Home › 2011

Yearly Archives: 2011

Customizing a WordPress Theme

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

WordPress is an amazing tool. It allows you to choose from thousands of themes, both free and premium. If you’re not too picky, you’ll find a theme that is perfect for you and your business. What is not easy about WordPress, is doing a custom theme. If you have a design that you made in photoshop, it’s not an easy thing to make WordPress play nice with it. So you have two choices.

  1. Spend 6 months learning the ins and outs of the wordpress system, learning CSS, html, javascript and php. If you know those things, it should be a piece of make.
  2. Or you can Contact me and I’ll help you get a quote for what you need.

I can take pretty much any psd and make it into a custom wordpress theme. Prices vary, but you’re looking at anywhere from $500 – $1000 (as of December, 2011) to create a custom theme from your photoshop design. If I see your design, and talk with you on the phone, I can give you a firm price. And I’ll get it done in record time.

New Favorite WordPress Plugin, “Post Content Shortcodes”

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I was showing a client her new site. She was loving it. Everything was going very smoothly. I showed her how to update pages, create pages, edit the menu – she was in love. Everything was going splendidly. I was happy, and more importantly, my client was happy. Then came a bombshell.

“I need my site to say the same thing on a lot of different pages, and I don’t want to have to edit 6 pages that say the same thing. where do I edit that content?”

My heart sank. In my head I was thinking “I have no idea… and I told you at the beginning that wordpress doesn’t do that.” But I maintained my composure and told her I would look into it – knowing full well that this would take hours and hours of research on how to do something that I’ve never done before. She said she needed to be able to edit a page in one place and have it change across multiple pages across her site. Not possible, at least that’s what I thought.

Little did I know, but there is a beautiful plugin called “Post Content Shortcodes“. Once installed, all you need to do is create a post or page with the content that you need repeated throughout the site. Then you paste a short piece of code wherever you want that content to show up.

So if you have your store hours in 25 different places througout your site (and it’s not in the header or footer), think about how annoying it would be to change them all. It would probably take you an hour just to change your hours of operation. With Post Content Shortcodes, it will take you 30 seconds to change it in 25 places. Brilliant. I’ll definitely be using this again.

How to Update a Page in WordPress

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Go to your login page: http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin
You should come to a page that has this login screen:

login

Enter your username and password.

Click on Pages in the left hand column of your WordPress admin area.

Pages

You will be taken to a listing of all the pages in the website. You may need to page through to find the one you are looking for. When you find the page you want to update, click on it. From here you can do most everything you need to do. Use the formatting tools to change the size of the font and to make other changes, just like using microsoft word.

To Make a Link, Highlight the text you want to make a link. Click on the link button at the top (it looks like a chain link). A box will pop up. If you are linking to an external page, enter the address in the URL box. If you are linking to another page on the website, select that page from the list. Press Add Link.

When you are ready to publish, you’ll want to find the Publish box on the top right side of your page. Choose the Update button.

Edits

It’s as easy as that.

Still having problems? Give me a call and I can help you out. 919-724-4417.

Or if you’re having larger problems: request a quote

Maybe you are the type of person that would rather read a guide book?  Check out this WordPress for Beginners book on Amazon.

 

Photography

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Photography, DurhamIt’s just a hobby for now, so don’t judge me too harshly. I’ve posted a new photography page here (Update, I’ve removed the page for now. I’m concentrating on web design).

I just wanted a place to showcase my work. I’ve used flickr, and that works okay, but since I’m already paying for this hosting service, I might as well put it to good use and start uploading some pics. I’ll be posting my new photos here as I take them. But that depends entirely on what I’m doing and where I am.

For me, photography is mostly a trial and error experiment. I’m the type of person who loves to figure stuff out, stuff that some people don’t have the patience for. And in that way, photography fascinates me. Like website coding, photography provides an immediate benefit, but you have to work at it and try to understand it to get the right shot.

Enjoy them, and of course, if any of my clients need some help with pictures, I’d love to help them out.

Durham to Orlando, and Back

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I recently took a week with my wife, and our friend, Mary, and drove down to Orlando Florida for a week of fun in the sun. I had great intentions of creating this amazing 10 minute vacation video. But then two things occurred to me.

  1. Nobody likes long vacation videos
  2. I don’t have the time to edit that much video (at least while I’m not being paid)

So I came up with this compromise using Apple’s iMovie.

Highlights (or lowlights depending on how you look at them) of the trip include Disney World, The Holy Land Experience, South of the Border, and hours and hours at the pool.