A Very Cool Valentine’s Present from Mandarin Design

I’ve been a fan of Mandarin Design for…oh, let’s just say since they popped up on the web a few years ago. Alright, a long time. Their innovative design offerings, tips, and tricks are brilliant. They are bright, fun, and way ahead of their time. Among their recent innovative posts is a recent Valentine’s Day […]

WordPress Theme Designers: Slapping You Upside the Head

AARRRGGGGHHHH!!!! Do you hear me yet? Listen closely. AARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!! This is the sound of the pain and suffering bloggers on WordPress.com and WordPress make when they encounter the most lovely and useful of WordPress Themes that lack a few of the most basic elements. Come on, folks. Can’t you read? This is common sense stuff […]

Designing Themes for WordPressMU – Fill In All The Details

This WordPress Theme called “Pool” I’m currently using is designed by Borja Fernandez and works well for my blog here on wordpress.com. We don’t have a lot of choices here, but I liked the look and some of the details, but after a few months using this Theme, there are a lot of details I […]

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 […]

Designing a WordPress Theme: Building a Post Sandbox

When designing and testing a WordPress Theme, or any web page design, it helps to put the design through the maximum amount of testing. In other words, you have to test all the code that might appear on a web page. Bold in one WordPress Theme may look different in another. Link styles change from […]

WordPress Design Details

Completely redesigning an entire WordPress Theme requires familiarity with web page design, CSS, XHTML, and web page structure. We’ll talk more about that in later posts, but for now, let’s make some changes to your WordPress site that are small and easy to do. We’re going to change a few of the design details. To […]

WordPress.com Blog Bling: Signatures and Writing Code

Wow! If you wanted some WordPress.com blog bling bling, we’ve covered a lot, haven’t we? I’ve shown you how to add graphics and photographs and video, lines and smilies, fonts, blockquotes, social bookmark links, blogroll bling and sidebar widgets, and…have I forgotten anything? Ah, yes. How to display code bling in your WordPress.com blogs, and […]

WordPress.com Blog Bling: Blogroll and Sidebar Bling

I’ve covered adding blog bling to your WordPress.com blog in the form of graphics and photographs, lines and smilies, fonts, blockquotes, social bookmark links. Now it’s time to add some blog bling to your WordPress.com blogroll and sidebar. The sidebar area of your blog is typically the canvas for the most blog bling. Sidebar blog […]

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.com Blog Bling: Lines and Smilies

In part one of the WordPress.com Blog Bling series, we covered how to add graphic images to your WordPress.com blog. In this section, we’re going to cover how to add more visual images with lines and smilies. Exploring Horizontal and Vertical Lines One of the strongest visual elements in design is the line. In WordPress […]

WordPress.com Blog Bling: Decorating Your WordPress.com Blog

For USD $15, you can upgrade your WordPress.com blog for access to the CSS stylesheets to change the look of your blog. Don’t want to spend the money? You can still glamorize your WordPress.com blog with some Blog Bling for free. I’ve got a whole collection of bling for you to choose from to decorate […]

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 – Identifying IDs and Classes

As we round up the mini-series on HTML and CSS basics as part of the ongoing Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, and to prepare you for working with WordPress Themes, it is important to understand how to find the right design element to change on a website, specifically within a WordPress Theme. We’ve been […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS Positioning

In Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course we’ve been exploring HTML and CSS basics to help you prepare for working with WordPress Themes coming soon. The information in these tutorials is essential for the WordPress user to learn for the most simple of tasks, from controlling how content displays in your posts to adding HTML […]