WPDesigner.com

The following links are my personal bookmarks to everything related to WordPress. Some will lead to more useful links for your WordPress needs. (more…)

It’s been days since I updated you on my the CSS gallery theme project. Welp, here comes the preview. The image to the right is a screenshot of just one of the color schemes for this theme.

As you can see, other than the fact that I’m still stuck in the minimalist phase, this theme puts content first. It doesn’t distract you from the sites being featured, unlike some galleries out there.

At the top is a simple, but straight forward horizontal menu. Under the content is pagination style navigation. You browse the site by selecting the page number that you want to visit. In the sidebar, there’s room for four 125 by 125 pixel banners (change to 6 or 8 banners if you like). Following the ads is the usual stuff like listing of categories. (more…)

WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 was released yesterday, August 27, 2007. It’s first release candidate will be available on September 17. From now until its final release on Monday, September 24, 2007, there will be a beta release for WordPress 2.3 on every Monday. While testing WordPress 2.3 Beta 1, there were several noticeable changes and additions:

Tags

The first obvious addition is the tagging system that was not available in previous WordPress versions. Tagging allows more room for organization when your simple list of categories isn’t going to cut it anymore. For details about this new feature, read Ryan Boren’s post, WordPress 2.3 Taxomony Schema.

Here are cropped screenshots of the tags input space and listing.

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It was a big surprise to see 1,021 subscribers when I logged into Feedburner this morning. I’ve been waiting patiently to cross the one thousand mark, but wasn’t expecting to cross it this soon, especially on a Friday. Tuesdays are usually when this blog gets the most readers. (Feedburner statistic is based on how many subscribers reading your content on the previous day.)

As you can see, the number of subscribers has been growing steadily, despite some minor glitches here and there. (more…)

What is it about August and redesigns? If you’ve been keeping up with the blogosphere, you know bloggers have been on redesign frenzies. Some did it for the right reasons and did it right. Some did it for the wrong reasons and created more problems for their readers. Even this blog went through a recent redesign. Here are several tips to guide your summer redesign.

Redesign Because You Need To
Do it to solve a problem. Don’t redesign simply because you want to. It’s short and simple, but this is the most important tip. My own blog needed a redesign because it was hard to use. For example, the search form was huge! However, no one used it because it was in the wrong location. (more…)

Don’t let your best content get lost in the archives. Use them to impress first-time readers. Here are two ways to put your best content forward.

First Method: WP-Sticky Plugin

If you publish multiple times per day or simply want to feature the best article of the week then install the WP-Sticky plugin by Lester Chan. It’ll allow you to feature or sticky the article that you want visitors to read first. It does this by letting you to pick which post to sticky then displays that sticky post before all the other posts on your page. (more…)

WordPress can be much more than a blogging platform. Thanks to its easy to modify template system and wide range of plugins, you can use it to power almost any type of site, a CSS gallery site for example. The next big WordPress theme I’ll be working on is a theme built to power a CSS or web design gallery site.

I spent last night browsing the top CSS galleries on the web and took notes of some features that I like. Here they are: (more…)

From Brian Gardner, Revolution is a premium WordPress theme built for WordPress powered sites that aim to not look like blogs. I understand that might sounds strange, but the demands for non-blog style themes have been around for a long time.

Nowadays, clients want to use WordPress as a total CMS (content management system), not just a blogging platform. Theme authors need an answer for that demand. I believe Revolution is that answer. (more…)

I recently finished the third part of my free e-book on how to create a WordPress theme from scratch. The third part is How to Code a WordPress Theme and I’m releasing it to beta-testers and subscribers. Yes, if you are subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed and are reading this from a feed reader then you will find a download link at the bottom of this post. (more…)

How To Slice A WordPress Theme is part two of my e-book on how to create a WordPress theme from scratch. (Check out part one.) It shows you how to merge all layers and save the areas that you want to use as images.

In related news: Part 1, How to Design a WordPress Theme, has been updated.

After reading all the suggestions and opinions, I’ve made a few changes to the this new version of Wpdesigner.

Here are the changes:

• added a favicon
• darker background color
• simple horizontal navigation, that looked like an Adsense Ad, converted into a tab-like navigation with a pop up effect on hover
• added RSS feed links to the top navigation
• borders around several elements that didn’t have borders
• alternating background colors for comments
• less cluttered entry meta area
• two Fam Fam Fam icons added to entry meta
• a softer red for link color

Now, I am aware that the old design is much better looking than this design, but uglying up my blog for a more simple and easy to use design was why I re-designed it. Maybe another web designer could improve usability without giving up all the graphics, but I don’t have the skills and time to do that, at this moment.

I’ll continue to tweak this new design to make it perform and maybe look better too.

Below are several items on my to-do list:

• add a logo – added my photo to the sidebar
• create a page dedicated to the best content of this blog
• add excerpts of most popular content to the sidebar or the footer
• customize the red blog description area to output different messages based on the area of the blog you are using
• add a color switcher for users that don’t like red

Layout bug(s):

• Horizontal negative margin – While implementing the pop up effect for the horizontal menu at the top, I came across an Internet Explorer negative margin bug. As far as I know, there’s no work-around or hack for this bug. Fortunately, the menu is visible and still works in IE.

I knew this re-design was going to be bright, but not this bright. Dang! It’s bright! Besides the brightness and that it’s less pretty than the last version, I like this version more than the last version because this version gives me a feeling of openness. Also, I re-designed (this time) for a more usable layout.

With this re-design, several things have changed about the layout. Instead of two menus, one on top and the other at the bottom of the header, Wpdesigner now has only one simple menu beneath the blog title.

The search form is easier to find; it’s sitting at the top right hand corner rather than within a header. Third, the theme thumbnails at the top are no longer there. Some of you told me that you simply passed over them to get to the blog posts so the theme thumbnails were actually useless on the home page.

Fourth, this design features 125 x 125 button banners instead of the 234 x 60 half banners for monetization. (Contact me if you’d like to advertise on this blog.)

The main color also changed, obviously. (Come over to the red side with Wpdesigner!) Do you prefer blue or red? What else about this re-design do you like or not like?

In other news: After two and a half years, Problogger is getting a facelift too. Read my Problogger design review (of the old design).