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 […]

Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Professional Site

Two questions on the same day triggered this blog exercise. I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog.” I told him it was one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. This is a good definition, but lacked specifics. A […]

Blog Exercises: Are You Serving First-Time or Return Visitors?

Every time I visit Feedly, Dropbox, and many other sites I think “They don’t like me.” Why? Why should something so important to so many, a tool that should be on most computers, make me feel this way. Look at their login screen. Giant button inviting someone to sign up for their services. Tiny “login” […]

Blog Exercises: Make a List of Everything on Your Site

Today’s blog exercise will require a little time, magnifier, and a score card. Well, maybe not one of those items. I want you to grab a piece of paper and load up the front page of your site in a browser. Zoom in so you can really see it up close and personal. Start counting. […]

Blog Exercise: When Was the Last Time You Got Personal

I walked into a friend’s home and found the fridge covered with refrigerator art from her seven year old. The traditional home often features such childhood artwork but this was extremely precious as the child has learning disabilities and drawing. The artwork was beautiful. I stood there transfixed at the crude scribbles, trying to find […]

Blog Exercises: What Are You Missing?

Frogs redefine my thoughts about amphibians annually. As a child, spring was for tadpoles and summers were for frogs in the swamps, ponds, and ditches around my country ranch in the Pacific Northwest. Moving to Oregon’s Coastal Mountain range west of Portland, my winters are spent driving up the foothills like a crazy person, avoiding […]

Blog Exercises: Know Your Pageviews

In this Blog Exercise, it is time to learn some website jargon, specifically, what are all the web pages of your site called. I teach web publishing with WordPress and web design courses at two colleges, and I’m stunned that students don’t know at the lack of proper names for all the parts of a […]

Blog Design: How Many Columns?

Mark from Weblog Tools Collection offers Two or Three Columns?, his perspective on how many columns a blog should have. I personally prefer one column themes with a minimal second column. Most information that is put on my sidebar(s) is extraneous and could be placed elsewhere. I have also found that some of that information […]

Lorelle is Naked

Oh, no. Don’t look, Ethel! Yes, Lorelle is naked. Well, at least Lorelle on WordPress is naked. Today, April 5th, is CSS Naked Day, a day bloggers and website owners can honor web page design and designers around the world by turning off your stylesheet for the day. UPDATE: Over 1600 sites are listed as […]

Blog Building: Who Controls Your Blog? You? Your Host?

Do You Own Your Website? by Healthy Web Design takes a good look at the hidden pain and suffering and control that comes from choosing a cheap web host for your blog compared to making a conscious business decision on how to host your blog. It’s true, companies such as Yahoo!, SiteBuilder, and Homestead offer […]

Don’t Get Rid of Your Home Link: How to Add a Home Link

I’m finding a new trend in web page design which removes the “home” link or button. Here is an example of how frustrating it is. I’ve found a delightful blog post. I’m thrilled with the content and want to learn more about what else is on the blog and who is blogging this prize example […]

Join the Conversation on Why Web Typography Sucks

Clagnut again tackles “Web Typography Sucks”, a favorite subject, but this time it is also in reference to the presentation given recently at the SxSW conference in Texas. The post continues the conversation about the issues that confronts web designers today dealing with web fonts, and also includes reference to the slides and references from […]

The Battle Over Centering on the Longest Line in CSS

There are a lot of things easy to do in print that web designers struggle to emulate when they take print designs to the web. One of those challenges is centering text on the longest line. Clagnut takes on “centering text on the longest line” to show you how to make this almost impossible task […]

Blog, Online Magazine, and Ezine: What’s the Difference?

In the Blog Squad’s article, Recipe for an Ezine, the core elements that make a blog or website into a successful ezine, an online magazine, are: We have found ezines that work well for attracting new clients usually have these eight key ingredients: 1. A great name that defines the topic 2. A defined audience […]

Accomplished: WPDesigners One Month Challenge on WordPress Themes

Small Potatoes of WPDesigner has completed the task of a WordPress Theme a day for the past month, as of tomorrow. Amazing. And what makes this Ridiculously Mind-Numbing WordPress Self-Challenge even more of an accomplishment is the release of WordPress 2.1 in the middle of the challenge, bringing with it new WordPress template tags and […]