How to set up two – separately themed – sections on one website

  • Resolved screenbeetle

    (@screenbeetle)


    11 years, 1 month ago

    I have a client with two aspects to their business
    – residential customer services
    – commercial customer services

    The Brief:
    Their site’s home page needs to guide visitors to one of the two sections. Much of the content in each section will be the same but they want each to be styled differently – with widgets and content tailored to the relevant audience.

    The Quandary:
    I don’t know what of the following options to go for – if any
    OPTION 1: use two different installs of WP with a single splash page for both. If I go for this method I am further in two minds whether to use sub directories for each install or sub domains.
    OPTION 2: use the same installation for both sections with maybe a splash page plugin for the home page. The issue here is I’m not sure how to style each section differently:

    OPTION 3: use WP Multi site?

    OPTION 4: use Joomla which allows different template styles in one site.

    Your thoughts/advice/criticisms are all very welcome

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • WordPress allows you to choose templates for individual pages as well, so there’s no need to go to Joomla! (yeah… bit of WP fanboy stuff there)

    Any of your options are vialbe, but it will depend on how you want it to work. If it was me, I’d work on a single site with multiple templates and set up each page to have the correct template for that section. Second choice would be a multi-site installation, but that’s only worth while if there’s going to be a full separation of both areas as that would lead to two separate systems that can be (mostly) maintained from one area. Two separate installations is dead last mainly because it’s giving you twice the complexity and twice the administration that you’d need to run one site.

    Option 2 would be the way to go. Perhaps even just using the post category css class tag on the html body tag to differentiate the design..

    Thread Starter screenbeetle

    (@screenbeetle)

    Thank you both. Option 2 was the one I was most comfortable with so it’s good to see a consensus.

    Catacaustic – As it’s the theme elements that need to differ (logo, colours, background image etc) my first thought was that page templates wouldn’t be the answer. No I think about it, there is probably more potential there than I initially thought.

    Dejliglama – brilliant thanks. Riding on different css classes has a lot of potential too.

    I’ll post back any further tricks I discover and resolve the thread.

    How do you choose different themes for different pages? That would solve an awful lot of problems.

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    You can’t choose different themes for different pages.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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