Need advice for blog overhaul
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Hello, I’ve been designated the “blogmaster” in our little troupe of writers, and so it has fallen to me to figure out how to make our wordpress.com blog work best for us. Before anyone suggests it, we are not interested in hosting our own wordpress.org blog (we’ve gone over it for 6 months and decided against it), so this is all in an attempt to use what we have to the best of our ability.
Our company’s face has become our blog, because that’s where we have constant interaction with our audience. We have daily content updates between 500 and 1000 words, almost always with images, and we would like to integrate elements from our website (which no one visits) into the blog. These pages are pretty simple in their demands, so it seems mechanically doable to me- I just need help figuring out where to start! I am willing to buy the CSS upgrade and/or purchase one of the Premium themes if necessary- it’s crucial that we turn our blog into what we hoped our website would be, to whatever degree possible. We can’t afford to lose our subscriptions and readers by shifting to a new format. The current theme is Vigilance, and I’m not sure it’s what we want. In any case, there are a number of things we need the newly update blog to have:
-Concise format. Our posts scroll down FOREVER. We would like to have something that looks a little more like a website, and I think the biggest change that would help is if we could get a theme that limits how much of the post is visible before clicking “read more”, instead of the full text of each post. Also, I was wondering if there was a way to limit how many posts are shown on each page- I would like to limit it to 4 if possible, while making the most recent one larger than the others.
-Menu. We need a menu that will navigate to pages of the blog; simple things like an About page, and pages for our authors and products. We won’t need a store since all of our products are hosted on various other sites, so all we’ll need to do is link to them from a normal page. What I’ve seen is a lot of Tag menus, and we don’t need that- we’ve gone kind of overboard with tags for our blog, so at this point we have hundreds.
-Header Image: This is paramount- we want a big header image that we can have our logo in that we can change with seasons and holidays. Does WordPress have stringent guidelines for these images?
-Widgets: I admit I don’t really understand these- we would like links and a search bar, but beyond that I don’t know what to do with these. We have about 18 widgets that the original “blogmaster” implemented, but as far as I know she just grabbed them off a list. What are some good widgets for making the blog look more like a website?
-Color! If you look at our current blog, it’s basically black and white! While that was fine when this was intended to be a background to our meticulously designed website, since everyone comes to the blog instead, we need something that pops. We already have color schemes in mind- I just need the tools to be able to implement them. What are some themes that would let me play with the colors?
So, this is probably a tall order, but is there such a theme that would either have all of these options or be a good starting point to work off of with CSS? While I am well aware that there are a lot of limitations on what can be done with the WordPress.com blogs, I think our needs boil down to pretty spartan basics. We need the functionality of a simple website that predominantly features a blog, front page. We have the blog part, now we need the rest.
Help?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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A couple of suggestions that are quick to to.
Use the Read More tag with a meat ax on your Posts: http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/
Dashboard >> Settings >> Reading >> Blog pages show at most – fill in 4 if you want but if you use the More Tag above things will be better.
Some news sites have a lot of the most recent Post on the front page and as you page down the excerpts with the read more get shorter and shorter until about number 5 and below it is only one sentence.
The above will make your site more friendly until others can pitch in.
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Without getting into specifics (which I’m too greedy to do for free) I’d suggest that doing a few forum searches and a look through the Support docs will help you help yourself, and also that paid upgrades at WP.com are not suitable to people who don’t know exactly what the results will be, which is to say fishing for “what upgrades do I need” should generally return the answer “none” unless you have a specific outcome in mind.
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