Blog Struggles: When Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation Interferes With Your Blogging

Discussing the challenges associated with blogging, a participant in a program I presented recently told me about how she tends to obsess over punctuation. My friends tell me I need to read that book, Eat, Shoots, and Leaves about punctuation. I’m obsessed with commas and ellipses. I love using them. I like how they sound […]

Blog Exercises: Blog a Conversation

In this ongoing series called Blog Exercises, today you will blog a conversation. “I don’t want to.” “Sure, you do.” “Nah. Don’t want to.” “This is a chance to improve your blogging.” “Uh-huh.” “This is a change to improve your writing skills.” “Nope.” “You will do it because I said so. Got it?” “Okay.” Writing […]

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 […]

WordPress School: Excerpts

If you are following along with Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course you’ve been writing posts as part of the article series assignments and other assignments. Go to the front page of your site in the Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme and take a look. Do you see long posts, one after another, and have to scroll, […]

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 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: 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: Web Browsers and The Search

Search is used in WordPress for many different purposes as you prepare, develop, implement, and launch your website, and as you continue to maintain and publish on the site. This tutorial will help you understand how to search within a web page with the web browser, search within a WordPress site, and provide helpful tips […]

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: WordPress Login

The word login is a strange word with an odd spelling, yet it is the gateway to our online world. We have to login to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, email, even our computers now require logins for security purposes. WordPress also has a login – many, in fact. Today’s assignment and tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School […]

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 […]

WordPress School

Are you ready to join Lorelle’s WordPress School? Let’s get going. Here is what you need to know. To participate, you need the following: A free WordPress.com site or other test site for experimentation Join and participate in the WordPress School Google+ Community Do the assignments and tasks associated with each lesson Comment on the […]

WordPress Publishing Checklist

The following is a brief summary of the workflow to publishing content in WordPress. Print this out to remind yourself of each step in the process. Consider this your checklist to review before publishing every post until you become accustomed to the process. This is your guide to the WordPress publishing process. This guideline is […]

Research on the WordPress, Web Development, and Web Design Job Market

In 2012 and 2013, I did extensive research for the grant program to develop and rewrite the Web Developer degree program at Clark College. This research included an analysis of current and future job opportunities for students graduating with that degree with a solid understanding of WordPress. Now that the program has completed its first […]