Easy WordPress Setup and Modification

Came across Smashfreakz while I was looking for website design – and other software – to help a friend who’s running for office. The perfect software, of course, would have a blog front end but also have all the back-end stuff (tracking donations in a legally compliant way, etc.) -  but it’s a set of problems that I don’t have a lot of first-hand knowledge of. One of the first hits I got in my search was     17 Free and Premium Political WordPress Themes  on the aforementioned  Smashfreakz. The post itself turns out to be a very good starting point and benchmark for my research, but I think Smashfreakz is going to turn out to be one of those sites I refer to when I’m trying to solve problems. But while I felt that in just reading the introduction to the piece, reproduced below, I had an idea of what I  was getting, it occurred to me that the site design gave me four ways of navigating through the site content – without sacrificing white space, without crowding, all of which immediately made sense to me. Not sure what the design magic is here, but I think it’s a combination of using contrasting colors and three different layouts for each of the navigation paths. Here’s a screen shot of the beginning of the piece (the “introduction,” although perhaps there’s a better word):

So – in order of appearance, the three ways (other than “search) that present themselves as ways to navigate site content.

By Category – but listed twice, above and below. My one objection is that the lower reference, which uses an icon I associate with “tag” – is actually a reference to the category “WordPress.” I’ve crudely surrounded both references in red:

Navigation by Category (above) and by individual tag (below)

“WordPress” as a category, and “WordPress” as a tag, as we might expect, have a big overlap (the former yields 6 pages of results, the latter 5). Smashfreakz cleverly hedges its bets by providing a concise list of related posts at the introduction to the post – titles/links only:

“See also” text links only

Relatively modest, likely to be relevant, and not creating a big delay before getting to the body of the piece – itself quite substantial involving the comparison of 17 WordPress themes. At the bottom of the piece, there’s a more select – but visual – selection of only three likely-relevant pieces:

“Related Posts” – with thumbnails, at end of post

Red Category Boxes

Last, the Category navigation to the left of the post body. (The WP media uploader, normally reliable, isn’t saving my changes; my apologies for the awkward layout, and if anyone has a fix for this, please feel free to add it in the comments).  In any case, in comparison to sites in which redundant navigation plus lots of advertisement make the content hard to focus on and hard to navigate, I find the navigation at Smashfreakz mostly useful – and when it’s not – not in my way.

What might improve this would be using the “tag” icon to denote a tag or tags; but while it may not be perfect, it’s certainly closer than anything I’ve done. I hope to post more about Smashfreakz, and perhaps they’ll tell us how they’re generating these cool red category boxes – and their “see also” and “related posts” content.

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