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() […]

WordPress School: Header Art Images

In the first article in this mini-series on learning how to create images for WordPress header art, call-to-action images, and add text to images for your site’s design elements, I covered the basic tools and materials you will need for these tutorials. In this tutorial, you will learn simple basics for header art, specifically how […]

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 […]

Customizing Your WordPress Theme Footer

UPDATE: WordPress now has custom menus. At the bottom of the article, I explain how to customize your WordPress Theme’s footer using Custom Menus. Yesterday, I covered the basic code found in the footer of the WordPress Default Theme, and gave you some ideas on how to add some impact and navigation to your WordPress […]

WordPress.com Blog Bling: Blockquotes and Quotes

Have you had enough blog bling? No? This part of the blog bling series covers how to add emphasis to your blockquotes and quotes in your WordPress.com blogs. So far, the WordPress.com Blog Bling series has covered adding graphic images, lines and smilies, social bookmarking links, and font bling. The techniques covered in this section […]

WordPress.com Blog Bling: Fun Font Bling

Why not dress up your WordPress.com blog with some font bling? So far on this series on WordPress.com Blog Bling, I’ve covered how to using images, logos, and badges to decorate your WordPress.com blog, how to add horizontal and vertical lines and smilies, and Social Bookmarking Submit Links on WordPress Blogs, including WordPress.com blogs. In […]

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 […]

CSS Tabs – The Ultimate Tab Menus

Part of designing a WordPress Theme is the decision on how to structure the tab menus. There are two core tab menus in a traditional WordPress Theme: Categories and Pages. The Page menu lists the pseudo-static Pages such as About, Contact, Events, Schedule, Site Map, and other non-chronological web pages. The category lists are the […]

Attention WordPress Theme Designers: Designing Themes for WordPressMU

One of the best features of WordPress is the ability to choose from over 300 different WordPress Themes for your site’s layout. You can choose from among a wide range of looks, layouts, and styles, from minimalistic to bombastic. You can have no sidebar or four sidebars. You can have huge header art or no […]

Navigating Your WordPress Site

How visitors nagivate through your site is critical to how long they stay on your site. While having quality content helps, their ability to move from one post to another, or through the archives and categories, finding the information they need about the site, you, and the content, is very important to a successful website. […]

Power Blogging: Web Browser Blogging Tips

WordPress and many other blogging tools require you to interface with your blog through your web browser, be it Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, or whatever you are using. While I’ve used any browser I could find on any public and private computer to access my blogs, and I declare Firefox to be the […]