Creative and Expert WordPress Web Design Atlanta and the World
Some people like to bake and others are better cooks. I have to say I avoid baking because it is so precise. Forget the one pinch of salt and everything falls flat and you can’t fix it.
Good cooks are not afraid to experiment with adding their own magic to make their dish really great.
Cooking up a good website has similarities. A lot of people have websites that have most of the right ingredients but are not going to be winning the chili cookoff. They find that they are not [Read more...]
Now anyone can easily create a free, fully functional and ecommerce site in WordPress by ad
ding WooCommerce plugin to any WordPress.org website.
Whether you’re trying to sell just four digital downloads or 400 different t-shirts, WooCommerce has you covered. The free plugin includes most of the functionality stores will need, but WooCommerce also has a set of premium modules that will provide extra capability for more unusual needs.
This tutorial will walk you through adding the WooCommerce plugin to any WordPress theme and show you how to set-up the required fields to get your eCommerce site ready to start making money. Throughout this tutorial, you will see screenshots of the process of building an example ecommerce site using the default theme, Twenty-Twelve, as the base theme. [Read more...]
Using email to post to WordPress could not be easier. This method will be a great tool to use while traveling, when you don’t have access to a computer or to WiFi , or if you have a client who feels intimidated about going into the WordPress Dashboard to post.
With the Post by Email method, you can just email your blog post in. That’s right, you just write an email to a certain custom email address and the subject becomes the Title and the message becomes the body of the post. You can attach images which will go into your post as single images or galleries, if there are multiples. [Read more...]
This week there were several scares from hacking attacks on WordPress sites or plugins.
One of these was a well known and much used plugin, Social Media Widget which had some code put into it by someone who was working on it (accidentally or on purpose, we don’t know.) The code injected links to a spammy PayDay site that you would not have seen, but Google could have black-listed you for.
This was re-mediated fairly quickly and sites could continue to use this plugin after updating it which removed the injected link code.
The second problem was a bigger issue, a brute force attack by bots [Read more...]
If you are using “admin” for your user name on your WordPress site, you are a sitting duck to hacking attempts from Bots.
These automated attacks run a program to target vulnerable WordPress sites. If they can get into the site through “admin” they only have to figure out your password. It is not unusual for people to be using “admin” for their user name and “password” or “1234″ as their password. This is not good, people!
The most common reasons people get hacked are [Read more...]
WordCamp Atlanta 2013 was last weekend and was a great success. We had 450 attendees, four tracks ( beginner, user, designer and developer) and over 40 speakers. If you are learning to use WordPress or sharpen your skills, you should find a WordCamp in your area. They are totally volunteer run and we keep the ticket price very low to make it accessible for everyone.
In addition to being an organizer again this year, I gave two talks in the beginners track. One on Choosing Themes and one on How and When to Use Posts and Pages.
Here are my slides for the Theme presentation. The videos from the talks should be edited and ready to post in a couple of weeks. This year we got the pros to do it!
Here are 7 tips from my talk at WordCamp Atlanta 2013 on How to Choose Install and Customize a WordPress Theme.
1. Choose Open Source GPL compliant themes. WordPress is Open Source and no part of its code can be owned or sold or contain limitations on how it is used. When you buy a premium theme, you are buying a service-like membership or support rather than the theme.
2. When you are just starting out making sites, choose a basic theme to practice on like the default themes, and get familiar with how WordPress works without a lot of geegaw options and crazy sliders.
3. Your content is more important than your site design. You can have a beautiful site design but without great content that converts, you have nothing. There are plenty of very simple yet very effective websites out there. Check out Social Triggers for an example.
4. Make your content easy to see and read. Don’t choose a theme with a dark background and light text and make your font large enough to read. They say 16 is the new 12. But a minimum of 15 for body text is as low as I tend to go. This is especially important for mobile.
5. If you are going to customize your theme by changing the CSS and you do not want to overwrite your changes when there are updates for your theme, make your changes in a “child theme”, or in a custom CSS file provided by a plugin like JetPack.
6.. Learn to use Filezilla to ftp files from your computer to your hosting account and back. Before making changes to the CSS file you should back up the file that way if you make an error you can re-upload the original file.
7. Use the Firefox addons, Firebug and Firepicker to look at the CSS code that controls the look of particular elements on your website. Firebug can help you learn to make changes in the CSS code to create the changes you want to make site. When you are in Firebug you can test the changes and to make the change permanent, you will make it in the actual CSS file.
Learn ho
w to embed a YouTube video on a WordPress site–it’s easy. Videos posted to YouTube are a great source of exposure for your business and they provide valuable links back to your website. So if you don’t use them, you’re simply missing out. You can make an ad, upload a short promo, add tutorials, driving directions, footage of new products, interviews, and so much more–the options are endless.
1) Navigate to the YouTube page for the particular video you are trying to embed. (You can also find the embed options and code for a YouTube video embedded elsewhere on the internet by clicking the grey icon that looks like this: 
2) You can find the embed options on the by clicking “Share” and then “Embed” (pictured below). [Read more...]
AgentPress is a child theme of the StudioPress Genesis Framework. It is a solid choice for a theme for a real estate website as well as when you need a site to display a variety of types of directory listings. Below is an explanation of child theme, directory sites, and a tutorial on how to install and set-up AgentPress theme.
Benefits of Using Child Themes
To use AgentPress, you upload the theme to your theme folder and activate it, but before it will work [Read more...]
If you want to edit .css you should learn how to use Firebug. Firebug is a free open source Firefox add-on that is an essential tool for anyone wanting to customize a WordPress theme. It allows you to find the exact place in the .css code that has to be changed for a particular issue. With firebug, you can identify the precise location of whatever you intend to change and it even allows you to do and view the changes in real-time. Unfortunately, you cannot make a permanent change in Firebug but you can copy the code and go change it in your text editor like Programmers Notepad. Oh, and be sure to add the addon to Firebug, called Firepicker which makes it easier to actually pick a hex color and see the change right there.
Watch the Firebug tutorial below to learn how to use Firebug. This tutorial shows you how install Firebug and preview edits to .css (cascading style sheets).
How to Install and Use Firebug for Firefox (preview edits to .css) from Judi Knight on Vimeo.
Thinking about making the move to WordPress for your website? Learn more about the content management system, the benefits of moving to WordPress, and how to get started in this slide-deck, which will cover the pros and cons of moving to WordPress, the basics of installation, theme selection and basic customization, and an overview of what works best on WordPress sites around the web. I created this slide-deck for a presentation I gave to the National Student Electronic Media Convention put on by College Broadcasters, Inc.
