I recently redesigned the website for the New Orleans Craft Mafia using the free open source software from Wordpress. We’d had the same design for almost five years, so it was time for a change. Here’s how the site looked before the change:
New Orleans Craft Mafia - our old website design
The original design was done by our founder, Rachelle of greenKangaroo, in Dreamweaver. While it worked for us for a long time, Rachelle was the only person that could update the site, and for a group like ours, it’s helpful if more members can share the tasks of keeping the website up to date. We also wanted to integrate our blog, which was on Blogger previously, with our website. So I decided to do a revamp of our website, using Wordpress, so that some of us could help out with website updates. Here’s a screenshot of the new design:
Why Wordpress?
As I mentioned above, the software is free to use, and there are lots of free tools, plug-ins and themes out there to make it do just about anything you could want. Wordpress is also very SEO friendly, meaning that it’s optimized for search engines like Google to find and index your site. And as I mentioned above, it’s easy to set up so that multiple people can have access to update the site, so it’s great for groups. This is also helpful if you don’t consider yourself very tech-savvy, but you’d still like the ability to update things yourself. You could have someone else set things up for you and do the design for you (search Etsy for “Wordpress” to find designers there or Tara Gentile of Scoutie Girl also offers Wordpress design services), but if you feel confident using basic tools like e-mail, Microsoft Word and setting up an Etsy shop, you can probably learn the basics of Wordpress without too much trouble.
One thing to note: Wordpress.com is different than Wordpress.org. For the purposes of setting up your own website using the Wordpress software, you’ll need to go to the Wordpress.org.
The basics of getting started
You’ll need your own website hosting and a domain name. I personally use Dreamhost for both. I like them because they’ve got a simple one-click install feature for Wordpress, and their customer service has always been helpful any time I’ve needed them over the past five years or so. (Note: I’m a Dreamhost affiliate, but only because I really do love their service. If you need a host and would like to use them, you can enter the discount code 25BUCKSOFF1YEAR at sign-up for $25 off your first year of hosting.)

To make Wordpress work and look more like a website than a regular blog, you’re going to need to focus on Pages. You can build an about page, contact page, press page, events page, etc. You can also make “parent” and “child” pages, which is what I did for our Members section… Each individual member of the group has their own page, which is a “child page” of the main members page.

Once you’ve got some pages set up, go into Settings and then click under Reading. It should look sort of like the above image. Now choose “Front page displays a Static Page”. For our front page, I used the About page, but you could use Events, or a Shop page or whatever. The “Posts page” is where you want your normal blog to be. For this, I set up a page named “Blog” and saved it… just a blank page. You could also name this page “News” or something. Now when you use the “Posts” feature to do normal blog posts, they’ll appear here.
If you already have a blog with Blogger or some other service, you can import your old posts to your new Wordpress site and they’ll show up in your blog section. For that, you’ll go under Tools and then Import.
For more tips on using Wordpress to build a regular website, check out Building a Website with WordPress.
For both Miss Malaprop and the new New Orleans Craft Mafia website, I use a paid theme called Thesis. I used a free theme here at Miss Malaprop until about a year ago, when I switched to Thesis for its flexibility and SEO capabilities. If you use Thesis, check out this post and video, which helped me out a lot in the NOCM website design process: Learn How YOU Can Design a Website with Thesis 1.6. (Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m a Thesis affiliate, but only because I really love their software.)
As I mentioned earlier, there are lots of free themes available, as well as plugins, which can do all sorts of different things to make your site do what you’d like it to do. Check out the Extend section on Wordpress.org for lots of themes and plugins. Here are a few plugin recommendations:
- Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one
- WP-Cache – an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive
- Robots Meta – allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links
- Google XML Sitemaps – generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog
- Akismet – checks your blog comments for spam
- WP e-Commerce – shopping cart plugin that allows you to sell your products (I haven’t used this one personally, but I’ve heard good things about it.)
I hope this helps some folks! Please let me know if any of this was unclear or if you have additional questions that I may be able to answer about using Wordpress to create an easy website for your crafty business!
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