How to get any of these templates to look anything like their previews!

  • Unknown's avatar
    happyhfd · Member ·

    Creating a site for a charity support group with no money so opted for WordPress thinking it would be a easy and flexible option. How wrong I was. :(

    This free version is terrible. hardly any of the of the templates come looking as the preview layout shows! Even after some widget fiddling and hours of messing about with the few combinations of options you are given you still don’t get anything like it. Why do that to people? You wouldn’t give a person a can of beans only for them to get it home to find that inside its really dog food and expect them to be happy about it would you!?

    I understand this is a free version and that certain things will be restrictive but the vary base level of choosing one of these locked in designs is massively flawed! You don’t get what you see.

    My preferred layout from the lost of pretenders is Twenty Fourteen which looks to have 3 images across the top, that should be clickable hopefully taking you to a different blog entry, a main image which I would expect to be the hearer for the most resent blog post and a wonderful feature rich side bars with video content and neat navigation. I’ve searched this forum and even goggled it and I can’t seem to find any answers that make any sense of creating what I would like to with this template.

    At this point I would just settle for a neat relatively simple layout with the following important attributes:
    A page set up that allows the latest blogs to be displayed in list format with a picture to go with it and showing only some of the text content. I am looking for something preferably that has a “show more” toggle button to drop down the rest of the article should the viewer choose to read that article.

    if a blog entry is long I would like my readers to not have to scroll for eternity to see the next item of interest.

    A couple of the picture of some of these template seem to hit at this being possible but I have tried every template and can’t find one that fits this simple need.

    Please can anyone help? i’m losing my marbles with it!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    Every theme has detailed theme description page with set up instructions and a live demo site. The instructions are linked to relevant support docs which are all found at http://support.wordpress.com
    Example:
    http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/flounder/
    http://flounderdemo.wordpress.com/

    I have no difficulty at all following the instructions provided and I`m sorry if you do.

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    A page set up that allows the latest blogs to be displayed in list format with a picture to go with it and showing only some of the text content. I am looking for something preferably that has a “show more” toggle button to drop down the rest of the article should the viewer choose to read that article.

    If you want to display only excerpts on the front page of the blog followed by read more links, you can insert “the more tag” into each post prior to publication.
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/

    Alternatively you can switch to using a theme that automatically displays front page excerpts. This is a list of active themes on WordPress.com that use the excerpt instead of full post content. Here are the themes that do provide that feature > https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/theme-with-automatic-excerpts?replies=13#post-1396410

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