Static Home Page & Integrated Forum With Thesis Theme

We recently launched Beyond 2012 HQ using the Thesis Theme.

Unlike our other Thesis Theme sites, we are using a static home page, with a blog page and navigation tabs for selected categories.

Simple: Press Forum provides an integrated forum that cleverly blends in with the Thesis Theme.

Thesis Theme Appearance

• A 3 column format (560px centre column and 161 px sidebars) was chosen to provide a large centre column for content and two skinny sidebars for minimal distraction.
• The multimedia box is not being displayed, in exchange for the use of Next GEN gallery thumbnails around the site.
• The custom style.css file was used to change the colour of the Forum tab, Home page and active category archive page.

Using A Static Home Page

Due to the nature of the site – exploring alternative views on the year 2012 – we decided to use a static home page that always displays the right combination of a variety of information for readers arriving at the home page.

• Relying on a blog format as the default home page does not guarantee a variety of views will always be displayed.
• For example, if we post five survivalist articles about preparing for disaster scenarios such as flooding and food shortages due to civil unrest, the home page will have a high bounce rate for those interested in other aspects such as Mayan prophecies, global warming and spiritual evolution.
• Yes, we can make sure that we post a variety of information using the schedule function or just write alternative articles, but in reality this is not always practical or desirable.

We plan to alter the home page from time to time, adding additional content and adding or changing links as more articles are posted.

• For example, most of the links on the home page are currently outgoing to other sites. As more articles are written, the links will take the reader to an internal page on Beyond 2012 HQ, with an article about that information and appropriate outgoing links.
• This will preserve some of that valuable Google-juice on the home page and provide further depth to the site in the mind of the reader.

A Selection of Obvious & Favourite Plugins

The following plugins are used on Beyond 2012 HQ:

Countdown Timer

• Handy for some sites for end dates of competitions, events, conference calls or special offers. In this case, the countdown timer is counting down to 21 December 2012.
• Read more about the Countdown Timer plugin.

Feedburner RSS & Email Subscribe

We replaced the Thesis Theme default “subscribe RSS” small orange button that appears in the navigation/header area – with a glossy button and one-click email subscribe form in the right sidebar – code courtesy of Feedburner.

• Small changes to the Feedburner html code add a splash of relevant colour.
• Burn your own feed and grab your code at Feedburner.

Next GEN Gallery

Use the Next GEN Gallery plugin to provide random, changing images in the sidebar, on the home page and in posts and pages to provide more colour and a dynamic explosion of images the reader might be interested in.

• This plugin allows easy image attribution, slideshow and tagging functionality.
• All of this increases the likelihood you will receive search engine visitors for your images.

Visit the Next GEN Gallery plugin home page.

Integrated Forum Using Thesis Theme & Simple: Press Forum Plugin

The Forum is simply a plugin by Simple: Press Forum. Seen below, the Beyond 2012 HQ Forum is wearing the “olota” skin and uses the “two-en” icon set.

While vBulletin may be a great forum, it doesn’t provide the ability to style the background, use your site’s navigation bar or change the colours easily. It comes with a user-friendly WordPress dashboard…

Simple: Press Forum Plugin is free, easily installed like any other plugin and can be styled to give seamless integration.

• You can also include details of recent posts from the Forum in your sidebar, using its widget function.
• On Beyond 2012 HQ, the most recent forum topics are fed into the sidebar.

You can also include details of recent posts from the Forum in your sidebar, using the widget function. On Beyond 2012 HQ, the most recent forum topics have been chosen to be fed into the sidebar.

Page Without Sidebars & the YouTube Plugin

I must admit I love the YouTube plugin.

It allows you to simply add a YouTube video and use a frame colour that blends in with your site.

To add a video into a post, page or sidebar, you just add some simple code e.g. [2012]chdjk47fghe[/2012] – the alpha-numeric is the YouTube video reference.

In the screenshot below, I used a “Page“, “Without sidebars” and a table to align the videos. To help readers find the page I wrote a brief post that appears in the blog with a prominent link to the page.

Blog Post: Explaining the Year 2012: Best Videos From YouTube

Video Page: Explaining the Year 2012: an Alternative Video Compilation

List Category Posts WordPress Plugin

Instead of the Thesis Theme default Archive, Beyond 2012 HQ is using the List Category Posts plugin. You can choose what categories to include (or exclude) as well as individually select links for pages on your site. You can also add text before and after the plugin output on the page, which is not possible with many page-based plugins.

Have a look at how it is used on Beyond 2012 HQ - please remember the site is very new and the duplication under categories is to ensure all categories appear in the navigation tabs. When the site has more articles, posts won’t be placed under more than one category. You can get the plugin from here.

p2p Converter

This plugin is great for quickly turning posts into pages (e.g. if you decide you want full-width without sidebars) or from page to post (e.g. if you want it to appear in your blog).

Grab it here.

Yet Another Related Posts

The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) provides the functionality to have related posts appear at the end of your posts, in your sidebar and even in your email feeds.

It is highly customizable. For example, you can vary the sensitivity of the posts selected for appearing to include more options (great for new sites), exclude certain categories and lots more.  We use this plugin on all of our sites. See it in action below at Timberwolf HQ.

Thumbnail For Excerpts

The Thumbnail for Excerpts plugin displays the first image of a post as a thumbnail on the archive page. Just activate the plugin and it does everything for you.

Unique Bullets

Like Thesis Theme HQ, Beyond 2012 HQ uses unique bullets instead of the default small black square bullet. Simply create a small icon (your favicon is ideal for consistency), upload it to your Thesis Theme images folder and “call it” from your custom.css file.

This is the code I used to replace the bullets. Keep in mind I am not a coder, I merely snaffled the code from the Thesis Theme Forum and modified it to suit my purposes.

.format_text ul { list-style-image: url(‘http://beyond2012hq.com/wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/images/bullet.jpg’); background-position: 1.5em; padding-left: 3.0em; }

.format_text ul li {margin-left: 1em; }

Breadcrumbs NavXT

We use the Breadcrumbs NavXT plugin on all of our sites, including Beyond 2012 HQ. Read about it here and download it to install it manually or let the handy WordPress 2.7+ “Get More Plugins” function to do it for you from the comfort of your plugins dashboard.

Our Final Words

Beyond 2012 HQ uses many of the same plugins as our other Thesis Theme sites, with variations in the appearance and custom stylesheet.

If you want to have a look at our other sites and how we have used Thesis Theme to design unique sites with very basic changes – here they are…

TIP: Use “alignstack” to run thumbnails after each other like I have done above with the screenshots. You will have to type it in when you edit your images. I usually select “alignnone” and overtype “none” with “stack”. Add some space between images using your arrow keys to move and space bar to add spaces.

For our Review of Thesis Theme for WordPress, read this.

Related Posts

1. Integrated Forum for Thesis Theme Without Coding
2. Thesis Theme Forum Familarisation for New Users
3. Thesis Theme HQ Squeeze Page Featured on WP Squeeze Page Generator Site
4. 4 Nifty Code Snippets to Trick Out Your Thesis Theme
5. SOLD: Established 2012 Niche Site and Forum – Beyond 2012 HQ.com