Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Well-Designed Site

I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog,” one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. What a marvelous question! We brainstormed all the elements that make up a web standard site, and mixed in personal preferences of the students […]

The Most Common Tiny Mistakes Made When Setting Up a WordPress Site

I’ve just finished five years of teaching non-stop college and community education workshops and programs on WordPress for beginners, novices, experts, web designers, web developers, web programmers, and those who think they know everything but still realize they have a lot to learn. I love that last group as they are willing to learn and […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS References and Resources

In “9 Truths That Computer Programmers Know That Most People Don’t” by Macleod Sawyer, he quotes Ben Cherry and adds the following after: “Under the hood, most critical software you use every day (like Mac OS X, or Facebook) contains a terrifying number of hacks and shortcuts that happen to barely fit together into a […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS – Identifying IDs and Classes

As we round up the mini-series on HTML and CSS basics as part of the ongoing Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, and to prepare you for working with WordPress Themes, it is important to understand how to find the right design element to change on a website, specifically within a WordPress Theme. We’ve been […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS Parent-Child Relationship

So far in this mini-series on HTML and CSS for Lorelle’s WordPress School, we’ve covered the basics and gave you a test HTML file to experiment with, explored the basics of HTML tags, inline styles with CSS, HTML embedded styles where the styles are removed from the HTML and placed in a <style> HTML tag […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS Embedded Styles

In the next part of this mini-series for Lorelle’s WordPress School, we’re moving deeper into understanding how CSS works with HTML. These easy tutorials will give you the basic tools you need to learn to customize your WordPress site and work on WordPress Themes. We will be working more on the test HTML file and […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS Tutorial

Over the past week we’ve been learning about the web browser, your gateway to WordPress and the web. This was a precursor to the next mini-series of tutorials in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. We are going to learn HTML and CSS. Learning WordPress from the inside out means learning the basic fundamentals of […]

WordPress School: Header Art Images

In the first article in this mini-series on learning how to create images for WordPress header art, call-to-action images, and add text to images for your site’s design elements, I covered the basic tools and materials you will need for these tutorials. In this tutorial, you will learn simple basics for header art, specifically how […]

WordPress School: Image Lessons

I’m often asked by students in the college degree programs of web development and web design how much familiarity and expertise do they need with images. “Do I need to learn PhotoShop and Illustrator?” The truth? You need to know more about images and graphic design than you would ever imagine. Web design and development […]

WordPress School: Pageviews

A student trying to explain how WordPress Themes worked to another student used the following metaphor: Think of WordPress Themes like a poker hand. They are all cards but the value of the playing hand changes with each deal. She was right. There are 52 cards in a deck, four suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades), […]

WordPress School: Text Editors

Coming very soon, I’m dedicating a couple weeks to learning about web browsers and HTML and CSS in preparation for moving into the site design and customization aspects of Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. To help you prepare, today’s tutorial and assignment is to introduce you to text editors. In WordPress, there is a […]

WordPress School: Background Images

A few days ago the tutorial was on changing and setting the header art in your test site. Today’s tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course is about customizing your site with a background image or color. Before I dive into the details, please note that things are a little confusing right now with […]

WordPress School: Header Art

It is time to begin to customize the design elements of your test site in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. We begin with the header art in the Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme. When you set up your WordPress test site for this course, you were instructed to set the WordPress Theme to Twenty-Eleven as it […]

What Does WordPress, iThemes, Goodwill, Home Depot, and Target Have in Common? Your Identity and Security.

We received a new credit card in the mail today to replace our old one AGAIN. An “unsuccessful attempt” to access our secure security data happened and this is a precaution the bank is taking to protect us. I have no other information so I’m left wondering. Yesterday I received an email supposedly from Home […]

Code Standards Project to Take WordPress Into the Future

WP Tavern reported recently that WordPress Developers are organizing a community initiative to standardize common post types, taxonomies and meta data. Led by Justin Tadlock, popular WordPress developer and author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development, the goals of the community project are to name these common parts of WordPress to create a more stable and […]