All in One Basket

Live!

Mandy — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:09:33 +0000

Claire’s new site is now live at Amaryllis Wedding Flowers. She’s still adding and adapting content, but is already getting a stack of new enquiries. Wordpress really does get those search engines working quickly – especially as we’ve not yet submitted the site anywhere as Claire is due to have a baby any day now. Good luck Claire!

Very Amusing!

Mandy — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:22:32 +0000

Well Google certainly picks up WordPress sites quickly. I’ve not submitted this site to any search engines (seeing as it’s very much a work in progress and I’m not sure where it’s heading yet!) but it must be being picked up somewhere as I’m getting a stack of comments – mostly to my “Adapting Colours” post.
Now, anyone who knows about these things will see that I’ve not mentioned anything complicated in that post. Those who don’t know about these things will see that I’ve probably not mentioned enough to get them started either. So all in all, a pretty useless blog entry, so why all the comments saying it’s “quality content”?! Well, it’s making me laugh anyway, so feel free to continue to make these random flattering comments about a less than mediocre blog! Maybe I’ll actually publish the funniest each week…
In the meantime, I’ve been working on a couple of sites, but more about those later this week.
Have fun!

The CMS solution!

Mandy — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:53:06 +0000

I’ve found a fantastic plugin that brings Wordpress much closer to being a full CMS system. TS Custom Widgets allows you to choose which pages and posts individual widgets are displayed on. Hoorah! Big thanks to that plugin developer!

However, despite it’s wonderfulness, it doesn’t allow me to hide the right side bar completely when I need to. For this, I need to do some more investigation…

mmm…I’ve worked out that it *can* be done, but it’s a bit messy, so I think I’ll stick with the two sidebars for now. Bringing more divs and even the sidebar call into the page posting takes away the slickness of WordPress! If anyone knows of another way or a good template with collapsible sidebar dependent on if any widgets are set to display on it, let me know about it!

More template tweaking

Mandy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:22:32 +0000

Changed a few bits on the template. Although WordPress’ Appearance Editor is fine for making minor changes, I prefer to use a text editor (TextPad) and FTP for more important things. For a start, it’s easier to roll-back if I change my mind or make a mistake, and also easier to copy sections of code to move them about or whatever!

I’d like to easily decide what’s on at least one of the sidebars depending on what page we’re viewing, so that’s my next challenge and would bring Wordpress capabilities nearer those of Joomla!

Getting going again

Mandy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:57:18 +0000

I got a bit distracted developing a site for a good friend of mine. She’s not finished adding content yet, but it’s here for those who are interested: Amaryllis Wedding Flowers. It’s my first “proper” WordPress site and I was pleased at how adaptable the template system was. Claire wanted rotating images as her background to the home page and I was amazed to discover this wasn’t too difficult to organise. She also needed a shop, galleries and various static pages. I’m not sure yet if she’ll actually use the blogging facilities of WordPress which makes my choice of software for the project a bit bizarre perhaps, but it was very easy to put together. Just like any project I work on, I’ve written an instruction manual for this site, and it is much smaller than one of my Joomla manuals.

Claire, I hope you like it!

http://www.aihosts.co.uk/amarylli/

Organising content

Mandy — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:13:13 +0000

There’ll be lots of steps to this!

Firstly, I’ve deleted all of the “links” in Wordpress admin. These were displayed across the header, but for now I don’t need any so have got rid of them.

Next, it’s time to edit, delete and add pages. This is where Wordpress works much better than Joomla for simple brochure style sites I think. The process for adding new pages and getting them shown in a menu is difficult for a new Joomla user to understand, although that software is probably more flexible in the long run. For Wordpress, just go to the “pages” option in Wordpress admin and it is all reasonably self-explanatory.

Adapting colours

Mandy — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:03:06 +0000

Next step is more css editting so that I can adapt the colours to match my logo a bit better. For this Firebug is really useful – allowing you to identify the code and colours you need to change. I use Textpad for making code changes but any text editor will do, just don’t be tempted to use a word processing software – Word will wreck your code! Don’t forget to upload changes via ftp.

Next step is to work out how to use Wordpress for a cms style site and add some content.

Changing the Logo

Mandy — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:28:38 +0000

A little bit more complicated!

Rocket Theme provide a good tutorial on how to edit the logo provided with the template. However, I already had my logo so wanted to use it as is (and besides, I don’t have Fireworks installed at the moment!). The template logo files are actually used for other parts of the template, and a section of that image shown in each place. I therefore editted the css to use my logo file in the logo position, and allowed it to continue using the template’s logo file for the other design elements. Bingo!

Installing a Template

Mandy — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:42:00 +0000

Just to get started with something heading in the right direction, I’ve installed the free Rocket Theme template, Afterburner. Again, very easy, just follow the links in the appearance section of the admin panel.

I also installed the Afterburner sample content. This fills out the template nicely so I can see what happens in each area, and motivates me to get my own content sorted out asap!

Next…get rid of the Afterburner logo!

Installation

Mandy — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:34:21 +0000

Well, that was easy. I started thinking that perhaps installation of Word Press would be beyond the average non-techy person when the instructions mentioned I’d have to actually edit a file – many open source software solutions use installation wizards now where everything is done for you, but really the knowledge needed for Word Press installation is useful for anybody delving into anything webby, so there’s nothing to lose from getting stuck in.

A quick rundown of what you’d need to know:

How to get into your hosting control panel.
How to create a MySQL database and user.
A basic understanding of FTP.
How to use a basic text editor.

I’ll try to expand on these points sometime soon…for now I need to work out how to make this site look a little prettier!