Creating one or more pages that looks completely different from your wordpress theme is a challenge. I am asked this many times every day.

Why would someone need to create a page that will show different from other pages ? The most common use is a landing page. On a landing page you don’t want to show sidebar, header footer, you just want a simple plain page to hard sell your product.

When I have to build advanced websites with many custom feature I use Genesis Theme Framework.  A very nice feature of Genesis is that i can choose for every page what layout to display: no sidebar, left sidebar, right sidebar. The truth is that a special child template have to be built to work on Genesis. I can use other themes only if I migrate them to Genesis, and that is extra-work.

Use Cases

What are other cases when you need to build a page that looks different from your wordpress template:

  • Maintenance page. When you work something on your website you want to show a single maintenance page that will prevent visitors from seeing the changes you make realtime. There are numerous plugins that will show a pre-made maintenance page, but sometimes you may want to customize it, to make it great so people won’t forget your website.
  • Static Homepage. You want the homepage to look different from your blog posts page. No sidebar to appear, no comments, just customize it to look like a home page, like a desktop on windows where you can start your work .
  • Thank you Page. After a visitor ordered something or filled a form on your website, you’ll want to thank him with a nice page that looks different.

There are many other use cases where you will want to make a page that looks completely different from the website.

The hardest way to do this is to code everything for yourself. For example, in the page.php file ( the template page that render pages ) you have to add the following code many times:

<?php if($post--->ID!='THE PAGE ID YOU WANT TO EXCLUDE SIDEBAR') { get_sidebar(); } else { //do something else } ?>

Well, you have to add this many times and for every page you want to make unique.

I have a better and simple solution that I recently used. There is a wordpress plugin that let you customize any page or post you want and the process is very easy. The plugin is available at Impact Page Builder.