look and feel should fit in with the image and style of your hotel. Colour schemes, graphics, font and font sizes matter. A boutique hotel may be looking for a very stylish look, modern and polished whereas a more regular hotel, make go for a simpler classic look.

The Regency Hotel and the Blanch Hotel go for a stylish look using contemporary dark colours.

Ease of use

Navigation should be clear and simple. Getting around the website should be intuitive so visitors can find the information they need easily, check location, contact details, availability and make smooth bookings. Pages and photos should load quickly.

Simple and effective booking engine

A good booking engine which integrates well, in terms of functionality and look, into your website is essential. Irritated customers often do not stick around if the booking process proves to be anything other than straightforward. In terms of look, can it be customised to match the look and feel of your site? There are many options out there to help achieve this such as Eviivo, The Booking Button and Guestlink. In my next post, I look in greater detail at booking systems and software.

The site works across devices

Does the website look good and function well on an ipad, a mobile and a Kindle as well as a desktop PC or laptop? A website that does is known as a responsive website. This is becoming more and more important as people access the internet on an ever-changing variety of devices but still expect good functionality and a good look. Many sites look too small on today’s wide PC or laptop screens but do not work well on smaller screens either.

Social Media

Promoting the hotel through Twitter and Facebook and integrating social media into your site can be an effective way to promote and attract reservations, but only if you devote proper time to it. A minimum is to have a Facebook Like button! A reviews facility either via Trip Advisor, another channel or on your own site is increasingly expected by customers, whilst a blog will enable you to provide regular updates on what’s happening at your hotel or in the area.

Conclusions

Overall, you’ll need to find the right balance between written content, images, style and functionality that suits your hotel and its customers. In a competitive market place, having a well-designed and easy to use website can really boost bookings and help you stand out from the crowd.

WordPress Plugin for a Radio Station.

I’ve been working on a few sites of late that have needed some more specific or niche plugins. One such site was for a Christian radio station that wanted a plugin for its schedule and to show who’s on air. After looking around the net, and finding quite a few others that were struggling to find good plugins for this, I found a good plugin called Weekly Schedule and complemented that with another called DJ On-Air Widget which provides a widget to display the current DJ and show on air. The drawback was that I had to enter the schedule in twice, once for each plugin.

But then I found a plugin that does both, called not surprisingly, Radio Station. It’s pretty neat though it need need a bit of customising to get the right look and feel. Radio Station provides a grid layout for the weekly schedule and displays the current on air show as well as upcoming shows. Each show also has its own page linked to the schedule and you can also create playlists.

Radio Station does the job and is relatively new to WordPress, having being developed first for Drupal. To see the plugin in action go to Cloud 9 Radio, which launched earlier this week.

Most Useful WordPress Plugins 2013

Plugins can do all sort of things to help improve your site and although there are thousands of plugins to choose from, try not to over-do it. It’s probably best not to use much more than ten. Too many may slow your site down. Those listed below are some of the key current ones.

• WordPress SEO by Yoast and All in One SEO Pack

Two good SEO plug-ins which help search engines find your site and rank it more highly. Yoast offers  great SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more. Use this or All in One SEO Pack but not both!

For more information on getting started with the All in One with this plug-in, see this good introductory article: 
http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/users-guide-for-all-in-one-seo-pack/

• AddThis Share, AddThis Follow, and AddThis Social Sign-in

AddThis provide several of the  many social plugins out there and provides a number of social media options, ranging from their original social sharing plug-in which helps you add social media sharing buttons to posts and pages; to the follow me plugin offering follow buttons and links to your social media sites; and to the more recent, social sign-in plugin allowing users to log in to a site using Facebook, Google or Twitter rather than having to create yet another password and account:

• TinyMCE Advanced

Substantially improves the standard WordPress editor.

• WooCommerce and WP eCommerce

If you want to add ecommerce to your site, then the two leading options are WooCommerce from WooThemes and WP eCommerce:

• Akismet 

Make sure you activate Akismet, included with your installation,  and get the ‘key’ to protect your site from spam. It really does reduce the amount of spammy comments getting through to your site. To get your key, go to 
http://akismet.com/wordpress/

• BackWPup and BackUpWordPress

BackWPup has been a consistent performer for backing up WordPress sites for some time but is currently not well reviewed following recent changes – check reviews first. It may be suffering temporary hiccups and return to form soon. BackUpWordPress has strong reviews so may be the better options at this time.

• Google XML Sitemaps

This makes it easier for search engines to crawl your content, which can be vital to your site’s success.

• Facebook

Essential Plugin if you have an active Facebook page and want to integrate it into your website. Could be more straightforward to set up though.

• Fast Secure Contact Form and Contact 7 Form

Not much to choose between these two – both offer easy ways to create a contact form on your site

• BuddyPress

Create your own social network for your company, school, team or local organisation with this ‘social network in a box’.

• Maintenance Mode

Updating your site? Adds a customisable ‘splash’ page to your site letting visitors know it is down for maintenance. Useful if you are making big changes, though it seems it is no longer being updated.

• W3 Total Cache and W3 Super Cache

If your site is loading slowly, these plug ins speed it up – good for your visitors and popular with Google too. Check the reviews and pick one.

• NextGen Gallery

With over 6 million downloads, this will help you make the most of your images including options for slideshows, galleries and much more. Depending on your requirements, it’s becoming less necessary as WordPress improves its own gallery features over time.

• Disqus

For a fully fledged and secure discussion board and web comments manager, Disqus is the market leader across all websites, and replaces the standard
WordPress comments system.

• JetPack

JetPack claims to supercharge your WordPress site. An impressive bundle of assorted plugins, it  provides you with extra stats for your site, social sharing buttons, automatic posting to your social media accounts, contact forms, a carousel for your images and much more. With this plugin you are unlikely to need as many of the above! Not everyone likes it – overbloated say some, slows your site down say others. You need to register with WordPress.Com to use it.

Quick Guide to Using WordPress

This is a quick guide to using WordPress after it has been installed. It has tried to focus on the essentials so there’s much more to WordPress than in this guide, but we hope it will help you to get to know the basics.

The Dashboard

WordPress has an administration area known as a dashboard. This is the page you go to when you log in and it is where you control most of your site’s features and content. When you first log in to your site, you will see a big blue box suggesting you customise your site with various other suggestions to get started.

Before doing this it is perhaps worth familiarising yourself a bit more with how WordPress works. On the left hand side, there is a menu with various items. This menu comprises of the main features and controls of WordPress. Click on each item for a full menu for that item or hover over each item to get the main options for that item such as ‘add new’.

You also have various options running along the top of the page including comment and update notifications, and a quick facility to add new content. On the top right hand side, you can change what is displayed on your page by clicking on Screen Options (each administration page has its ownscreen options to modify what is displayed). On the top left side, if you hover over the site name, the option to click on Visit Site appears. This is useful to keep track of your changes, and if you open this in a new tab, you can see the changes you make by refreshing the page after each change.

Posts

This is where you add your blog posts. WordPress began as a blogging platform and posts still feature prominently on the site. To create a new blog post, simply click on ‘Add New’. You are then taken to a text editor where you can add a title, text, photos and other media. You can group posts together by choosing a category for each one.

To add a photo or other media into a post (or a page), click on ‘insert media’, and upload a photo or choose a photo from your media library (see below).
Once uploaded, insert into the page – you can align it to the right, centre or left, and there are size options too. The positioning of photos does not always look as it will on the screen in the editor – to double check, you can view your live site at any time by hovering on the name of your site on the top left hand side and then clicking ‘view site’.

Once you have finished your entry, click on preview, save draft or publish if you are ready.

Pages

This is where you create your site’s pages. Click on ‘Add New’ and you are taken to the editor, just like in posts. Pages can have parent pages so a page of Windsor Castle might have a parent page ‘Castles’ and you can reflect this in the menu settings (see below) – you can set this under page attributes on the right hand side.

The front page of the site is set as the blog by default but you can change this. Create a page and then on the right hand side, look for Page Attributes, and choose ‘blog’. Each new blog entry is then automatically added to that page. You also need to go to settings, then ‘reading’ where you can choose which content will appear on your front page and which page is for your posts (blog).

Appearance – themes, widgets, menus

Depending on your theme, you will have a number of options to help you modify and customise your site’s appearance.

• Theme
  Your site’s appearance is largely controlled by your choice of theme. You can customise and modify themes to achieve a better look and feel, and you
  can change themes. WordPress comes with two default themes, currently Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve. These are quite good but many people are using
  them. You can find a new theme on the web or search from the themes menu page. Once you have found a theme, you download it as a zip file but there is
  no need to unzip it yourself. From the Theme menu in WordPress, choose install theme, upload it and then preview and/or activate it. If you do change a
  theme, and then want to go back to your original theme, bear in mind that you may lose any changes you have made to the theme’s appearance including
  backgrounds, colour changes, widgets (see below) and headers for example. It’s therefore best to preview a new theme before activating it. You can
  manage, search and install new themes from the themes menu.
• Widgets
  Most themes come with a number of widgets (small apps) that you can display in certain locations according to the theme (e.g. the sidebar). This
  usually includes items such as recent posts and a search box but might also include a Follow Me or Flickr widgets. To use a widget, you simply drag it
  from ‘available widgets’ to the desired location on the right hand side.
• Menus
  Your menu options depend on your theme, but you can configure which pages or categories appear on the main menu, and other menus if available, and
  adjust the order. On the left hand side, click on the post, category of page you want, then on ‘add to menu’. Once added to the menu, you can drag it
  to the menu position you want. Most themes allow for sub-menu items under a main menu item – simply drag an item to the space below a main menu item
  where it will then be indented a little.

• Header, background and theme options
  Provide various ways to customise the look of your site e.g. by changing the background colour, the layout or uploading an image to use as the
  background. Again, the choices available will depend on the theme.
• Editor
  This enables further customisation but is best left to people who understand code!

Media

This is your media manager where you can view your media files or upload files ready to insert into posts, pages or galleries.

Plug-ins

WordPress has a huge range of plug-ins to increase your site’s functionality or features. Make sure you have the Tiny MCE Advanced plug-in installed and
activated – a much better editor than the standard one. Other good plug-ins include the essential Akismet which blocks spammy comments on your
blog (ensure you get your ‘key’ to activate it), the All In One SEO plug-in to help optimise your site for search engines, back up tool BackWPup and social media plug-ins such as AddThis.

The easiest way to search and install a plug-in is from the plugins menu. Click on Add New and search the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Comments

This provides various options to manage and moderate comments on your posts and pages.

Users

You can add users to the site with varying rights, roles and capabilities – Administrator, contributor, subscriber, editor or author.

(see
http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
).

Settings

There are a large number of options under settings and you can change various things such as what appears on your front page and how many blog posts are displayed though many of these you won’t necessarily need to touch. Settings for plug-ins also appear here including the All in One SEO Pack and TinyMCE Advanced and you may want to tweak these.

It’s a good idea to change the settings for permalinks – this is how your site’s url (internet) addresses will be displayed for each page or post as soon as you start your site. The WordPress default settings are not very friendly. It is probably best to change to ‘day and name’ or ‘month and name’ if your website is heavily blog based or ‘post name’ if it is more of a static website.

Other Features

Some themes come with extra options such as:

• Portfolio - some themes include a portfolio. To create a portfolio page, you first need to add a new page in the pages menu, and set the template to portfolio. Once the page has been created, to upload a photo, go to Portfolio, and select ‘add new’ and then select ‘Set featured Image’. This takes you to the media manager where you can choose an image to add or upload to the portfolio. As with other posts, portfolio items can be placed into categories. You can also add text in the text editor to describe the photo. If some of your photos do not display, you may need to go to settings, permalinks and then just click on save changes – this resets your site’s internal links.
• Home Slides - for use on a photo slideshow. This option helps you add photos for the slider – bear in mind most sliders work best with photos cropped to an optimum
  scale for that slider. Adding a slide is the same as adding a portfolio post but you also have the option to link at an external photo hosted on
  another site.
• Highlights - small snippets to highlight content that you can place on the front page. This option allows you to add and edit your highlights.

Updates and back-ups

WordPress is updated fairly regularly, and so are its plug-ins and themes. This usually increases security or fixes a bug, but be aware that updating WordPress and its plug-ins can have an impact on your site and so it’s a good idea to back your site up regularly. In particular, you may lose any customisations you have made, and  some plug-ins can cause problems if they are not compatible with the latest version of WordPress. WordPress will notify you on your dashboard or plugins page when you have updates available, and normally, it is just a matter of clicking on update to do so. Note that if you’re with 1&1 hosting and you installed WordPress via the one-click application, you will not be able to upgrade WordPress automatically, only manually.

See also: 
http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress

Theme Providers

There are many readymade WordPress themes out there for many purposes – for hotels, artists, estate agents, bands, newspapers – anything really. Good premium themes come at a price (from $40ish or you can sometimes subscribe to access a number) but there are some good free themes available too. If you install a free theme, make sure it’s from a reputable source as free themes often contain malicious code.

For good theme providers, check out:

Theme Forest – leading and established theme provider

Elegant Themes – clean and, indeed, elegant themes

Woothemes – good range of free and premium themes

Wp-Explorer – good range of free and premium themes

Suffusion – highly rated premium-like free responsive theme with ‘power-packed’ set of options

MintThemes – impressive range of niche themes though not the cheapest

Moving WordPress from localhost to server

Having recently uploaded a Joomla site from localhost to a server without any problems, I was surprised that to do the same for WordPress was not quite as straightforward. It seems that many people struggle with this. The most common approach seems to be to use ‘search and replace’ in a text editor to change the site’s urls in its database before uploading. Once this is done, you export the site’s database from localhost and import it into the new server (you will need to create a new database on your server first). You also copy the sites content over to your server and change the wp-config.php file to match the new settings.  A good description of this method is provided at Code my Own Road and also by Jason Bobich. Jason, however, provided an update last August pointing out that you might get ‘varied results’ using this approach and suggests an extra step (uploading a temporary php file) to overcome this.

This no doubt does work for some but judging from the cries for help on the net, not for all. I tried it but many links still pointed to my localhost, so I looked for another method, and found one at Ostraining.com, who always seem to give clear explanations. They recommend beginning by changing the site’s url in the WordPress admin settings. You still need to export and import the database, transfer the content and change the wp-config.php file, but there is no need to risk the use of search and replace in a text editor.

I still had to tidy up a few links but this method was quick and worked well. Whatever method you choose, make sure you back up and able to get your site working again on your localhost if things go awry.

The site by the way was for Lord Ian Strathcarron, an interesting fellow – travel writer, publisher, mediator and counsellor – www.ianstrathcarron.com, whilst the Joomla site I mentioned, is a lovely site for AliKats Mountain Holidays in France. Book your holidays now.