WordPress School: Posts and Pages

Let’s be Lorelle’s WordPress School with the two core content elements of WordPress: posts and Pages. By default, WordPress displays content in posts and Pages. Each behaves differently and distinctively in WordPress, and can confuse people easily. Let’s make this simple. Pages hold timeless content. Posts hold timely content. Please be patient with the videos. […]

Do Business Blogs Need Help Pages?

By Greg Balanko-Dickson I was wondering what might happen if a blog or website had a set of help pages? We expect help pages when using a software or web application. We see About pages and FAQ on blogs but how often do we see a set of “Help” pages on a business blog? Never? […]

Are You Abusing Your WordPress Pages – and Your Blog?

Here are two of the most important definitions you need to know about your WordPress blog: Post: An article published within a blog and displayed in chronological order within multi-post pages such as the front page, category, searches, archives, tags, and other page views. Page: A pseudo-static web page which holds content on a blog […]

Validating Multiple Pages on Your Blog

Validating one web page full of code on your WordPress blog doesn’t help you find all the errors that may be hiding out among all the various pages and page views on your blog. The W3C Canada Validator validates multiple pages on your blog, tracking down errors across the different pages and page views. You […]

WordPress Pages: Exploring the Pseudo-Static Pages of WordPress

I fought long and hard to change the name “Pages” in WordPress jargon. After failing miserably, we’re now almost two years into spreading the word that the pseudo-static web pages on WordPress are called “Pages” and all other pages generated by WordPress are called “web pages” or “post views”. While most of the confusion seems […]

WP-SNAP WordPress Plugin: Alphabetized Index Listing of Posts for Category Pages

Many people use their blogs like encyclopedias, wikis, or great repositories of information. Or for handling collections of information such as quotes, poetry, recipes, code, research, or facts. Others write reviews of books, movies, television shows, and technology. So wouldn’t it be slick to be able to sort through the collection of posts in alphabetical […]

Translate WordPress: WordPress.com Home Pages in Hebrew, Farsi, Bulgarian, and More

One thing I am very passionate about is breaking communication and language barriers. So I was thrilled to see this morning’s announcement that WordPress.com is starting to release language specific “home pages”. As Ryan wrote in his blog, we’re starting to enable more and more languages that are finishing the community translation process. Personally I’m […]

Archives Pages Tip from Photomatt

PhotoMatt, yes, the famous WordPress Matt Mullenweg, has a tip for improving your archives Page in WordPress. For my archives I wanted to display a list of recent entry titles like Hemingway [Theme] does, but I ran into the problem that it would only show 10 at a time (or whatever you have set in […]

Portals, Splash Pages, Guest Books, Midi Songs, Traffic Counters, and Other Web Duds

Beware the Web Fads of Yesteryear By Sean Carton in Publish is a look back, “not quite lovingly, at portals, splash pages and other Web duds.” And while it’s tempting for developers (and their clients) to want to jump onto the virtual bandwagon of development fads, it’s important to examine what you’re trying to accomplish […]

Web Pages That Suck

Top Hated Web Page Elements If you want to stay in the good graces of your visitors, the following are absolute NO-NOs: Music or sounds Flashing anything Movement Too many fonts Too many colors Things that go bump and twirl Automatic Page Refresh For almost ten years, Vincent Flanders of Web Pages That Suck has […]

WordPress School: What’s the Difference Between the Display Posts and Archive Shortcodes

In Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, we’ve been exploring shortcodes. In this tutorial, let’s take a look at two shortcodes that appear to be the same on the surface. WordPress has long had the ability to generate a list of posts in a Page or post with a bit of code in the archives() […]

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 […]

How to Avoid the New WordPress.com Interface

For the past three to four years, WordPress.com users have been “experimenting” with the what is known as the “new” WordPress.com interface. A drag-and-drop-meets-wysiwymg interface (What You See is What You MIGHT Get), it is designed to make interaction with WordPress easier. I’m still waiting. What it continues to do is make my students and […]

Blogging Tools: DownThemAll Browser Add-on

DownThemAll! Firefox Extension is another tool for your blogging toolbox. As a reminder, most power bloggers use Firefox or Chrome web browsers. Not just because they are “better” in the terms of meeting web standards, but also because of their powerful extendable features. Browser extensions, add-ons, or plugins allow you to extend the features and […]

WordPress School: Copyright Policy

We’ve started our mini-series on adding policies to your WordPress site with some basic information and details on how to organize and structure policies on your site. It’s time to evaluate the five different policies featured on almost all websites regardless of topic or goals in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. Remember, we add […]