Blog Challenge: Top Ten Blog Interface Designs

Business Logs offers “The Web’s Best Interface Design” websites, and I thought I’d challenge you to: List Your Top Ten Best Interface Designed Blogs As part of my ongoing blogging challenges, I want you to blog about your ten favorite designed blogs from a different perspective: user friendly navigation. Pretty is important, but what is […]

WordPress Plugins for Blog Layout, Formating, and CSS Designs

If you want to change the look of your WordPress Theme, you can edit the Theme’s stylesheet. There are a variety of tools to help you. I’ve featured a lot of them in this Month of WordPress Plugins series, including: WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics WordPress Plugins That Play With Paper and Documents […]

Research and Choices You Make in Website Designs Can Make or Break Your Website

“Design Choices Can Cripple a Website”, by Nick Usborne on A List Apart, explores how the choices you make in choosing and creating a website design can make or break your site or blog. Here’s how design choice can make a difference Here are just a few of the design elements we have found can […]

A Gallery of Website Layout Designs and Ideas

Website Layout Cookbook – An Illustrated Reference for Designing Website Layouts showcases various website layouts in a catalog format for you or your client to browse looking for possible layout styles. As a reference for the web designer, this website provides over 500 layouts to use in planning and designing websites. Various elements such as […]

Blog Exercises: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

Does your site look spammy? How would you know whether or not your site looks spammy? It’s time for a spam check. Web design is hard, especially if you aren’t an expert. Yet, in many ways you are an expert if you are a fan of the web. You’ve seen enough sites to know the […]

Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Trackback

In the first blog exercise on trackbacks I explained how trackbacks work and how to respond to trackbacks. It’s time to revisit the concept of how to respond to a trackback. In the exercise, I described the unique quality of trackbacks for tracking conversations across the web. You publish something, someone likes it and publishes […]

Blog Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays

Every year I celebrate January 11, the birthday of WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg. The first week in April, I celebrate CSS Naked Day, a day to turn off the CSS designs on your websites world-wide to pay tribute to web designers. Later in April is the Day of Blog Silence, honoring the victims of violence […]

Blog Exercises: Make Post Titles Matter

Post titles are the titles of the articles you publish on your site. They represent the subject matter of the article. Newspapers and magazines are famous for their sensationalism when it comes to titles, lurking in readers with “Sexy Siren Stabs Six.” Or they include number counts to impress. “101 Best Ways to Cook a […]

Happy Anniversary WordPress: The Beginnings

On August 16, 2005, Lorelle on WordPress became blog ID number 72 on the brand new WordPress.com. The first post was appropriately titled “Lorelle on WordPress” to introduce the site. Looking back, it’s amazing how true to form that I’ve kept the mission of this site all these years later as proposed in the first […]

Blog Exercises: What’s Your Site’s Tagline?

In Blog Exercises: What is the Name of Your Site?, the Blog Exercise explored whether or not your site title was still appropriate for your site. Today’s exercise examines your tagline, the subtitle of your site. Not all site designs or WordPress Themes display the tagline, but it is there under the hood. Search engines […]

Happy Holidays and Onward!

We survived the Mayan Calendar. We’ve survived planets lining up. We’ve survived attacks on our person, our community, our faith, and our country. Just another year. As we charge forward this coming year, here are some things to look forward to here on Lorelle on WordPress and on my other sites, and many things to […]

Help Needed with WebVisions WordPress Theme Developers Panel

Webvisions is in Portland, Oregon, May 16-18, 2012, and I’ll be there again this year leading an awesome panel of WordPress Theme designers and developers, and I need your help. For over eleven years, Webvisions has been the go to conference for exploring the future of design, content creation, user experience, and business strategies on […]

What My First WordPress College Class Taught Me

As the last day of class approaches for the world’s first WordPress College Course at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and the next one begins in a couple weeks (filling fast), I’d like to share some lessons my students taught me about WordPress – and teaching. They taught me humility and pride. I stand truly […]

Basic Facts and Resources You Need to Know Now About Web Accessibility

Last night I gave a presentation for an amazing group of web designers and developers in Portland, Oregon. I spoke about web accessibility, a long time passion of mine. My co-presenter was Winslow Parker from the Oregon Commission for the Blind who has been teaching screen reading and computer techniques to the blind. He’s also […]

WordPress 3.2 Released: Faster, Prettier, Powerful

WordPress 3.2 has been officially released, this time after a fairly short testing time period. To upgrade, use the built-in automatic upgrade. According to the announcement, this is the 15th major release of WordPress. Wow, that just doesn’t seem possible, and yet it also feels like too few. How far WordPress has come since 2003, […]