The Best FREE way to make wordpress a non-blog

Use pages not posts. That way your site will look and feel like a regular website.

Any theme of your choice should be fine.

If you use my favourite theme, Atahualpa, you can choose how many sidebars to use. When I'm using it for a regular website style, I usually use just one sidebar.

If you got to Add New themes in the Wordpress dashboard you can search for themes using a selection of criteria - such as colour, number of sidebars.

Hi Roy,

You can tweak the code of the theme you use so posts do not display things like post dates and comments. This gives the posts a more permanent and static feel to them, like regular web pages.

You can get rid of extra widgets or use a theme that doesn't support widgets.

You can use pages rather than posts. Page layouts can be customized and saved as templates, so you could have a template for articles, template for product pages, etc.

All of this is free if you can hack the code yourself.

There are also paid themes that have a lot of these options built in to them in the admin section of wordpress, so you can tweak the theme's settings even if you don't know php.

Another option is using Joomla or Drupal, however that isn't what you were asking, just wanted to give my insight that they are probably not hard to learn and a good alternative (don't know from personal experience but do plan to learn them)

Nplat and Rosetrees have it right on though, so wordpress is a good option

Hey Roy,

You can't really make Wordpress a non-blog platform because that is what its coded as at its core. However there are a few tricks you can do to make Wordpress look more like a static website than a blog.

1st) Make only one post to the blog itself. Have this post be an introduction to your site and let them know what content you have there.

2nd) Use Pages for all your content and have Pages as the main navigation in your Sidebar.

3rd) Edit your Sidebar and remove the tell-tale signs of a blog. Things like Categories, Meta Data, Archives, Recent Comments, Blogroll, Etc.

4th) Edit your Main Index Template and your Page Template to remove the dates of the postings, and "Posted By: Admin" pieces of text.

5th) Anywhere on the website where you need to refer to the site itself, use the word "website" or "site" and not blog.

6th) Remove mentions of Wordpress from the site. Many times its in the footer where it says "Powered By Wordpress"

Change the permakinks so that the website is more SEO friendly and it is easier to remember. For example, don't leave it as YourSite.com/p?gh432 change it to YourSite.com/Keyword

It's all in the theme and how you chose to structure the site.

Basically, CMS systems, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc, are intended for creating easy to use dynamic sites, sites where new content is being added often by the webmaster and/or contributors. Also, they're intended to make things easier for those who don't know basics like HTML and CSS. If you don't need these features, you'll be better off building a static HTML site in terms of performance and site security.

The only free way I can think of is learning yourself how to tweak wordpress themes and use template tags.

You can also buy a premium theme that doesn't look like a blog. There are tons out there.

I can do it for you for a good price. Send me an e-mail at my site and I'll show you a bunch of sites you wouldn't even believe are running on Wordpress! matt@snidge.com

Its all in the way you design your theme and set up your options. But your theme is just the framework.

In the main site change it to a CMS by using pages instead of posts and then just add your pages. You can use a side navigation bar or not.

So we do these for our customers all the time.

Tyrehouse for car tyres and servicing in Sydney Metro area
Affordable garden garage industrial steel and storage sheds
Kilns Furnaces And Autoclaves: Home

We still use a blog component as it is a great way to drive traffic.

Q

There is NO difference between a "site" or a "blog", it's all in your mind...
But seriously, it depends on the theme and what you display. No one forces you to
display "latest blogs" or "latest comments" on your blog...uhm..i mean site.

There are countless ways to style and design a wordpress blog..uhm..i mean site...there really IS no difference in technicalities except that the "blog" has usually already some web2.0 features "out of the box" like rss feed or pinging capability whereas a static site often does not have them.

Would you say this is a blog --> http://www.insurancehub.org ??