So you’ve decided to use WordPress as a basis to sell products big or small, a lot or a few, doesn’t matter. Now you need to figure out how you can set it up to make it as powerful as possible, and easy to manage at that.
There are really two premises here. Either you expect a lot of products, which means there would be a point to having a post per product and relying on categories, or you expect to have a smaller amount, which points to the use of Pages. If you think you’ll have a steady stream of new products on, say, a weekly basis then it sounds to me like using posts would be best, but if you won’t be adding new products more than a couple of times per year, you can probably do just as well with Pages. Remember, there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t have numerous Pages in a WordPress install, it’s more a matter of what you can do with them and how you can output that.
Posts do have the advantage of being easily put into categories and then tagged, and you can even add custom taxonomies to add separate tag sets and such to them. Pages, on the other hand, offer Page templates, which give you extra control, and you can tackle the lack of categories with hierarchical Pages. Which way you go is up to you and how you want to manage your products; these days both have support for your premiere weapon of choice: custom fields.
There are hundreds of ways to set up an e-commerce site using WordPress. The easiest way is probably to dedicate a post or Page to a product, add a buy link, and then charge your customers. If you use a plugin you’ll end up getting these decisions made for you, which can be a good thing, especially since any decent e-commerce plugin would have a shopping cart and a checkout sequence, and possibly even a payment scheme sorted out.
However, when it comes to product presentation the whole thing is in your hands. That means that you’ll want to style image galleries properly and add product shots as custom fields so you can display them in nice listings.
I think that is the key for most WordPress-powered Web shops: putting custom fields to good use. You’ll want at least one product shot saved in a custom field because you can call on it in listings, but you may also want a larger one to use in presentations, or perhaps one of those oversized product headers that are all the buzz on promo Web sites nowadays. Here’s a quick recap:
Powering a portfolio site with WordPress is a great idea. Since a good portfolio whether it features Web design work, print designs, photography, or anything else that is best presented with images or video should be constantly updated, you can build it around WordPress to make it easy to maintain.
Most portfolio sites have three main functions that you just can’t leave out:
Most portfolios benefit from having a weblog complementing them, since that brings traffic. You don’t need that, and I didn’t want it on my portfolio either, since I’m writing in other places as well, but if you’re the blogging kind then by all means add it. Just make sure that people visiting your site for your portfolio get what they want.
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05132010
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