Using free WordPress templates for fast & affordable redesigns
Here are two beautiful, highly functional, self-editable websites that were launched on shoestring budgets by making good use of off-the-shelf WordPress templates:
Deva Foundation
www.deva.org
I started off with this freely available WP theme. Then my client found a nice stock image of clouds on iStockPhoto.com that I converted into an ephemeral background. Finally, I popped in a new header graphic, improved the font styling (and IE compatibility) and integrated iContact for email newsletter signups and and PayPal for ecommerce.
Ta-da! Deva Foundation’s brand new site was completed in less than 20 hours, from concept to completion.
Maria Benitez
www.MariaBenitez.com
This website for the legendary Santa Fe flamenco dancer Maria Benitez was completed in even less time by taking advantage of the excellent — and freely available – “Yoghourt” WordPress theme.
Strip www off URLs at GoDaddy using .htaccess mod_rewrite
Here’s how to remove the www. from your domain name so that Google won’t “split” your pagerank as a result of some inbound links going to www.foo.com and others going to foo.com. (Google will see this as two separate sites.) This tip is tuned to work at GoDaddy, where using mod_rewrite can be a real pain because GoDaddy has some unfortunate default Apache settings that prevent ordinary rewrites from working properly out-of-the-box.
Add these lines to the top of your .htaccess file:
# Override GoDaddy defaults that inhibit URL rewriting
Options -MultiViews
rewriteEngine On
# Rewrite URLs to remove www from domain name
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]