How to customise your Word Press blog

‘Static’ home page
With blogging you want your most recent posts displayed on the home page, as Word Press does. But what if you want a more conventional looking home page that doesn’t carry posts? One way to do this is to produce your home page using something other than Word Press, install Word Press in a sub-directory, for example /blog, and link to it from the home page.

Alternatively, you can easily set up Word Press to display one of your pages as the home page and define another page as your ‘blog’ page, displaying all your latest posts. This has the advantage of saving you the effort of designing your own home page, plus it will be consistent with your other pages in Word Press and be able to hold widgets and other content.

To do this, select ‘Reading’ from the Settings panel and opposite ‘Front page displays’ select the radio button labelled ‘A static page’. Then use the pulldown menus to select which of your pages you want to be the new home and blog pages.

Plug-ins
You can find plug-ins either in the Word Press plug-in as already mentioned, or by selecting the plug-in browser from the Manage plug-ins page.

Most Word Press plug-ins are designed to add functionality to your blog ­ - they make it easier to carry out administration tasks, or to display information in a format that isn’t otherwise available. Plug-ins that manage visitor statistics, filter spam, or enable visitors to rate your posts will set your blog apart from the crowd, but they won’t do much to alter its visual appearance.

One solution is to install a plug-in that provides an alternative way to display images in your posts. Word Press includes Gallery shortcode that displays a thumbnail gallery of images attached to a post, but there are a variety of plug-ins that go much further with images.

One plug-in such as Lightbox provides about the coolest and most user-friendly way to display pictures and will instantly set your blog head-and-shoulders above the rest.

There are several Lightbox plug-ins, but they all do much the same thing with minor variations, which is to overlay your images in a modal window on the page. The rest of the page is dimmed to highlight the image window which displays a full-sized image and can usually be closed by clicking anywhere on the page.

The more sophisticated Lightbox plug-ins will show an entire gallery as well as individual images and display captions.

If you want to see Lightbox plug-ins in action, take a look at any of the following examples:
www.4mj.it/lightbox-js-v20-wordpress
www.stimuli.ca/lightbox
www.tinyurl.com/cmxz7h