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Question:  I am making our school NASA club website and I’m using WordPress. Everything is working really well, but I want a specific theme for our site. I have looked all over the internet for a FREE theme that suits my needs. What I basically want is this:

- A featured post slider (better if customizable)
- Three columns right below it (ability to put posts from different categories would be really epic)
- A sidebar only on the non-homepage pages
- Preferably a dark the (black)
- Free only (for now)

Any help is extremely appreciated.

Answer:  It’s not the theme that does all of that, but rather specialized features.  Sometimes a programmer will include it within a theme and then sell the theme at a premium price, but then you’re stuck with their idea of “good functionality”.  You can do all of that special functionality for free with plugins by searching the WordPress.org plugin site.  Plugins are your best friend.

Post Slider – You’ll find several sliders for images, but some with with posts, too.  Posts are usually included in a slider by using either custom field values or by placing them in their own category.  Smooth Slider will do posts, pages, and images.  That one requires you to insert a tag in the page.php or single.php templates.  Personally, being a former programmer, that sucks.  See if you can find one that uses shortcode.  OR, you could insert the php code right into the page with another plugin that allow for the insertion of raw HTML/PHP.  There are many more slide plugins.

Multiple Columns – You can use a magazine-style plugin to create multiple columns, but those usually only work for continual text that flows from one column to the next.  There is a plugin called WP Easy Columns that will allow you to create multiple columns.  Then within each column you can use another plugin that utilizes short code to display posts from specific categories.  It’s called List Category Posts.  You can control how many posts to display, from which category, title, how much text from the post or no text at all, lots of parameters.  I use it a lot on my blogs. 

No Sidebar On Home Page – This one is a little trickier and it depends on your theme and the page templates available within it.  I use Artisteer to create all of my WordPress themes and by default, Artisteer automatically creates a no-sidepage page template that can be selected from the page editor page so you can make a page with or without a sidebar.  It’s really slick.  However, you can roll your own page with no sidebar by following these instructions to create a no-sidebar page.

Change WordPress Theme Colors – This would require changing the CSS and Lord God Almighty, make a backup of your CSS files before you begin tweaking.  In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance, Editor then in the right sidebar you’ll find the Stylesheets on the bottom of the list.  I would comment out (NOT delete) the lines of code for the color settings, and the insert the code with the new colors.  This is a complex thing to do because there are color settings for the background, borders, shadows, widget boxes, titles, post body, text, etc.  It’s a gigantic undertaking.  I suggest making your own theme with Artisteer.  There’s no code to write or jack up.  The program does it all for you.  You don’t need the Standard version.  Just get the Home & Academic version for $49.95.  Have a bake sale or car wash or something to raise the cash. 

WordPress Web Hosting – Be sure to get some decent WordPress web hosting.  On most web servers, WordPress is pretty slow.  However, I recently tested a new web hosting account of mine at WebHostingHub to see how WordPress performs over there.  Their servers are optimized for the demands of WordPress.  You can read WebHostingHub WordPress Hosting here, but long story short, there was a significant increase speed in loadtime.

 

A Reader Would Like To Know:

I have 70+ videos from a trip to Europe, none of them longer than say 2 minutes and I want to host them on my website with all of my photos (hosting from my home on an old desktop I don’t use much anymore) and am curious if there is a decent wordpress plugin or some other program I could use to easily put them on the web?

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Additional Resources You Might Find Interesting:

Every wonder where people get those fantastic images, graphics, photos, and illustrations for their websites…legally…without swiping them from other sites?  They are called royalty free stock images and you can get endless stock images anytime you want.  Some of them are even free.  Here’s a list of just a few of them.

iStockPhoto  This is probably the granddaddy of stock image sites.  A tad bit on the pricey side (that’s an understatement), but with exceptional high quality.  There are also video and audio clips.

Big Stock Photo  Over 5 million royalty free stock images.   This is one of my favorite image sources because they have a decent selection at reasonable prices.

Dreamstime  Images as low as .20 each.  Not sure now many images they have.  They also have a free section and it’s searchable.

123RF  The selection of high quality images here aren’t as great as the other sites, but you can often find them here at lower prices than the other sites.  Their free section operates a little differently than other sites.  The images in it expire, but I’m not sure how long they stay in the queue.  Right now there are over 30,000 free images.  However, there is no way to search on them.  You just have to look through them page after page.  I suggest doing it with your laptop in front of the TV because it’s so easy to waste an entire day in the free section.  The selection is a little bizarre at times, but there are definitely a lot of little gems.  If you see something you might be able to use in the future, better grab it while it’s there.