Website: http://www.visitphilly.com/ (beta)

Designed by Happy Cog

Home Page

What they did good:
Simple, clean and colorful. That is how I would describe the redesign of the visitphilly.com website. I really like the vivid images that are used on the background as they are colorful and grab my attention. Many designers are afraid of taking up a lot of space before the main content but the designers at Happy Cog showed a great example of crushing that myth and doing it in style.

To improve:
The Featured Listings on the home page look great but the images and the titles of the sections should also be clickable. Right now the only way to get to that article is to click on the small More link.

Great Job by everyone at Happy Cog

There will be times when you need to not show a category on a certain page. You can either code this manually or use a plugin. Here are some options:

Manually Excluding a Category
Step 1: Go to your WordPress Dashboard
Step 2: Expand the Posts dropdown from the left sidebar
Step 3: Click on the Categories link
Step 4: Click the Category you want to exclude
Step 4: In you browser address bar you will see a url that contains your Category ID. It looks something like this:

 <br/>http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=5<br/>

The Category ID is 5 at the end of the url (cat_ID=5).
Step 5: Open the Functions.php file for your Theme
Step 6: Past the following code before the closing PHP tage ?> and make sure you change -xx in the code below to your category id

function exclude_category($query) {
if ( $query->is_home ) {
$query->set('cat', '-xx');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

Try it out. I will be updating this post with other examples of excluding categories and plugins you can use.