The first HTML5Up template I turned into a WordPress Theme was WP-Dimension. The great irony was that I made use of the original static HTML theme on my own domain at cog.dog, but never went back to chow my own theme food.
The thing that happened I was looking for a kind of welcome mat site like mine for the main site of a client’s WordPress Multisite. I could have jigged up way of re-directing it to a static HTML site, but the client was not going to go into the code to update. That’s when I decided to see if I could make it a WordPress theme. It worked so well I did like 3 more.
It’s one of my favorite ways to do a calling card site; you can see many great examples, but I like how JR Dingwell just blogged about the usefulness of a top of the domain landing site.
A few days ago I looked at my site briefly before sharing a link. Not only was my information a bit stale, but the background images I had set up to randomly load were not doing that. After looking through the JavaScript code trying to debug, I shrugged and said, “Hey I got a Reclaim Hosting cpanel one click install, why not do it that way?”
It was a good chance to see how it works, but pretty much inside cpanel, under All Applications, are Featured Apps ones at the top. Five of them are mine!
The brilliance that Reclaim Hosting has done here is that rather than installing a vanilla WordPress site and wading through my directions (though I think they are well written), you get a clone of a site that has the theme installed, recommended plugins, menus, and sample content. For the Dimension site, you get a copy of my demo site (yes it has silly Cowboy content).
So it was worth it for me to see how slick it worked. And does it ever make it simple.
The other side benefit is, with the installer done this way, you will get automatic updates to not only WordPress, but this very theme. You only get this with Reclaim Hosting, folks! And the offer does not expire at midnight.
So I just had to move my content over from the static site, update it a bit (well a lot), and the site is solid. It actually does not look all that different, but under the hood? It’s all chow.
Featured Image:
Dr Ballard Needs Better Dog Food Dishes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
