Here’s some of the types of questions I’ve covered recently:

• How to update the Featured Image on page or post.
• How to change the font size in the content on a Thesis site.
• Using the blogroll but only show it on the home page.
• Changing the number of comments shown in the Dashboard
• How to edit menus
• How to change backgrounds or headers or logos

I also fielded questions on moving sites to new servers, backing up sites, converting sites into WordPress and so many others. So I’m offering one hour sessions – where you can get one on one hand holding with your questions about your site. It’s personalized and specific to your situation.

I love being able to help this way – there’s nothing better than to see someone get more out of their site, or be able to grow.

Quality Tool has a brand new WordPress site built out on the Genesis child theme Associate. With a custom background and header, it matches the look of their print materials. The site also makes use of WordPress image galleries. If you’re looking for custom tooling or prototypes, check them out.

One thing I’m really glad to see is the change with permalinks. /%postname%/ will no longer be a custom setting that you manually enter. It will be a selectable option. This one is big because the performance issues associated with using /%postname%/ has been fixed.  For those who may have shied away from using that in the past: if you’re considering changing your permalinks, make sure you have redirects in place – test and make sure things are working if you change your permalinks.

Other improvements: drag and drop to upload media like images, pdfs, etc.  – this one will help lots of people.

See Mashable’s great in depth writeup. As always, when a new version drops, be sure to upgrade your WordPress site.

The Aussie X launched their new site just in time for their appearance on the Dragons’ Den. An HTML to WordPress conversion, we used StudioPress’ Genesis and the Associate child theme as the basis for the site and customized from there. The site is also using Gravity Forms and Cart66. W3 Total Cache helped the site weather the increased traffic during the show.

The gist was this: be aware of what plugins you are using on your site. Check out the plugin before installing, know what it’s supposed to do, check it’s stats, who wrote it, is it maintained, is it documented, is it current and will it work with the latest WordPress. There are a lot of good free WordPress plugins out there, but there are also a lot that will cause you problems. I also touched on premium plugins – they’re worth it for the development cycle and support.

Don’t  leave  unused plugins installed – clean up after yourself. Unused plugins that are still activated can slow things down and unused, un-updated plugins can be a security risk for your site.

Not all plugins play well with others, some may conflict with your theme, they can even slow your site down depending on how they’re written/coded.  To take a page from Carolyn Shelby’s presentation:  If you have a site, you should be familiar with enough  html, php, and the general workings of WordPress to be able to spot something not quite right. I’ll add, if you’re not, then you need someone on your team or that you can go to, to help you make the call.

Scott Hendison did a great overview of WordPress SEO by Yoast on the panel, and Ben Cook covered some of the reasoning on how to best use Categories and Tags in WordPress – and if you weren’t there, you missed Ben’s great Lego slides – I looked for the Panda one for this post, but didn’t spot it.

SEO and Performance

• WordPress SEO by Yoast
• W3 Total Cache

Social

• Socialize
• Share This
• Social Media Widget
• Simple Facebook Connect
• Simple Twitter Connect
• Google Plus Widget

Other Plugins

• Broken Link Checker
• Viper’s Video Quicktags
• Cookies for Comments
• Redirection (although I’m a fan of working directly in .htaccess)
• Login Lockdown

Premium Plugins

• Gravity Forms
• Wishlist Member
• BackupBuddy
• WordPress Mega Menu
• Cart66

I saw a few tweets that mentioned some other plugins, I’ll be checking those out – do you have any favorites?

It’s going to be a great event, if you’re there, come say hi!

This is a small site and we adapted their existing design using the Thesis theme. For SEO and best practices, all urls were kept the same.

This site is using StudioPress Genesis Theme and a customized Magazine child theme. Relationship Gold also uses Premise.

I’ll also be doing a full day workshop on the 10th – if you’ve been thinking of doing your WordPress site, or setting up your blog – I’ll be taking a limited number of people through the process, hands-on, step by step.  We’ll start with installation, theme choice, and cover SEO, customizations, backups and more – your technical and design issues tackled live. More on the WordPress workshop ->

Look for more on WordPress from me – I’ve got some top secret stuff in the works.

Tiling Background Image

Today, let’s tackle your background.

Sure you can use the Design Options and set the background color. And if you’re feeling really adventurous you can even check the box that adds a cool shadow effect to the site. (this keys off your background color to create the shadow effect)

But what about adding a tiling image to your background? This page has a custom tiling background, here’s how you can do it. (you can also do it for a particular post, more on that in a moment)

Enter custom.css – and a little bit of code. (don’t worry, it’s not hard to work with…)

First you’ll need an image to use as your background. Check out this site for generating background patterns: bgpatterns.com (warning this site can be fun and you might find you spent more time there than you intended) and download your background. This site’s backgrounds are nice – because they seamlessly tile to create a background. Small file sizes create really striking looks.

Got your background? Good. You can rename the file to something easier to work with – if you downloaded from the bgpattern site – it will be a randomly generated name beginning with patt_. You’ll need to ftp or upload it to your web server. It belongs in the wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/images folder.

Now for custom.css. Go to the custom file editor in Thesis and you should see the the custom.css file there ready to edit.

Here’s what you’ll paste in:

body.custom  {
  background:#F3F7FB url(images/wpa-clouds.jpg) repeat-x;
}

Now change the name of the image to your background image’s name. That works for all the pages on your site – but what if you want to assign a special background to a particular page? Thesis makes that easy, actually!  For example, say you have a page called “services”. You can apply a different background on this page by using this css, because Thesis adds a css class for each page of your site. (home would be home, contact would be contact, basically whatever you entered in as the page’s name in the permalink or slug field.

body.tiling-background-thesis {
 background:#F3F7FB url(images/patterntile.jpg) repeat;
}

If you wanted to – you could even apply different backgrounds to your category pages of your blog – the classes for these are created like this: cat_categoryname – so if you had a category called Beaches, it would be cat_beaches.

If you decide to apply this to a post, there’s one more step – after you’ve created your style, note what the class name is – that’s the part after the dot. Then edit your post, look in the SEO Details and Additional Style section for the  CSS Class field, add your class there (no dot) and update your post. That’s how I got the different background on this post! Easy!

There’s a lot more customization you can do with this system – but this is one of the simplest and easiest changes you can do to your Thesis site.  Have fun!