As you have seen while reading this book, WordPress comes fully equipped to power a blog, with all of the particular requirements of post handling, categorization, chronological display, and so on, that come with a blog. However, powering blogs is not WordPress' only purpose. Not anymore. In fact, there are millions of websites out there right now that run WordPress, but where blogging is not the primary focus of the website. I myself have built a number of such sites.
Just to give you a general idea of what's possible, the following is a list of some popular non-blog type websites that you can build and launch using WordPress (we will cover some of them in more detail later in this and the next chapter):
- Static websites: These feature just a handful of static subpages that are not meant to be updated very often; also, the main content is not organized chronologically like blog posts.
- Corporate or business websites: These are similar to the previous type, but usually a bit bigger in size and in the number of subpages; additionally, for most business sites, their design appears very official and toned down.
- One-page websites: These are websites that only have a single page of content; used mostly as a business card-type site, or used by businesses that don't have a lot of content to showcase on their site. Even though the whole site is comprised of just a page, the designs are usually attractive, with a lot of dynamic transition effects and parallax scrolling backgrounds.
- E-commerce stores: These are websites where anyone can browse through a number of products and then use a shopping cart to make a purchase. Apart from the shopping cart functionality, there's also online payment integration and often a backend inventory management system.
- Membership websites: A type of site where some of the content is available only to those users who have signed up for a membership and (often) paid a small fee for the privilege; such members-only areas can contain any type of content that the site owner finds suitable—WordPress doesn't limit this in any way.
- Video blogs: This is just like a standard blog, only instead of text-based posts, the blogger publishes video posts.
- Photo blogs: These are just like video blogs, only revolving around photos; they are a very common type of blog for photographers, graphic designers, and other people of similar professions.
- Product websites: In short, it's a type of site very similar to an e-commerce store, only this time, we're usually dealing with just a single product on sale. It's a very popular type of website for all kinds of web, iOS, Android apps.
- Social networks: Just like Facebook, only these are run on WordPress.
- Niche business websites: Some examples of such sites are local restaurant websites, hotel websites, coffee shop websites, personal portfolio websites, art gallery websites, and so on.
Again, if I were to explain, in brief, what a general non-blog website is, I'd say that it's any kind of website where the blog is not the main functionality used by the website owner. And of course, non-blog websites make up the majority of the internet as a whole. However, since we're discussing WordPress here, which many still believe to be a blog system only, I just want to assure you that this is no longer the case. These days, WordPress can be used for virtually anything.
In this chapter and the next, we will go through some of the types of websites we have just mentioned and present an effective way of building them with WordPress. We'll also use the knowledge that we've acquired in the previous chapters, so it's best that you get familiar with everything that's been going on so far, before consuming the information in the following pages.
Here are the types of websites that we're going to cover in depth:
- Static websites
- Corporate or business websites
- One-page websites
- E-commerce stores
- Video blogs and photo blogs
- Social networks
Also, there are a number of new pieces of functionality that we have not explored in the previous chapters, and this is what we will be focusing on. These include the following:
- Creating a custom post type with a custom taxonomy
- Altering the custom post type display in wp-admin
Let's get started!