Part of my inspiration was using the fantastic Standard Theme for a client site. The simplicity and flexibility of the theme inspired me. I also quickly realized that it would allow me to build in all the features that I needed to build one site for all of my needs.
For this site I wanted a home page that was not a blog. I wanted a home page slider (the large graphic in the middle of the home page). I love rotators because they give you the option to feature anything from a single post to a section of the site. For now I’m just putting graphics for the portfolio section of the site and the blog.
To add the slider I used the WEBphysiology Portfolio plugin. The biggest thing that drew me to this plugin was that it used a custom post type to add slides. By using WordPress’ built in ability to schedule posts and another plugin called Post Expirator, I am able to both add and remove slides from the home page on any schedule.
At the bottom of the page I wanted to direct visitors in a little more detail to a few areas of the site along with details about contacting me. In this section I used a plugin called J-Shortcodes to give me the ability to easily add columns. I also used the “archives” shortcode to add the links to the blog posts on the right side.
