Google the Brand Name or google the word?

Joanna Tidball pointed me to some news stories on Google attempts to prevent the use of “google” as a generic and general reference for searching the Internet. According to The Independent: In June, Google won a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, while “to google”, with a lower case “g”, was included last month in […]

Weekly Digest: Hating Web Hosts, Blog Herald WordPress Wednesdays, and WordPress Plugins

Welcome to the second Weekly Digest from Lorelle on WordPress, a one-stop buffet of tips, tricks, and techniques on WordPress and blogging. If you missed it, check out last week’s edition. Released once a week, to add the new Weekly Digest category to your feed, you can use this link: https://lorelle.wordpress.com/tag/weekly-digest/feed/ You can also sign […]

WordPress School: Adding Policies

It’s time to talk about policies in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. While every website, personal or professional, requires some policies, learning how to publish policies on a WordPress site involves learning about WordPress Pages as a content type, customizing the navigation menu, using jump links, creating lists, customizing links in Widgets, and a […]

Blog Exercises: Define Your Community

In this Blog Exercise, it is time to start building a community around your blog. If you have one, it’s time to re-evaluate it to ensure you keep it. We will start with defining your community. Your blog topic should give you a clear indication about demographics of your online community, but it might not […]

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 Tags

The last lesson was the HTML and CSS Tutorial, another mini-series on Lorelle’s WordPress School. This is a very basic tutorial on HTML and CSS to prepare you for WordPress site customization and WordPress Themes. This tutorial in the series will help you understand the basics of an HTML tag, the architectural code wrapped around […]

WordPress School: Bookmarklets and User Scripts

In the last tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course covering the web browser, your gateway to the web and WordPress, we covered bookmarks and how to save a web page for later access and reading. In this tutorial, we take bookmarks a little further by exploring browser bookmarklets and user scripts, small but […]

WordPress School: Blockquotes

No matter what you do on the web, you will quote or cite someone, some place, or something. In today’s assignment and tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, I’m going to teach you how to quote and cite in WordPress, and save yourself from a copyright violation. By publishing content on your site, […]

WordPress School: Links

I’ve dreamed of teaching a class or workshop on nothing but links. Web links fascinate me. They are the connective tissue of the web, the glue that binds us all together in the virtual space, an economy in and of themselves, and links can save lives, they are that powerful. In Lorelle’s WordPress School free […]

WordPress School: Terms – WordPress

Throughout Lorelle’s WordPress School this year, I will be teaching you the words, jargon, and names of things, including their nick names. We’ll start with the word “WordPress.” WordPress WordPress is an Open Source web publishing, content management system platform. That’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down. Open Source Open Source is software for which […]

Presentation: Blog Your Passion

The following are the presentations notes for my workshop called “Blogging Your Passion” at Making it in Changing Times in 2015. In 2010 I was in Chicago for SOBCon, the Successful Online Business Conference, and I had an amazing encounter with a woman on the crowded downtown streets: …I was storming away from the last […]

Your Blog is Your Business Card

The following are the notes for my popular workshop “Your Blog is Your Business Card”. The premise is that today’s business card can’t hold all the contact information necessary to connect adequately with potential clients, but the blog can. It is the holder of your contact information and online identity. The workshop covers the philosophy […]

How to Write an Editorial Article Online

For the Writing for the Web course at Clark College, I wrote an in depth article on “Web Writing: The Editorial Article.” The article serves academic courses on the art of writing for the web, exploring the most common type of web published content found on blogs, the editorial article. Web content represents traditional media […]

Blog Exercises: If You Wouldn’t Do It In Public, Would You Do It Online?

If you wouldn’t do it in public, would you do it online? Unfortunately for many, the answer is a resounding YES! However, most of us have some…whatever you call it…oh, yeah, class, ethics, moral fiber, manners – etiquette. I’m not the Dear Abby of social norms, but I’m first in line to tell you that […]

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 […]