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Understanding CSS
CSS CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Its job is to control the presentation of a web page document, written in (x)HTML. The idea is that your web document, written in (x)HTML, contains the content and structure of your page, and then you apply the CSS to give the page colour and layout, keeping content separate from design. To understand more on this way of working I recommend reading SitePoint’s – What is CSS?. There are 3 ways in ...
Continue readingUsing the WordPress Lightbox
WordPress Coding & Design Since version 2.5 of WordPress, jQuery and its popular lightbox, thickbox, have been included in the WordPress files. Plenty of people are still using plugins to create their lightbox when they don’t need to now (although, of course some may prefer the design or additional control and options that the plugin may bring). First off you’ll need to include the call to jquery.js in your header as explained in enhance your blog design with ...
Continue readingThe Structure of a Web Page
Design & Coding Whether you’re setting up a new page or site from scratch, or trying to edit a free template, understanding the basics of the page you’re working on will undoubtedly make life easier for you and give you a greater control over the layout of your web pages. Just for clarification, when the word ‘tag’ is mentioned, it refers to a HTML tag which is a piece of code contained within diamond brackets eg. <p> for an ...
Continue readingEnhance your Blog Design with jQuery II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I explained a simple show/hide method with jQuery to allow you to declutter your sidebar. However, the show/hide methods are not very graceful, but now that you have a basic understanding of jQuery, we can look into the other methods available for you to try out. Sliding Rather than an instant show or hide, a sliding animation is much nicer. This is a fairly quick change on what we had last week. Instead of the code [sourcecode ...
Continue readingEnhance your Blog Design with JQuery
WordPress Coding & Design Recently I visited a blog site where the sidebar was so neat and tidy it looked great. There was plenty in the sidebar but thanks to a bit of simple JavaScript the ‘busy-ness’ was contained well. It was using a simple show/hide but worked very effectively. I’ve also seen it in use with hiding a comment form out of the way until it’s needed. JQuery JQuery is a JavaScript library that simplies event handling, animation, ...
Continue readingHow Important Is A Blog Design?
Blogging Photo by Shiny Things I’ve seen people ask in the past, should they launch their blog without a decent or final theme in place. They get varying answers, some say yes it’s fine, others say no wait. There are pros and cons for both of these answers. If you’ve already got a decent amount of content written then in my opinion you need to get that site up and running, into the search engines and start getting it known across ...
Continue readingAccessible Comment Form
WordPress Coding & Design I’m not a designer so the idea of designing my own theme doesn’t appeal to me, however there are plenty of free themes available which means I can have a decent looking site and use my time to actually write content for it rather than procrastinating over how it should look. However, the first thing I do when I download a new WordPress theme for my site is fix the markup. Unfortunately, whilst the themes look great they’re ...
Continue readingCreate a Magazine Style Theme II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I gave an example of how to create a magazine style theme. This method allowed you to have a main post followed by a list of titles. This week I’ll explain how to separate these on the page so that you can have a far greater control over your layout. The Latest Post Rather than using the WordPress loop to display the latest post in full, we can use the get_posts() function to grab the latest post and display it in full. To do ...
Continue readingCreate a Magazine Style Theme
WordPress Coding & Design A few weeks ago I wrote about how to create your own template for WordPress. A type of design growing in popularity is the Magazine style theme. Probably because it comes across as a more professional look and is maybe a bit less overwhelming to first time visitors, as it typically only displays the most recent post in full, and then lists previous posts. The first time I saw a magazine style theme was The Morning After from Arun Kale. There ...
Continue readingCreate a Contact Page Part III
WordPress Coding & Design I recommend you read Part I and Part II of this series if you haven’t already. In the previous posts on this subject, I’ve explained the basic page template and the validation that we need to do for our contact form. Finally we can deal with the actual emailing of the form content and then put it all together. Emailing the form content The theory behind this is to grab all of the information from the form, put it into a message ...
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