Making of Chitwan.Info – A user driven wordpress site

by Sushil Gupta

I recently completed making a website http://chitwan.info which is about Chitwan district in Nepal. The site is totally based on WordPress and it’s advanced plugins. Thanks to the plugin authors who had done really brilliant job.

I have aimed the website contents to be generated by users that are related to Chitwan in someway. Once the website has generated enough content, it will start serving peoples of various fields to collect and share information for various purposes such as, toursits can use the site to explore Chitwan, local peoples of Chitwan can use the site to promote their business and services, researchers and other peoples can gather information in very easy way.

Don’t ask me why would people submit articles or contents on my site. Well, that’s a really hard question to explain, for me specially. Simplifying it, users will be submitting their information in post/article formats so that they can promote themselves. Such as, if you are a business owner, why wouldn’t you submit it to my site if your article will be acting as a free advertisement to all who wants information about Chitwan? If you are just another normal people, you may want other peoples to know about what culture you have, or what place you live in what is the specialty of that area, wouldn’t you? Yeah, I will be earning money through displaying advertisements on the site.
Starting from the design, I have used the internetcenter theme! Not modified a lot of it, but yea, I have changed the way text appears on and removed the images. Also did a little more mockup with the CSS. I have used the custom fields options to some extents too.

Coming down to the features, I have used a lot of plugins, as mentioned above. I have used around 40 plugins which lets users register easily, sets user access, enables them to post from the front end of website instead of requiring to go to the WordPress back-end for posting new updates. I also have used plugins to restrict unauthorized users to go to the backend, limit login attempts. Of course I have used the popular plugins such as All in one SEO, Contact Form 7, Bit-defender. I have used the Relevanssi plugin to power the search on the website that produces search results based on relevancy and also helps the admin know the search stats. Admin Bar Removal is the plugin that works for the removal of admin bar from the front end when a user has logged in to the site. Few more are Disqus, Google Analytics, Wp-PageNavi, WP Fancy Zoom, Widget Logic etc. I have used the WP Underground plugin to show up the weather forecast on the site, of course a really nice plugin.
I would be happy if you could help me by reviewing my website and throwing up some of your comments on me.

Disclaimer:
I have not listed out the complete information about the plugins and other components, because SECURITY issue! Of course, I don’t want hackers showing their ass on my website.
Yes, I have removed the credit to the theme maker from the website. I am sorry, but do you really think anyone will put it on their professional website? And if I was willing to pay for the theme, I would of course have got professionals to design my own template or bought a nice theme from themeforest.