This ability to work with a specially designed site template and the ingenious way the code has been written to configure and manage everything, now means that blog software can handle sites that are more complex. The best of these, in my opinion, is WordPress. There are many others. MoveableType and Drupal are two of the best known WordPress competitors, but there are many others. WordPress has a long lead and a lot of fans and supporters, so it will probably remain the leaders for a long time.

The reason for WordPress’ success is that it is a system that gives even non-technical, non-programmers the ability to set up, configure and modify a complete website using point, click and type way to manage their blog or website.

The underlying programming code in WordPress is PHP and it writes HTML and Javascript for use in browsers, which render and display the finished site and its functionality.

Almost anything is customizable in WordPress. The site template (which is why we’re talking about it on The Templates For You) is made up of a theme, which is the basic design of the site, plus various customizable layouts, color settings and other management features.

You can set the number of columns to display, the size and location of a header, make the front page operate differently from other pages on the site, insert “widgets” that provide various functionality such as embedding a slideshow of pictures or videos, links to external sites with news stories or internal links showing the most popular pages.

Even after you decide on the main layout for your site or blog, WordPress allows you to customize again, if the layout you chose doesn’t work for the functionality you need on a particular page. For example, you may have chosen a three column layout for most pages, and it works perfectly, except for on one page where you need to display a table or wide photos or videos, that need the full width of the center column, plus the right sidebar. You just select a different template for that page, if the creator of the theme made one for you, or you can write the code for it yourself or hire a contractor.

WordPress is so versatile that thousands of programmers have created special functionality within themes or within plugins. Most of these are available for relatively little cost. Many are free, but I have paid as little as $7, up to $200 for access to plugins, because they saved me the time of designing, creating, debugging and maintaining them myself.

All of this is the reason that so many webmasters now are using wordpress for their website. WordPress’ templates, themes and plugins, together with its ability to be easily customized, have made it the platform of choice to support blogs, news sites, websites, sales pages, email collection and newsletter systems and many different types of specialty applications. The are some things it doesn’t do well, but for a non-complex website or blog, I’ll take WordPress any day, over creating a custom-built site, as I used to do.

It was the first woo theme I ever used, and although it is a premium theme, I found it difficult to work with, initially. Some of the things I wanted to do were difficult to achieve. Being a patient code hacker, I just plugged away until I got what I wanted and I used it at the Boca Raton City Online news site.

Initial installation was straightforward, with no issues. After installation, you see a new menu item on the left side, in the topmost block, “Premium News.” The theme comes with seven different color palettes. They are basic, but they work. I have used lightblue, darkblue, red and green, but I like darkblue best. Red is more like orange and I used it on our Orange County news site.

One feature of Premium News is the ability to rotate ads and the system caters for three standard sizes, 468×60, 300×250 and 125×125. Choosing an ad format depends on the location you want the ad, but I have never liked 468×60, and although I do use 125×125, the most useful – and profitable has always been the 300×250 size, as long as you put it in the right place!

The General Settings page allows you to select the base colors, and the custom logo. I use 960×200 pixels and it looks really great. I had to modify the header CSS settings to allow an image that wide, because the standard is to have a wimpy banner on the left side. The wide top banner makes the site look much more professional and pleasing to the eye – in my opinion. I didn’t do it on this site, but it is probably a good idea to stop the RSS logo and links showing up on the right side.

One feature that is really nice, is to allow a 16px x 16px pg or gif to be uploaded to act as the site’s favicon. This saves you the trouble of converting it to a .ico yourself. Further down, you can add your google analytics code for tracking. Be sure to use the google asynchronous code because that has minimal effect on the loading speed our your page.

The other fields can be left blank for now.

Front Page Layout

The front page layout section is accessed through the theme menu on the left side, that is to the right of the main left menu.

I chose to not check the one column blog posts item because I like the side-by-side effect of posts in the Boca Raton site – but I do have other sites that use the single column, just to be different. I also chose to display 8 entries, but you may need to choose a larger (even) number later, if your right hand column grows.

I also like the Featured post functionality, even though it wasn’t obvious how to make that work at first. A lot of experimenting led me to understand how it works. You have to create a “Feature” post category, then select that as the featured post category, in the dropdown box. Then, to make the features post picture work correctly, when you add a post, you add a picture scaled to 300px wide by 200px high, that you mark as the featured picture in the post editor, using the link in the picture upload and preparation area. – you can also paste the URL of the picture in the “image” field that is part of the “Premium News Custom Settings” box below the editing area.

If the photo you upload and mark as featured does not cleanly scale to 300×200, then be prepared for a distorted feature photo, where faces can look like chipmunks with cheeks full with nuts and people can look like they just came out of a compactor.

If you don’t set a featured picture, the theme uses the default, a black background with a colored ribbon, which is extremely ugly! I didn’t like the ribbon, so I removed it by adding this code in the custom.css in Appearance->Edit

#featured-th {height:0px;margin:0 0 0px;}
#featured-th img {display:none;}

If you need to set the top banner height, you can add this to the custom CSS, adjusting the number to suit your needs, but be aware that you can cause other problems if you deviate too much from the standard.

#header{height: 195px;}

One of the features I really wanted to use was video on the front page. Unfortunately, I was never able to make it work – it just gave me a blank page, and after wasting a few hours trying to make it work, I decided I didn’t really need it after all.

This theme also allows you to put flickr photos in the sidebar, but I never had any use for that, so I never investigated it. I did use the rotating ads, though, and they are very easy to set up. Look in the side tab “Banner Ad Management.”

Those are the basics for setting up the Woo Themes “Original Premium News” theme, fairly straightforward, other than the time I lost trying to get the front page videos to work, discovering how to make featured photos to display and working out how to remove the ugly default that displays when there is no featured photo.

This theme is fairly good for a free theme. I found other problems (most of which I have forgotten about, because it has been two years since I set it up) so if you add too many post categories or you want to do some wild things with the top banner, be prepared to adjust the CSS to suit your needs.

Note that I use firefox and the free firebug plugin to help troubleshoot and fix such problems.