Workshop: How to style your website with Twenty-Ten
In this workshop I’ll tell you about the styling options of the Twenty-Ten default theme. This is a great starting point to get a feel for what you can do with your new site. Twenty-Ten is ideal because it allows you to use Custom Menus, a Custom Header and a Custom Background. Not ever theme allows you to change all these options as you will soon discover. Typographically it looks great too so I reccommend you stick with it for a while. Enjoy Twenty-Ten responsibly 😉 Check out my other workshops in this series...
read moreHow to add new Themes to your website
Let’s take a look at how to add new layout designs (Themes) to your website and how to activate them. You’ll love this feature about WordPress: your content stays the same while the look and feel of your site changes completely. Webdesign was never easier – from a creative mind’s point of view that is (it’s still a tough task to build good themes that you can use at the touch of a button though). Every Theme provides its own options in the back end, which is why I’m exploring some in more detail in my Theme...
read moreAdding Links to your Website
In this workshop I’ll show you how you can add links to your sidebar. WordPress has a very convenient Links Manager in the backend. You can use it to either display and share your links, or if you want to remember a link for later just pop it in and it’ll be stored in a convenient and save place. Check out the other workshops in this series...
read moreThe whole process was completely painless
As part of an on-going webpage refurb I’ve moved my website hosting to WP Guru. My resident IT consultant tells me this was something to do with poor performance at the server end. Anyway where there were previously red crosses you should now see all the images on the site. Moving the site was all taken care of for me and the whole process was completely painless. I cannot recommend the service more highly. Thanks Jay and Julia! Eliza
read moreWriting Pages and adding Pictures
Here’s a screencast I’ve made about writing pages, it illustrates how to add a single picture to your posts or pages: https://wphosting.tv/2011/11/workshop-writing-pages/ To add an image, use the little picture button next to Upload/Insert (underneath the post title): You then have the option to add an image from your computer or from a URL (that’s how you can use images from Flickr). If you upload more than one picture from your hard drive, they can be displayed as a gallery – so your viewers will see thumbnails and...
read moreHelp – Where has my content gone?
Sometimes you may find that you’ve been writing a post or page for a while, and then your computer crashes. Or your internet goes down. Or god knows what else happens, and you hadn’t clicked the save button yet. Thanks to the auto-save feature of WordPress, your content should be should be safe and sound, even if you had not given it a title yet. Here’s what I would do: go to Pages, All Pages (or Posts, all Posts respectively): If you’ve had anything that was autosaved but not published, you’ll see...
read moreWhich blogging platform should you go with?
There are so many content management systems (or blogging platforms) on the market, many of them offer a free service. Some of them that spring to mind are these: Blogger (by Google) WordPress Live Spaces (by Microsoft, now defunct) Movable Type Type Pad Joomla Drupal The choice is endless and the list could go on – but only two are serious candidates, at least for me. This comes down to personal preference and I encourage you to try them all… but who has the time to do that? Let me explain the differences. WordPress Before we begin: I’m a...
read moreBacking up your site
You want to make sure you have a local copy of your website. That’s in case you want to leave your current hosting provider, or you fear that important content could be lost in a data centre crash. I’ve seen it, it’s not pretty. Here are some plugins you can use to backup your site from the WordPress back end. There are quite a few solutions that let you backup your entire WordPress site – BackupBuddy is one, Blogvault is another, I’ve even written one myself called Snapshot Backup – it’s free from...
read moreHow to add custom menus
Menus can be a bit cumbersome. The key thing is that you need to create the menu first, then activate it on the left hand side. Here’s what your structure looks like once you’ve created a menu: Now you need to head over to the left hand side and pick said menu from the list under Theme Locations. If this is empty, then the menu isn’t active and won’t show up (like in this screen shot): Pick it and save it – then you should be on to a winner: I’ve made a screencast about this too – have a...
read moreWhat does RSS mean?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a generic content feed of your website’s content. Every WordPress site has one (several in fact). For example, my website is http://wphosting.tv and my RSS feed is https://wphosting.tv/feed. Have a look at the differences. The RSS feed is used by “content aggregators” which display your content without a visitor having to come to your site. These aggregators frequently check if there’s new content available and then display it accordingly. The idea is that you can use a...
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