As many of you know I use WordPress for many of my projects. I had some spare time the other day and went browsing around the free themes that were available and there are some really nice ones available there now. Some of them have pro options to give you even more features but the ones I saw looked really well and had some really powerful customisation available.
One of themes that I spent time was the Platform theme and using it I was able to pull together this WordPress site on my Sample Blog in a relatively short period of time. I admit I dipped in and out of it a few times over this week but it came together really easily.
One of the things that really helped me make it look more complete was having a sample.xml file. A sample.xml file is a WordPress file that contains a set of pages, posts, comments and categories and when uploaded can make a pretty sparse blog look busy and active . Admittedly a lot of the text is the Latin Lorem text but if you want to present a WordPress theme (whether it be your own design or a downloaded theme) it can flesh it out pretty fast.
It needn’t even be a ton of pages and posts. If you plan to use the site as a CMS it can be 8-10 pages with the usual type of headings like Home, About, Contact and pages such as Privacy Policy. Keep it handy for your next site and you can fast track a lot of the administrative tasks that may consume a lot of your time.
WP-Candy keeps a nice set of sample WordPress content here and it shows how to upload it as well. Essentially this is a really quick way to get online with a nice looking WordPress site. I plan to use this site and build on it to play with plugins, some formatting and jquery over the coming months so ti could become quite the monster and be a good example of how even a free theme can solve a customers needs.
Having such a demo site can save a ton of emails as I often get asked questions like can you do a site with a contact form (Yes of course) a photo gallery (easy peazy), or a changing header (umm yessss) and I can now point to this site as a good example of how it can be achieved.
