We're just wondering what you guys think is the best way to optimise an existing website for mobile use (preferably, though not necessarily exclusively without the use of plugins).
Making the site responsive would be very difficult as the completed site has thousands of lines of CSS etc that would need to be changed, not to mention the structure changes that would be necessary.
If we were to set up a new site (say at m.xxxxxx.co.uk or xxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/m) would it be better to start from scrath or import the existing stuff and edit it. Then that raises the question of databases etc.
Anyway just wanting some opinions on the best way to do it from any Wordpress experts out there?
Thanks,
Mike
Responsive design, or scaling elements of the site based on the available space. You are going to have to do the CSS all over anyway if you make a new site. Sounds like a good opportunity to clean up your styles.
Running two WordPress sites off of the same data presents a few issues that would be much more of a headache than the 'too much' CSS problem you have now.
Related
I had a website which was built using the CMS WebYep. Now I want to shift it to WordPress. Can anyone tell me how to do that?
Thanks is advance :)
Regards,
Ryan
I'm afraid there is no automatic process for most CMS.
You can either do it manually, or write a program (or hire somebody to write it) to help do the job.
In most cases the manual way is preferred. Different content management systems work quite differently, so there's usually not a universal way to set things up. Recognizing the differences and how to achieve a similar result is an easy thing to do for a human but a very hard thing to do for a computer. Plus, from my experience, with a relaunch usually comes a re-structuring. When you're moving to a new house, you might just get rid of that old broken sofa while you're at it, basically.
When you have a very large website with lots of similar content, a developer can certainly write scripts to aid in the process of moving your content over to WP. This will usually not be cheap, so it's not a smart idea for a site that consists of a dozen pages or where the content isn't very homogenous.
I'm looking for a light theme with beautiful design and html5 basis (to be a quick site) - Anyone have ideas?
I prefer free (or demo-free to test and buy it later if it's really a fast theme).
I was looking around for the html5 boilerplate template - however, it does not allow me to add plugins (not all) - for example, did not give me a visual editor - no sidebar, etc. Its too simple and i cant do almost anything on it - does not work. Any ideas, suggestions and more?
I am currently using the Divi theme, but it is very heavy, so the sites are slowed by 5-6 seconds minimum while they are loading. And that does not work for me.
Please help .
Thank you in advance!
I think you need to know your requirements first and should research on that google it for you and found this lists
Page caching will drastically improve load times, even on shared hosting.
But you could try one of Automattic's themes: https://wordpress.org/themes/author/automattic/. They're free and do not suffer from feature creep like premium themes tend to. I've great experiences with (rather heavily) modifying them by means of a child theme.
I hope this is not too basic to be off-topic, but I am wondering to what extent it is possible to customize WordPress to fit an existing design. I have a design in mind and read somewhere (WordPress manuals?) that it is possible to only manage a small part of a website with WordPress and then slowly migrate the whole site to be WordPress-managed. If one would like to preserve a certain design, is this preferred to tweaking WordPress templates? That is to say, should I start from a website and slowly move into WordPress, or should I start from the WordPress template, and try to tweak it until I arrive at the design I want. Are there any examples of WordPress sites, which fall into light-weight (but image heavy) websites, which exhibit freedom from the WordPress mold? (Is this too vague?)
Generally speaking, I think it makes more sense to start with WordPress from the start if that is what you intend to use at the end. It will be much easier to transition your site into being fully WordPress-managed after you have some small piece of it in WordPress. This is because, while a lot of the design will fit easily into the HTML WordPress with only minor tweaks, WordPress theming is kind of a specific subcategory of its own, and there will be less of a barrier to moving if your start with CSS that is compatible with WordPress.
WordPress also makes it easy to override individual page nodes, so the static portions of your site can be part of WordPress in a very loose sense, and you'll have full control over the markup. It is less to start writing your markup knowing what you've already had to do to get your design to work with WordPress than to transition to WordPress later.
If you are new to WordPress theming, here are some links to get you started:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
http://themeshaper.com/2009/06/22/wordpress-themes-templates-tutorial/
Your approach depends on the technical capabilities of you to setup two sites that live next to each other.
In general, you'll have to modify Wordpretss theme to fit your design. I prefer something of a skeleton theme - http://themehybrid.com/themes Skeleton/Hybrid one. The thing about this approach is that you'll have to build your design from ground up and fit it into Wordpress way of doing things. Wordpress likes to output HTML with additional CSS styles and it's usually much easier to use those elements then to modify them to fit yours.
My personal choice, I'd start using WordPress right away, learn as much as I can about the CMS aspects, you have great tutorials at WP101 (dot) com then move to create or built your own templates. I'd suggest you first start with a simple template like Twenty Ten and modify it then perhaps you can use Responsive which is my favorite or many others. This 2 sites for example were built in WP
http://www.philiphousenyc.com/ and
http://www.danielhopwood.com/
Good Luck,
Mike
I'm going to be moving my website to a CMS in the coming months I'd I need some help on choosing an appropriate CMS. Many of the websites I've seen tend to say "use Drupal, hands down". However, my website truly doesn't have a need for commenting or community features. Its pages will need to be modified occasionally, but not extensively. My website will also consist of many programs, each with their own sub-pages and menus.
There are probably 25 people that will need access to the content on my website and will need the ability to update it.
I do like the idea of being able to tag and categorize the content, and the modular aspect of Drupal but is it really right for my website? If not, which CMS may fit my needs better?
It sounds like Drupal would be an excellent solution to your company's needs. I used to recommend WordPress for smaller, single-blog type sites, but now, even for those, I recommend Drupal because you can start small and scale up as your needs grow. It has a very dedicated community and there is a module for just about any need you may have.
I would agree with Drupal. The thing about Drupal is that you start out very small and add on as you need things. There is a ton of documentation, it is well coded, always being expanded on, good forum support, and free. It's the easiest to install, most problem free, and most maintainable CMS system I've seen so far.
You can turn Drupal commenting off with the press of a button, and if/when you decide to add onto your website, perhaps you want an ad rotator, more extensive user permissions, etc, etc, it is all already developed for you and ready to go.
I am not sure if Wordpress supports multiple users on a site.
The smallest you can go for a CMS is something like 10kCMS or the more popular TinyMCE
If it is something small I will go with WordPress as it is easily themed and extensible. There are a lot of community plugins and support. Their documentation is also fairly simple as they don't have a thousand of functions and stuff you need to remember and understand. With some creativity the basic functionality of WordPress is sufficient to solve almost all problems that might arise in small to mid-size website.
I also like Drupal, but you may consider Umbraco as well. http://umbraco.org/ I'd use Umbraco over Drupal if your team is stronger in .Net than PHP. (Really, I think that's a larger concern - what are your organization's strengths? Play to suit them. You are making a decision that will pave the way for many developers besides yourself, and business decisions of your company.) Both are extendable and open source so you can write your own modules/components to customize. It may be cleaner to import into Drupal tables than Umbraco, since it goes down to xslt files. (EDIT: This looks to be no longer the case in the new version - http://umbracohosting.com/umbraco-4---get-excited/one-cms-any-database) From a front end dev perspective, both offer great control of the final output.
From working on legacy stuff a lot, you may end up hiring interns to do the gruntwork. There's bound to be tons of inline tables and all sorts of un-reusable code in there, it may be easier to scrape the content manually and start w/clean markup for the content portions.
For creating wordpress themes, people usually follow one of these two methods
Design Mockup in photoshop or similar tool and code the HTML & CSS from the scratch
Choose a base theme and design the mockup keeping the base theme in mind and code on the selected base theme.
Which is the better way of these (or anything other than these) on tackling the Wordpress theme creation?
It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I lean and develop using Option 1, with using option 2 as a way to glean ideas from.
The main reason is that the photoshop mock-up, no matter how close you ask the designer to follow a existing template, "usually" is different in some fashion, so that by the time you get into the middle of the theme you find that the existing template you could modify doesn't accomplish everything that the client is asking for (unless the client is a relative, in which case you could say too bad).
The other reason is call scope creep. Meaning that the original scope that was presented has now grown past your theme. You'll then have to ask yourself if you can dive into someone elses code and figure out what they were trying to do and then see if you can hack it up enough to fulfill you clients new requirements or if you're better of developing from scratch and then when scope creep comes up, you know right where to go/do in order to meet their requirements.
Anyways, something to think about.
It really depends on what your company/client requires. If they have specific requirements that cannot easily be met with a theme, you'll probably be better with option #1. If they are asking for a design submission, and are leaving the implementation/design up to you, go with option #2.
Some of the premium wordpress themes out there are quite good. Note that for either tool you'll be doing a mockup in Photoshop, so start with that and see what your company/client thinks.
You'd probably want to use an existing theme as a base for a new theme, or at least as a reference, for knowing which Wordpress Codex functions to call to retrieve data to use in your theme.
The HTML/CSS design is only half the solution - you still need to retrieve the data from WP to show.
Use Sandbox to start your theme with, it is free and it gives you many classes to do a lot of the design tricks you see is great wordpress themes.
http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/
Another great theme to start from would be Thesis:
http://diythemes.com/thesis/
I always start from a theme that allows me to do things easier in the long run.
I always start out with a Naked theme (like Starkers, by Elliot Jay Stocks), and otherwise build everything from scratch.
If you want to save time, or are not (and don't care to become) very familiar with Wordpress PHP logic, then I'd start with an existing theme.