Customizing themes, 6 things I can't find in any 1 theme

  • Resolved kathy@lasvegasinfocenter.com

    (@kathylasvegasinfocentercom)


    11 years, 7 months ago

    Hello, I hope someone in the blogasphere can help me! If you visit my existing website, http://www.lasvegasinfocenter.com
    which was created in; don’t laugh, MS Frontpage. (I know, I know, but even beehive hairstyles and bell bottom pants were once in fashion.) Okay, so that being said…I am trying to transfer, seamlessly to a wordpress platform. I downloaded wordpress on our server and have been learning how to use it. For website creation it seems straight forward enough, but limited. I experimented with dozens of themes. The temporary directory I set up on our server for wordpress is: http://lasvegasinfocenter.com/mw.lasvegasinfocenter.com/
    Warning though, I am constantly trying out new themes, so there is no telling what you will find. I only entered a minimal amount of content until I find the right theme. Most of the pages have titles only, with the exception of the home page and the strip hotels page.
    I need a theme that will allow:
    1. our banner at the top, full size
    2. we are willing to lose the buttons and go with drop-downs
    3. our slideshow on the homepage only
    4. all the text, pics and youtube video on the home page
    5. different background pics on every page
    6. most importantly, w3c compliant, seo optimized and some way to keep that updated and know it is correct as I create

    I added the seo widget by Yoast, which is extremely helpful. I know I call myself a webmaster, but I am more of a designer. I have a knowledge of html but it is limited…css, non-existant, php? fu-get-about-it! so a WYSIWYG type authoring program is essential. After attempting to verify our w3c compliant status, the report says the current site has many errors. Obsolete html, is only one of the problems. I fixed everything I knew how to fix,
    I added robot.txt files to each of our 4 sites, favicon files, custom 404 error pages, alt text on all the photos, and a long list of other fixes, but some of the errors sound like greek to me. I was hoping wordpress and a fresh start would solve the remaining errors, as I have no idea how to fix the obsolete html. Our budget is limited, so if anyone out there knows of a free or low cost theme that will do all these things please contact me: [email moderated – this forum does not provide support via email] THANK YOU SO MUCH I am now going to wade through a thousand more themes, but I have become very frustrated and discouraged. We would love to fashion the new design similar to: http://www.seemontery.com
    What we like about that site is the nice size font on the drop-down menus, easy to navigate, even thumbnails on the menu entries! Beautiful site.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • WPyogi

    (@wpyogi)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    You can do everything you mention with WP — though it will take some work and customization, likely using some plug-ins and custom templates. You will need to learn some coding (CSS in particular, but also probably some PHP in addition to HTML) to do the work yourself. Alternatively, you could hire someone to help you with it.

    Jobs can be posted here:
    http://jobs.wordpress.net/

    Plenty of the free, good quality themes on this page would be fine for your purposes — with modifications.

    If you find a commercial theme that you prefer, I’d recommend that you make sure that there is good support — as commercial (paid) themes are not generally supported here. Same goes for making sure that any theme you pick uses the GPL license.

    Do be aware that copying obsolete html or css code into WP is a bad idea — and will result in validation errors — so use caution in cutting and pasting code from your old site. Generally you can cut and paste text (not raw code if it has errors) — though be sure it’s not from MS Word or other formatted text program.

    The Monterey site you linked to is not WP — but there is nothing there that you could not do in WP (or at least close to it).

    Thread Starter kathy@lasvegasinfocenter.com

    (@kathylasvegasinfocentercom)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Ohhhhhh Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! “Pagelines” seems to have everything I need. I might try “Responsive” as well. It seems Pagelines has a “lite” version for free and the full version for $97.

    I didn’t know about the dangers of copying obsolete code to WP…I was hoping it would magically strip out the bad stuff and leave in the good stuff….ahhh maybe in a perfect world. (before I read your post) I tried copy/pasting code from the home page to the WP home page, I see what you mean, I think I made the Yoast SEO widget have a nervous breakdown! LOL. There is a weird gray line on the left side of the page next to each text entry. (this is now in Pagelines) http://lasvegasinfocenter.com/mw.lasvegasinfocenter.com/
    Other than that it seemed to look okay…but I will be more cautious in the future.

    Of course I had to edit each title on the home page…they started out as wordart in word, I liked the look, but they wouldn’t show up in FrontPage or WP, so I did a screenshot of each one, and saved them as .png in paint. The Bellagio video was the only simple transfer as it is a youtube embed code.

    I have tried pasting text into notepad first, then from there to WP…sort of works. Then removing the formatting in WP and re-tagging it as ‘paragraph’ I hate the idea of re-typing everything, but whatever it takes. It’s only 50 pages or so…

    I can’t thank you enough, so thank you again, you most likely saved me hours of trial and error work and gave me new hope.

    Warm regards,
    Kathy

    WPyogi

    (@wpyogi)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Glad my post was helpful. From what I know, Pagelines and Responsive are both great themes with excellent support. Yeah, all the cutting and pasting is tedious, but doing it right now will save you much aggravation down the road (or immediately when you have errors or bad behavior on the site…) Like a lot of things in life, shortcuts aren’t always the way to go in the long run :).

    Good luck with the project — and if you run into problems, just ask for help (here or on the dedicated theme forums) — though if you post here, you’ll get faster responses on the “How To and Troubleshooting” or “Themes” forums — as the one you posted this to initially is really for “feedback and requests” ABOUT WP itself — looks like a moderator moved this one. Not a big deal, but just FYI.

    Thread Starter kathy@lasvegasinfocenter.com

    (@kathylasvegasinfocentercom)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    I did figure out how to remove the big gray line next to the paragraphs, I removed the ‘blockquote’ tags and viola! no more unwanted gray lines… so thank you again for all your help. Back to work.
    Warm regards,
    Kathy

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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