7 replies to this topic

[hitechsol]

Hello There,

Some time ago, I had been increasingly dissatisfied with my WordPress blog site design. I wanted to have a better website design for all my static pages plus keep the WP blog as it had been for several years.

Not getting any clue what the solution to this dilemma could be, I created a design which I liked and created a separate website consisting of .php static pages. Then, I imported all my existing posts in a sub directory as blog. Now I have following issues/dilemmas to handle.


Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks and regards.

• Is it OK to create a website the way I did from SEO perspective?
• How to handle the canonical issues for this site? I used the following code in the .htaccess but miserably failed.

Thanks and regards

[jonbey]

Although this will not answer your question, I would spend the time making the Wordpress blog design better, rather than having two designs and essentially running two CMS's. That's what I did (I actually had about 5 wordpress installs at one point, don't ask!) and this helped wrt SEO, I think.

[hitechsol]

Thank you for the suggestion. I tend to agree with what you said. However, it is my guess the WordPress, despite all its beauty as a great CMS, does not provide full flexibility as to how the index and other pages will look like. Any definitive answer to this question out there?

Thanks again,

[hitechsol]

Sorry to bother you guys again,

I guess the above thread should be moved to SEO forum instead of web design forum so that I could get more comprehensive responses. Is there any way to do that?

[DonnaFontenot]

Your SEO won't be affected by the way you've done it, although it's probably easier to handle the SEO via WordPress, but in any case, you can deal with it just fine as is.

Now...there's absolutely no reason WP can't handle the design of your non-blog pages. In the early days of WP, sure, that might have been more true, but these days, nope. If you are doing some crazy fancy programming on your non-blog pages, then it may be easier the way you are doing it. But if we are only talking about design, then WP can handle pretty much anything you throw at it.

[hitechsol]

dazzlindonna,

Thank you sooo much. You have opened a whole new world to me.

jonbey,

Thank you as well for the nice suggestion.

[DonnaFontenot]

Just for others that might be wanting to consider this more, let's take a look at a typical example of a versatile wp theme. This particular one is one that I've used on one of my own sites. When you go view the demo, make sure you click around the menu to see the various page templates (portfolio, images, full width, etc), as well as the blog, so you can see just how versatile a theme can be. And this is only one of many many many ways wp can be designed in various ways for different parts of a site - pages and blog posts and ecommerce and on and on. Anyway, here's the one I'm using as an example, but there's tons more out there too - http://www.elegantth...theme=Chameleon

[jonbey]

I am no coder.

But, if you are essentially running static pages, you can, or should, be able to create custom page templates in Wordress that allow you to do your out-of-wordpress-stuff but within the wordpress theme, I think....

I have done some very simple stuff, like having a calculator script on the custom template, working in wordpress. Actually, my Google Custom Search page is the same.

But back to basics, a wordpress theme is just a bunch of html and css hacked together in a theme template. With a bit of work there is no reason to have 2 designs.