Looking for guidance on the best way to design static pages

[noisyfrog]

Hi everyone,

Newbie here. I just started playing with WordPress over the past few weeks, and after trying out what seemed like a hundred themes I found Suffusion and am glad I did. It's been very educational, and I'm appreciating the depth of expertise here in this forum. And of course, many thanks to Sayontan!

THE PROJECT:
I'm currently working on a site for a band. What I'd like is to create a few static pages and host a blog. I've spent many hours reading in the forum, but I'm still a little confused as to the best approach for the kind of pages I'm trying to create.

The most important (static) page on the site will be the home page. As you can see from the attached wireframe, I'd like to create a simple page that has a header, a featured content slider, and then an arbitrary number of "rows" with content. I say "arbitrary" because I'm hoping to feature new music on the home page as we create it. I'd also like all pages and posts to align to the grid I've shown in the wireframe.

THE PROBLEM(S):
At first, I started with the custom layout, defining the number of columns in a widget area and then filling it with HTML, text, images, or using plugins to display content (e.g., a SoundCloud player). But then I ran into some trouble:

a) I couldn't figure out how to create section titles that would span the columns in a widget area, and because there are only five widget areas I ran out "rows" -- if that makes any sense.

b) I also couldn't figure out how to adjust the padding for the widget areas so that they would line up with the grid. I created an image header to my specified dimensions, but the widgets have padding that prevent them from lining up.

I also played around a little bit with the [suffusion-multic] but I also had a difficult time getting things to line up correctly.

THE REQUEST:
I would greatly appreciate it if y'all could take a look at my wireframe and provide me with some guidance in terms of the best approach for designing the pages.

Thanks so much!

Noisyfrog

[noisyfrog]

any thoughts, folks? thanks in advance!

[Colin]

I don't believe that there is any way that you can create this sort of layout out of the box.

It is perfectly possible to do it though by creating some divs of your own in Custom CSS and then populating these in HTML view in your page edit window. You will probably need these on top of a custom template with some of the widgets as well. It will require some design effort on your part though.

[noisyfrog]

Gotcha -- thanks so much for the help. I'll give your suggestion a try.

I don't believe that there is any way that you can create this sort of layout out of the box.

It is perfectly possible to do it though by creating some divs of your own in Custom CSS and then populating these in HTML view in your page edit window. You will probably need these on top of a custom template with some of the widgets as well. It will require some design effort on your part though.