WordPress is great. It lets me do everything I could ever want from making templates for websites, reconfiguring layout to have blogs, magazines and websites all within the one CMS just by hacking with templates, I can develop plugins and if I break it there is a huge community out there to help - and they often do. My favourite area in WordPress just now is the way that WordPress themes are growing at a craz yrate and how people are re-imagining what a WordPress theme is. What I’m hoping to do here is give you some ideas of how you can use WordPress in new and exciting ways. And it gives me a chance to wander the web for a bit while researching this.
A blog is a blog is a blog is a blog… isn’t it?
The WordPress theme I saw which just blew my mind is really a simple concept.
Concept - What if I configured a WordPress theme to show my blog embedded in Google Maps?
Result - http://contolini.com/chris/
Holy Mother of all mashups Bat Man! It rocks - I don’t have anything that I could use this for (unfortunately) but I’ll be storing this little baby of an idea away for a rainy day. By the time I get round to messing with the idea it’ll be a ubiquitous WordPress Theme.
WordPress: That’s for Blogs not Websites
If you believe this your losing out on some of the great power that WordPress could be having on your site. I know of an ever growing band of webmasters, esp. website based affiliates, who are using the power of WordPress to make blogs look and act like websites. Magazine themes - think of offline publications powering their magazine sites in WordPress, they’d work so much better: RSS, pings, true communities growing, real conversation would be possible eqaily and quickly esp. if they used WordPress MU. Think the NME giving every journalist a blog, where the readers could get involved with setting the agenda - if the public gets what the public wants. You could use WordPress to do consumer testing like NikeID under the radar and test advertising positions amongst niche markets and more just by having a great magazine theme in WordPress. I’ve been using hacked versions of the Mimbio theme on some test sites lately and they’ve been doing really well at getting increased page views from users as opposed to the same site in a blog looking theme. Theme Playground has a nice little post on Magazine Themes for WordPress.
To Blogfinity and Beyond…
If you have any ideas for a WordPress Theme let us know in the comments below. I’m always looking for strange and crazy ideas to base WordPress based sites on in the future.
