WPThemesPlugin.com

Changing Themes

anum — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 03:05:59 +0000

Even with all the themes out there in the market, we are never satisfied. Any theme we download is never complete although when we choose it, we make sure it is as close to what we want as possible.

Once we have downloaded it and put it into our WordPress, its time to look at it to see how we can make if fit our needs.

There are many and varied opportunities to change it by using various plug-ins and widgets to choose from.

The first thing we tackled after the set up, was the RSS feed as we wanted an accurate count.There were two options to choose from to alter the default, Feedburnercount and Feed count 12.

I chose the later as it looked and was easy to install. Once uploaded, there were several different options I could choose from, I went into the publicize area and made sure I checked the awareness API service. I chose where I wanted to put it, and I was ready. The theme I was using was an older one and sometimes the option I chose doesn’t work in that case you will need to use Feedburnercount.

If you wish to show how many subscribers you have you can do so by using the following bit of code.

Twitter

Do you want to display how many twitter followers you have? Rather than using the twittercountlet there is a plug-in you can use, which is called Tcounter. This uses the twitter API so make sure you have it. After extracting the file from the download, place it in the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory. After that it’s just a case of placing it where you want it viewed.

There are different ways of doing this, one of which is outlined on Sitesketch.

Sidebar

By using the plug-in Sidebartabs you can organize it as you want it to appear. To make it blend better with your theme you can then go to the relevant page on the WordPress plug-in directory and follow the instructions to enable you to alter the styles.

If you feel very adventurous, you can follow the instructions on WP Pro and build your own design of the sidebar. Be patient with yourself as it can be a learning curve.

The third option is to use a jQuery. This is fast and it looks good. You will find the full tutorial on the page as it shows you how to create the jQuery option.

Comments Area

Improve your comments area to make people want to interact with you. No extra plug-in is necessary with the up to date WordPress downloads. All you have to do is enable threaded comments. You also have the option of changing items around to suit the way you want to view it and CD Harrison has written an article explaining how to do this. As he has covered it so well I will just point you in the direction of his article.

You have now made a vast improvement to your overall theme, and made it more of your own.

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How to Customize the WordPress Admin Area

anum — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 02:57:48 +0000

WordPress becomes the worldwide use publishing platforms these days. Indeed, many individuals find it very interesting because of many features they have, that actually different from the other blogging sites. They are not the typical publishing sites with limited features only.

In fact, it has several styles available that are included in the WordPress setting such as pages, posts and most popular the customizing admin area. Apart from, it has newly updated content management system for keeping all the procedures intact. In fact, WordPress is considered as one of the excellent CMS existing today. It is because they have various features that cater for all types of users, whether you are a publisher, co-authors or average consumer. Moreover, they have systematized graphic interface, which needed for commands. Just like, for instance, in handling several posts, editing and Export feature.

However, the WordPress to some people is difficult if you don’t have any idea on the main features. Furthermore, we are making now this information a lot easier for our valued customer as well as customizing the admin area. This process can be done individually by following diligently the steps below.

Removing Meta Boxes with the use of Editing Pages

Usually, the user interface for editing and making post or pages is commonly used, especially in the Admin area. Sometimes, it is the visible features that you normally see when you open your blog. Although, some considered this clutter and needs to be remove. However, removing this will help you at the same time to download your theme a bit faster.

Moreover, if you don’t need the excerpts field or custom fields, you can either delete them from your site by using accurate snippet code. Usually, the snippet code is remove_meta_box() function. Then again, set all the parameters first before starting a new process. Actually, the first parameter will look like this: meta box’s HTML ID, but this is only the sample feature you want to remove. Apart from, you can use the Web Developer Toolbar if you want to determine your ID feature value in such section in which consisting of

. Just, for instance, your Custom ID is #postcustom, therefore, the parameters you’re going to use is postcustom. Then, your second parameter is the page, but actually it can be either of the following: link, post and page. Moreover, you can also delete the trackbacks checkbox and custom field as well as status of the comments.

Deleting Items from the Page Columns and Post

Typically, the WordPress Admin area can display all your content lists by using tables in grid or columns. However, if you change your mind and decided to delete the columns, you can actually do it by using add_filter() WordPress function. In fact, a filter is also functions that are looking for data being call from the source of database.

Customizing your Favorites Dropdown

Actually, favorites can be found at the top most of the Admin area bar as well as the new tasks. Including Comments and New Post, though you can still modify them if you want.

WordPress as we know it

anum — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 02:34:27 +0000

WordPress 3.0 is the new latest version of WordPress software. In this software, there are many features, which are not available in older versions of WordPress.

WordPress is first come to market in year 2003. WordPress is used for the management of the content on the internet, blogging in the net or any other place.

This software of wordpress is worldwide famous for its features, which is very helpful for the people and companies that have to make blogs on the net or at any other place.

There are many new versions of the wordpress is come to market every year since 2003. Every version has their different features. It is also used for the large sites of business for giving all the information about the business on the net which is also good for the business of the enterprises.

WordPress 3.0 is very good for the making of the full CMS website in place of just blogging on the site. This is also very useful for blogs as well as for website of big companies. WordPress has also been used by some large Companies such as Nikon, CNN, Pepsi, Wall Street Journal, etc. in the past. WordPress 3.0 is also encouraging another big company to use this to making CMS on their website. It gave extra features to the engineers to make their sites more attractive.

The New Menu Management is the latest feature of the WordPress , which is not in older version of WordPress. New Menu Management is default installation in this New Version because in previous version it can be done by creating dynamic menu by the use of plug-ins or its ninja skills. Which has never been easy to do but in this version it is so easy that anyone can do this. We can add pages; customize website links and categories with the help of WordPress 3.0. It can be done by the use of custom website option in the menu bar of the WordPress. With the help of Custom Website links option, we can link direct to another website. This version is user friendly.

In the previous version of WordPress creation of a page is difficult but in WordPress 3.0, we can create pages or customize our pages as per the post. This is the most important feature which is very helpful for the CMS of the websites of big enterprises.

WordPress MU is the most known version of the WordPress before this. This is worldwide known for its features. It allows us to make two or more websites by using an admin panel.

It is very useful for one who wants to have more than one site and want to get log in is done by the user for just only once. It saves time of the net user, and it gave all the information about the sites of the enterprises. This feature is also available in WordPress 3.0 in much simplicity.

In the end, WordPress is the most helpful version of WordPress, which has come in the market untill now.

Get rid of unnecessary calls on your server

anum — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:18:41 +0000

There are certain applications on your site that you can and really should pass on to a third party to manage. By doing this you prevent unnecessary calls on your server making the use of bandwidth that your site is taking a whole lot smaller and therefore faster as the server doesn’t get overloaded. It is something doesn’t think about until your server demands that you pay more as you are causing heavy loads. If your site becomes very popular these bandwidths increase exponentially. While that is fine in some ways in others its not. If your bandwidth is causing blockages it means that it will also be far slower loading. So consider off loading some items that are actually both taking up too much of your time and your bandwidth.

RSS Feed

For example are you doing your own RSS feed? Rather hand it over to one of the services that specialize in this like Feedburner. This is a Google owned product which has recently been taken over by them and is a good way of saving your site from constant call by places like technorati where they are constantly looking for update. Google will know when you have updated your blog because there is an automated ping from WordPress so they will check and update. It all then works together as the feed doesn’t come off your site except for the Google draw. This is then sent to you Rss list via Googles servers.

This is one that works on dynamic pages. Most of the smaller ones work on static pages.

It is the better of the feeds and the one I would say would probably be best suited to your blog as it is well integrated with WordPress.

Site Search

Rather than use your own site search plug-in or panel ship it out to one of the search engines Google has provided you with the means to use their code to do a blog search with the insertion of an API key. You will need to join Google to obtain this but that is simple and if you already have a Google account you can use that to log in.

Yahoo has a similar search facility called Boss which works in much the same way. The difference is it doesn’t display ads and it is far better integrated into your blog. This is the one I personally would go for.

If you are using a lot of jQuery tools for things like slideshows and other Ajax features it would be advisable to make use of the Google Ajax Libraries API. Slideshows and other items that are run by the jQuery and other similar tools draw a lot off your site. Google uses a network to distribute content and as a result the closest place to the person requesting the data will spring into use. This not only saves the load on your server but it will be a whole lot fast for the user.

There you have lightened your load quite a lot from your server.

iPhone Applications To Improve Your Phone Experiences

anum — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:49:23 +0000

Iphones are part and parcel of our lives nowadays and one wonders what they will come up with next to extend the applications that these phones can do. I read recently that because of these phones the point and click cameras have had a sharp decline in sales. I wonder how many people have turned off the internal tracking and marking of photos in their phones. It is one of the features that is not so good if you have a stalker on line. This can be a very dangerous feature as it documents where you are and pinpoints your whereabouts. Be aware of the fact when you post your photos online. Your whereabouts and your possessions and if you connect it to the fact you are going to be away can all make you a target for burglars.

The first application we are going to look at is Evernote for iPhone

This application allows you to take photos and also record voice notes which you can then recall to refresh your memory. You can of course also write notes. You really need to read you notes that came with the phone to find out about safety.

Omnifocus

This application gives you the ability to keep track of your business with phone touch ease. You can synchronize all your applications with your phone and your Macs to be able to all work together by using any one of the server applications like Mobile me or a webDav server. You can change the mode in the application with just a tap on the screen. You will need to set these up to suit you but once set up it’s merely a case of a tap. You can even making a map of where you want to do things and it will tell you when you are in the right neighborhood to do something. For instance if you have a shopping list and tap on the phone while close to a shop, it will point out the closest shop for you to do your shopping and give you your shopping list.
It has a full search function where you can search through it for what you need.

Fring

This application allows you to do free video calls and live chat to all types of phones like Nokia, android and other iPhones. It is a new kind of social streaming media with the ability to catch tweets and facebook new updates. It combines all your social media into one. This might not be a good thing. Make sure you have very good antivirus and a good antispam on the phone.

PixelPipe to make your phone the latest in iTunes

This application links you through iTunes to enable you to download the application. Once you have downloaded it, you can use it to share photos on applications like Flickr and all the other major photo sharing apps including Twitter and WordPress.

Air Sharing

This application allows you to use your iPhone as an External drive. You can move files from your phone to your phone and visa versa. It can be used as a wireless drive to your pc.

Load up your Arsenal of Tools

anum — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:53:02 +0000

As web designers it’s always useful to find new online tools we can use to help us in our work. Often we don’t really have time to browse through sites to find these items and rely on people to point them out to us. There are only so many hours in the day and designing takes a lot of our time and thoughts. Therefore it is all the more important to make note of new tools when they get pointed out to use. Sharing these tips on where to find things is a great way of giving to fellow workers on line.

A few that came fall under my gaze recently that I thought I would point out to you so that you can make use of them too.

Fontstructure

Font structure requires you to have an updated Adobe flash player. Here you can find a full gallery of fonts. You are required to sign up to use them but it is free and has been sponsored by Font Shop. There is also a Font structure tool which you can use on the site to play round with how you want to show your fonts. It’s rather a neat way of taking a font into a drawing element and editing it to what you want to show.

FromaColor

This is an adobe product. What you can do with this is color your themes and thus create themes as well as share them. There is an online tool which you can use to do this. Again it is a requirement to have Adobe flash installed. I know a lot of people don’t like flash because of the dangers of hacking attacks but most of these sites do require it. Once can always turn it off with your firewall in between times.

Photo Editor on Line

Presented to you by Pixlr this is a pixel editing tool which you can use for photo editing.
Somewhat similar in the way it’s laid out to Photoshop, it performs some of the basic function you would find in Photoshop. It is one of the many photo editing tools on line.

Color scheme designer

This tool is great for helping you mix and match your colors so that your scheme blends perfectly. All the tools are there just waiting for your experimentation. You have a color wheel and the pad waiting for you. Adjustments are possible and the presentation can be complete. You can place your colors in blocks of light or dark and mix and match all you want.

Typesetter

This is an online site for you for using various types of font. All of the standard ones ar there and you can also add your own personal ones. To be honest I can’t say it worked very well for me but then I tend to have a good tool on my pc so maybe I am just fussy.

TypeNavigator

Another font shop tool. This makes identifying the type you want to use easy. When you see a particular font you like on the web this site makes it easy to get the name and the font. It’s a very useful tool.

Twitter yourself into a better state

anum — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 11:18:40 +0000

A fact of daily life Twitter is often the first thing people do when anything news worthy happens. In fact it was remarked recently that someone was totally horrified to see how many people grabbed for their cell phones to twitter a tragedy instead of going to help. If it’s a sign of the times it’s a sad statement for humanity.

Twitter can be made for more effective for your own use if you do a few tweaks to it.

If you have several friends and people you tweet with about a certain subject use a grouping function so you can easily see tweets on a particular subject. This is a facility that is available and often not used. Create your groups and move the people into groups.

Hashtags # have been talked about a lot recently and making use of them is a good idea either by associating it yourself to a tweet or picking up the one that someone else has already associated it. What this does is associate a keyword tag to a tweet.
You can also auto complete other tweets by using things like the @ to auto complete a word.

Use text links by pointing the receiver at the article rather than providing the URL. This saves considerably on your number of characters used. To do this you need to enable the hyperlink facility.

Couple your tweets with the reply this will give you a way of actually following the conversation. This is what is called threaded tweets.

Now that you have grouped people you can enable group tweets by enabling double@ for a group tweet. This can save you having to tweet a number of people individually about the same subject.

The Hover principle can be used on your twitter as well as your blog by using tooltips.

This is an interface that allows people to see more info about the tweeter by the little info box that attaches to the nic. It’s another way of getting more info far more quickly than to having to log in and view the profile. This helps spread more info about yourself so that you can have an interesting little bio up there that will make people want to follow you and also visit your blog.

You can have twitter feed in your side bar to show not only the replies and Hashtags but all relevant current tweets. By using the right hand sidebar for your tweets you are using one of the eye hotspots of your blog.

Make yourself a tweet page on your blog where you can display all the tweets which have your twitter name. You can even use some of the great ways there are to display them that have been made available by some of the newer plug-ins. It is nice to organize them in a way that will give the reader a thread they can read without having to jump from one area to another. This is a great way to extend your followers especially if people find your quotes and link to them. This will increase your follower base exponentially.

What is The World Coming To? Phone bloggers!

anum — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:50:18 +0000

The phone and internet connection seems to be growing at an alarming rate. If you don’t have an iPhone or a Blackberry you are in the dark ages. They forget what damage that they can do but I guess they are here to stay. More and more plug-ins are being developed for these phones as add ons that can improve your phone and internet experiences. The use of these phones to get on line seems to be the latest thing for the net. That said lets get right to showing you what they are. These are all of use to you if you use phone applications in your blogs.

WordPress for Iphone

This application enables you to write posts directly on your phone and upload including photos. This means you can be available for you blog even when you are away from you PC. You get full support for both hosted wordpress as well as the self hosted option.

Another Iphone application. ShapeWriter

This application allows you to send emails using their keyboard as well as store all the needed notes. There are a full series of help notes to teach you how the application works. Top right of the screen is your start point. This enables you to type up your emails. This program soon recognizes the words. A secondary key panel is used for punctuations and other symbols.

Your Twitter phone.

This is an application that enables you to both read and post your tweets direct to you Twitter account. Means you are never far away. People don’t need to even need to realize you are talking from your Iphone.

Jott for your iPhone.

This is a little different to the rest of them as what it does is turn your voiced thoughts into text on your phone for you to send as messages. It is a very good feature for someone who has any difficulty with sight. It also saves you from having to type on those tiny little letters. I always find myself having to back track as I have typed the wrong letter. That can be kind of a pain especially as the screen is so small.

ByLine.

This is a free with ads application or you can pay the $3.99 and have no adverts. This means you get constant updates on news from both websites and blogs direct to your iPhone. Google has a Reader account which you can subscribe to which is a free product and this will allow these sites to come though to you. These include items like Rss feed as well as Atom feeds. The feed is basically automatic and also allows you to browser while off line. This means that even when out of range on Wi-Fi you can still get the feed. It will also mean you don’t need to worry about the areas where you are in a no receive area as the news can also be stored in full.
This application is fully integrated with Twitter as well as Instapaper and Read It later.

Ways to be Search Engine Friendly

anum — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 06:11:56 +0000

Being Search Engine friendly is an extremely important part of your website or blog. If the search engines don’t find you or don’t like you, you are basically going to land on page 9999999 if you appear at all. As you can see from that it is important to grab all the info available and get yourself both seen and found.

The old fashioned methods of submitting yourself to the search engines and hoping they will list you are dead in the water nowadays. You need far more likely to be found methods.

We are going to tackle the ways to make your URL a little friendly than the structure that currently appears in WordPress. If you do this your chances of ranking higher in Google are so much better. Every little tweak count in the ranking’s game.

Head over to the URL option’s page. This is sometimes called the Permalink page. You will find this in your WordPress Admin Panel. Scroll down the options in the Permalink until you find the custom link or structure. Find the documentation. Choose the structure that is:

The reason we choose this one is because it isn’t going to be a totally static site. If it were you could put the .html on the end.

You now have a URL that will contain both the category as well as the title. This means that Google will see you as real and with some knowledge to impart.

Now don’t forget to save your changes and then head over to .haccess to see the changes that have been accomplished. It is best to start your website this way, as this means you will be picked up as such on the web when you first get indexed.

This is just the start of your SEO setup. You also need to download All in one seo pack.
Install this plug-in and once installed make sure to check the alteration you made above to make sure it hasn’t altered it in any way.
Make sure all your alt tags for your photographs are optimized to the best of your ability. By this I mean make sure that the description in the tag is a good well labeled description relevant to the website. This way the alt tag will show up and be found by Google. They pay a great deal of attention to Alt tags.

Your personal SEO duties

While you have optimized as best you can on your actual site your work for SEO doesn’t end there. It is an on going business of article writing and posting. Not just on your own blog but on blogs of others in a similar category to your own. Post to Twitter and Facebook and other social network links. Make sure you put your free link on the Google Maps so people will find you there. All this helps to get you placed on Google.

Modify Your Theme to Suit Your Purpose

anum — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 05:51:47 +0000

Basic WordPress themes, especially free themes, often need to be modifies to suit your purpose. Luckily this is very easy to do when you know what you want.

With the amount of plug-ins you have available on WordPress there is always something to suit your purpose. There are the few that you just have to get but most blogs will discuss them I am looking at the more out of the way type of plug-ins.

Some of the options available to you

For most of these you will need to understand some coding. These tend to be hacks of what is already in WordPress but that you can alter to suit you a little better.
Say now you only wish to display particular categories in the menu so you want to take some of them out but not the others this little snippet of code works wonders.

Changing your Drop down menus

If you have to have stuff that you need to change on your menus you can do this with
some alterations to the codex if you want to make the changes it’s a good idea to read the relevant section in the WordPress Codex

This bit of code should help your to do some of the changes you want.

If you want to exclude the display of some categories, you can do so with the subsequent code by altering the exclude number you want taken out of the loop.

Mostly this one isn’t needed because usually the very recent posts are automatically display but if you want to make sure you can put this code in to make sure a particular post is shown in a particular category. For example if you want it displayed on your home page area.

To be category specific use this code.

If you want certain areas excluded from going out on your RSS feed use the following.

There are hundreds of hacks you can use and by going through the codex you can learn a whole lot about WordPress and how to set them up. These are just a few of the items you can do by altering the code. There are a whole lot more you can do by using the different plug-ins. And the function of WordPress can be done to suit your particular theme like it was tailor made and just for you. It can take days if not months to go through all the items that are available and unfortunately we really only see the ones that get written about on the net. Most people don’t take the time or the trouble to go through them one by one and try them out. It’s a pity really as so much good work can get lost when they aren’t used and continually upgraded to suit the latest WordPress update. More and more people really need to get involved looking at all the widgets and plug-ins to make sure they are actually made use of. I know that the original person who wrote the code is probably using them and updating them for their own use but that need for that code is probably not even seen by someone who needs it desperately.

Limitations needed

anum — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 05:16:16 +0000

After you have been on WordPress for a while you will start to see your archive section filling up and showing more and more.

As this is actually a waste of space because you can make your own archive page and show things in a far better fashion than filling up the side bar, it is a good idea to do some clean up.

You need to make that space become a far more useful item in your blog rather than showing old posts that are probably way out of date.

To fix this problem you can put in code that will limit the archives you have on display in the sidebar.

You can change the code from this, which is pretty standard in themes.

To read like this.

Change the number to the number that you actually wish to show.

Now if you want to include a page in your categories to show your archives with a pretty good write up and also picture thumbnails, there is a great way of doing this.

The snazzy archives plug-in is a great tool for achieving something a little different in the way of archives.

With this plug-in, you have a whole page of archives, which feature as both a write up with the archive number as well as a thumbnail as I said. There are several layouts available and the effect is very good. I particularly liked the carousel way of showing the relevant achieves. It seemed so unusual but at the same time effective. If you want to show them all together, the full page with the write up and the photo is probably the best way. If you want to do it by month, you could probably do it as 12 different pages. That is as one page for each month of the year.
There are still two more ways of doing it with this plug-in but they are in the experimental stage. One is with clouds and the other is with flash. Vladimir Prelovac is such a pro at what he does you really can’t go wrong.

Should you decide you want to do your own thing without a plug-in you can always create your own archives page. This is an extremely efficient way of doing things and actually scores you points with search engines as they can scroll through far more easily. Not only the search engines find it easier but so do your visitors. If you are going to do this make sure you do it in detail.
Making an archive page should be done in .php. First thing to do is make a blank doc. Name it as the blogarchievs.php for which you need to make a template just for it.

This shows WordPress it’s a different page.

Now create the necessary elements to it including the month by month and the tags as well as the categories.

Your code for months would be like this.

Also list by category to make it easier for the visitor.

Now save the page and place it in your templates folder. Then add a new page in your admin panel. Don’t forget to change the template name to the new template under the templates option. Link it into your navigation.

Let the Artist in you “Play”

anum — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 04:07:49 +0000

Dependent on what your likes and dislikes are, there are several different ways you can look at the headers on some of the WordPress themes.

The biggest problem with a write up like this is the fact that good bloggers change their themes and headers pretty regularly so it might not be there any more.

With the result, the photo shown here might not be the one on the website any longer.

Matt Mullenweg

The first one is the header on the theme of Matt Mullenweg, who was the original developer of WordPress. This gentleman’s profile reads like a who, who of the internet. However, the actually graphic which is a gif file at the header of his blog is an interesting mix which includes his name. Interestingly he has chosen his name to include the country extension to round of his name. http://ma.tt

Number two in my list is Web Designers Wall

Again this is a graphic and a gif. It was designed by Nick La. It is one of the best on the web as far as easy on the eye is concerned. It is well balanced and doesn’t hit you in the eye but gives you a sense of business efficiently.
No harsh contrasts are in the design, but you have many colors without it being over busy.

Third on my list is Web Designer Depot

This design was created by Radim Malinic. It is in a jpeg and it is a little large in file size probably because of the strong colors used. Decreasing the colors would alter the effect of the design. Although it was created as a graphic, the final save was done in jpeg probably to save in a smaller format as a lossy format is a lot smaller in pixels.

A blog for Ayaka Ito

The creator of this blog is a media designer, and you can see why. This is more than a header it is the complete page. It is truly brilliantly done. This young lady is definitely going to go far. I really liked the work she displayed on her blog.

Another lady this time Deborah Cavenaugh

For the second time, it’s not just a header it’s a full designed page. She has used her talents well with the soft colors in this design. This is another really good header from a true artist, correction page.

A design studio is the next one up Ndesign.Studio

This again is a soft design. It’s just a pity they didn’t size it properly to the page as you can see the page on the left should still be going somewhere as it has the cut off effect. I know its Nick La again, but I was a little disappointed that he didn’t check that. And yes Nick we do notice.

The next is Jason Bradbury

This is a bit slow loader because it is interactive. It’s a bit on the bold and brazen side for me but the design itself is good. He is obviously a keen game player with all the videos he has on his blog. I am a little undecided on this one.

WordPress Plug-ins to extend capabilities

anum — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:45:49 +0000

Every now and again we need to go through our list of plug-ins for WordPress to make sure we have the ones we need. It is a good idea to collect and organize them for ease of use when they are required rather than to have to hunt for them when you need to do a particular thing on your blog. This way you also get familiar with how they work prior to having to the job that requires immediate attention. I recently went through the list and downloaded some that had been updated and some that I hadn’t seen before..

WP-DB-Backup

Backing up WordPress and your data files is always important. With the internet so prone to attack you can never tell when your site might be hit. While we all try for the very best security there are times when something slips through. This is a time when it is vital to have your backups ready. Instead of having to recreate the site from scratch all you have to do is log in and upload your replacement with the backup. I have several different versions of backups and it’s a good idea to do them often. You can even have this one sent to you by email which means you can hold it on yet another server. It’s always important to hold the information in more than one place. Although the chances of being hit in more than one place are remote, one can never be too safe.

Tidy Up

Scripts of your source code can become extremely untidy and unwieldy and it’s a good idea to run Tidy up to clean up your code and make sure its optimized. In addition to uses the Tidy conversion tool from WC3 which means it validates your XHTML.
This automatically does an update of your database with the new clean data.

Form Builder

Forms are a part of the internet life nowadays. It is far easier to have a form on your site than delete 600 spam emails a day. Form Builders enables you to build even really complex forms without knowing how to code. There are even pre-made forms on this that you can use just by changing a few items. There are all sorts of built in sections to prevent people from spamming which is an excellent idea. It can also be used for several different languages. With this plug-in forms are built quickly and easily and cam be easily inserted into your blog. I would recommend you to always use one for your means of contact.

Theme Preview

When you are building a theme it is annoying to keep having to activate it which means it’s live. Wit Preview you can now view it prior to going live. It is an excellent alternative.

WP Debug

WordPress might not have many bugs but when you have one you really need to know what is going on. With this plug-in you can see behind the walls and get to the basics of what is needed to be fixed.

Is WordPress Your Home from Home

anum — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:16:44 +0000

By giving you a small clue to the biggest part of your new life, we are going to take a little look at the innards of WordPress.org. I don’t mind telling you that blogging can take over a big part of your life once you get started.

To start correctly you really need to understand how the basic platform works and what you can find in various sections of the basic program and what you might have to look for in other plug-ins and widgets. WordPress is the ultimate in mix and match.

Let’s look at WordPress from a newcomer’s point of view.
For that we need to have WordPress installed either on your pc at home or on your host on the World Wide Web.

If you want to install it on your own PC you will need to install a server packet on your PC. You can use either Xampp or Wamp as your server on your PC and then install WordPress. You will need to download the WordPress file.

Now you need to install this file on your PC or on the host file. I am going to install on a host server, and I am going to use Hostgator as an example of a host server as that is where I mostly go with domains. It’s inexpensive and it allows you to pay on a monthly basis.

Once you have your hosting account and your domain name, which has been pointed to your servers you need to log into your account. Ok Log into your Host and go to the panel to find the “smiley face” of Fantastic de Luxe in the software services.
Click on it and then go to the left hand side. Find the WordPress link. You are now going to install WordPress on your domain. Next find the domain name and access your domain name data and choose both a password and a name for this.

Remember to make and keep a note of these passwords and names. Do not use the same names for everything but make a special file where you keep all your info. I would also suggest that you either keep these on a remote server as well or write them in your diary offline. This way if your PC crashes you wouldn’t have lost them all. Believe me it happens. Now we need to do the Base configuration. This is where we choose what identity we are going to use in our posts as well as the email id and the domain name of the blog. Once you have that all filled in, click on the install. Send the email for all this info to yourself and one off your pc email address. (That’s a backup).
The install can take a few minutes so be patient. Once it’s installed, we will log in using the name and password we entered earlier. You should land in your dashboard.

Ok set up your dashboard in WordPress now and find the theme you want to add.
Now you need to have an FTP uploader. I use one I purchased called WS_FTP_home but a free one that is available is FileZilla.

Upload your main file for your theme. Go to appearances in the dashboard and click on Add new theme. It will ask you to upload your chosen theme. Upload the zipped file you have downloaded when you choose your theme. Now click on install.
You should now continue installing whatever modifications you want to get into your theme.

Big boys Choose WordPress

anum — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:18:29 +0000

When one thinks of WordPress, by and large, the public consider it a little company’s platform to do things easily and without too much trouble but in actual fact you will be extremely surprised to learn that far from being the little person’s blog this platform is used by many quite large corporations for their blogging platform.

Yes the famous companies do blog. And they are learning more and more that blogging pays better than those huge adverts in newspapers and magazines.

Blogging is a medium that the small man and the man in the street tend to pay more attention to as it is not conceived as an advert. When someone gives you advice in a blog this tends to be more regarded as an advice rather than pushing of a product.

Let us take a look at some of the big guys that are using this platform for their blogging.

Ever Considered where eBay Blogs?

Yes eBay is on WordPress. EBay uses it for EBay Ink, which is situated on http://ebayinkblog.com where you will find both a twitter link and a blog showing you how to set up your eBay selling account. This obviously is a full blown advert, but it works because people trust blogs.

Yahoo also uses WordPress

Yahoo uses its blog to display its company achievements mainly. This is more company oriented than global news, and they use it as such. It’s not the headline news stuff that you will see on the main search engine page. It’s about their internal company achievements and its quite interesting read.

Digg

Yes Digg uses it too. They use it to blog announcements about changes to their programs and things like that. It seems to be done via subscribers.

Ford

Called the Ford Story this blog is about people who have purchased Fords as well as any question people want to ask about Fords. And yes its on WordPress.

Wall Street Journal

The big boys like WordPress that is obvious. It’s so easy for them to set up and monitor by just having on their desktop or on their phones.

Sony

Sony has a blog here too. They call it the Sony makes believe. It has video snippets and the like on it. It is probably aimed more at youngsters and gamers than the older marketeering blogger.

People Magazine

This is an interesting magazine style blog with lots of news on all sorts of subjects. It is obviously aimed at getting you to buy the magazine as it is on the same sort of theme.

Samsung

A basic do gooder site where the company has good things to say about things they are doing as the community service. Though it is interesting to see what they are doing the actual presentation gives you the impression of let us show you how good we are to everyone. One thing I think they need to remember is to use bigger type. It is difficult for older eyes to read that tiny script even with glasses on.

Basic Function in Out the Box WordPress

anum — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:05:29 +0000

WordPress as it is downloaded already contains all the basic functions you need to run the platform. It’s a great way of getting yourself online and blogging without the real need to understand a whole lot of tacky stuff like code and various languages. Of course if you do understand a little of it, it is a great help, but it really isn’t a necessity.

We are going to take a look at the basic functions that the WordPress platform offer you in its out of the box setup. Once you know what is there you will better understand what you might still want to look for in the plug-ins and widgets that are situated on the website of WordPress.org.

Do not make the mistake of thinking these can be used on workpress.com. That is a completely different operation where you are actually using their hosting service rather than using your own domain name and your own host. The freedom that wordpress.org gives you is the ability to alter and change the themes and abilities that the program can give you.

Functions

The first function we are going to look at is Navigation.
This is the basic navigation of the site. Although this has been built in, there is a new plug-in available which extends this function and allows you to do far more with it.
The Basic function allows you to set up the pages as you wish them to appear. By default they will appear in alphabetical order. Your posts are done by alphabetical order as well. Remember posts and pages are two different things. You can change this by choosing the sort-column item. Here you will probably find 7 different options.

* Post-title – Sort alphabetically (default value)
* Menu-order – Sort by page order
* Post-date – Sort by date of creation
* post-modified – Sort by the time last modified
* ID – Sort by page ID
* Post-author – Sort by the page author ID
* Post-name – Sort alphabetically by post slug
You then have 7 different ways of making the pages order appear.

How you display your info

Called blog info, this shows how your info was input for that particular blog. This is useful if you use the same theme on many different blog sites. It will give you the blog name, the email address and a description of the blog in question.

Next up is the Sites URL

This is one of the functions as well. Here you will find the various URLS that are used for your particular site. This includes extension like the logo you use as well as any images used. You can obtain the theme’s URL as well in this manner, you would use the Template- URL selection to find this, and it enables the use of the same theme on many sites without worrying about a conflict.

Similarly, you can obtain the RSS feed link and link it in.

Content on your blog

Until you start actually using your blog not much will show, but word press is creating a loop to connect all the different items. If, for example, you want to show a connection to a different post on a different page jQuery would come into operation. This is your way of connecting the various pages together by creating a category and putting them all together.

You can then display posts by category as well. Should there be any posts you want to exclude from showing you would use the minus sign in front of the id of that post.

Are You Ready To Publish

anum — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:52:57 +0000

After a while of working on your WordPress and getting all the bits and bobs that you need to fix and plug it. There will come the day that you are almost ready to publish. This is the time when you make your final decision as to what you are going to do on your blog. Is it purely a social interaction or are you going to monetize it by putting on ads either of your own or using Google ads.

Monetizing your blog

Personally, I would go for my own ads as you can sign up for programs that are connected to what you intend blogging about. These programs then pay you when someone actually buys after clicking through your ad. It might take a while before this starts happening but don’t give up. People tend to look, see first.

For example, if you are writing a blog about Cricket and have a few ads down the side for cricket related products like bats and shoes, etc. People, who are interested in cricket will make up the large percentage of your visitors and as a result when they need something will probably come back to your site to click on the link, or if they have clicked while they were there they will have a cookie already installed in their system and when they go to the site, you will be credited with the sale.

Once you have hit the publish button you need to make it visible to the world. You do this in the WordPress admin section. Go to settings and then to privacy. Now select visible to all. If you want to keep it private and available to family and friends only, click block search engines.

It is now time to use your twitter, Facebook as well as other social media websites and attach the link to your website to your name. Do not spam people. There is no harm in telling a few what you do but never spam. Look for other people with the same interests and on twitter click to follow them. 9 times out of 10 they will read your profile and follow you back if it is something they are interested in. Now is the time to build up relationships with folks. If they have a website or blog, go on and visit them there. Make carefully thought out comments on their blogs. If they get to know you this way they will start to visit your blog too. Be patient. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Start writing articles which you can submit for syndication. You won’t be paid for these but with your name and your web address on them, you will find more visiting. If they visit and like what they see they will be back. It is seldom an overnight success, but it will build up slowly. What you need to do now is get backlinks preferably one way links from others either in your niche or from blogs about a subject such as yours. Sometimes, you can get them by going on and finding high ranking sites, which have blogs where you can do a guest post, which allows you to attach your link. Try to get ones with rank 5 and above. 10 with that kind of rank will do more good for your blog than 500 that have no standing.

A Variety of Plug-ins For WordPress to make you Take Notice

anum — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 08:07:48 +0000

A new source of plug-ins for WordPress is always interesting to look at. The ingenuity of developers is a delight to behold. This is no exception I have a collection of new plug-ins that range over the spectrum. This time the range is extremely interesting as we go into areas not often examined.

Language translations

This plug-in gives your blog the opportunity for your visitors to translate your blogs into 52 different languages. Just imagine how many extra people your blog will be able to be read by if all the content gets translated. Its just so interesting when you think about it, most of us write in English but what percentage of isn’t actually English when the most spoken language is I am told Spanish. And that is just a small percentage of the world population and now this plug-in offer’s to translate into their own language automatically. It is available to download from WordPress and works with 3.02

WordPress WPML Multilingual CMS

Similar in operation as the last one but it apparently turns the actual site into a multilingual webpage. This has a full CMS navigation with all sorts of things like sidebars and drop menus.

qTranslate

This is another plug-in for languages which is a little simpler than the previous two. This will translate the site into a completely language translated site and they suggest using a separate URL per language. As you write, so this plug-in translates it. You have some languages already built in. Others are also available.

Indoeurropean

This translates a whole lot more languages and also has a no-follow rule in the code so you don’t loose you page rank. This actually is an important factor. Seems to have good ideas and might be a good way to go for your translation. With the amount of people you are missing in the world by not translating you really do need a plug-in to do translation.

Xili Translation

Another translation plug-in but it is a “on the fly” translator. But the actual theme has to be checked for the languages. You need to make sure your theme is “internationally compatible”

Buddy Press

For this plug-in you need to use WPML API language. It uses this plug-in to perform the actions of the translation and links the plug–in to the language of choice for the searcher. You need to switch the language director on in the in WPML. There is a language switch in the menu bar of Buddy Press.

Transposh

This can be a Buddy Press integration and also translates link Tags and titles.
There are 57 supported languages with this plug-in and it is said to increase your exposure for SEO.

Mlanguage

With this plug-in you need to tag the various languages and then it displays the various language flags. There is a good example of it at Gronmx. The flags can be changed under the options and you can add to and delete various Language tags or even change one to the default one. As yet there is no data on whether or not it works with WordPress 3.02 or not.

Java One Two for Blog Posts

anum — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 22:31:26 +0000

Java is a language that is used more and more to create a quick way of calling up web services without the need of submitting the current page. This makes for fast loading time which is something we all strive for. More and more the ways of making things faster are becoming more important. Heavy loads for opening pages are a thing that should be in the past.

Snippets and more from Ntt.cc

This is a good resource to go to for all manner of items. They have freebees of code as well as various kinds of plug-ins for WordPress and a full series of Tutorials on Java code. The amount of items on this site provide you with an array of good content besides the normal stuff like links to places where they will receive a commission.. Well that’s fine, we all have to live, don’t we?

Ican’t

I can’t give you a completely rundown on how to make your Java unobtrusive. I am no Java fundi and most of it is, quite frankly, over my head but I think it makes sense even if I don’t understand how to put it into practice. From what I understood he gives rules on how to utilize it without being dependent on it.

Specky Boy Design Magazine

Specky boy has come up with 40 assorted Ajax and Java script items that are free.
This is a good assortment covering a range of programs which allow you to create things in Java and Ajax. While you might not know java this can help you create what you need by remote. It’s an interesting assortment. Some of which I didn’t even know existed. One of those includes a shopping cart in Ajax. The original page didn’t work but all the various down loads are on the Ajax page above.

Hunlock Advocates Tools web designer should have

One of the things they offer is a routine in Ajax for you to include in your arsenal of tools. Anyone looking for good tools that aren’t normally include but that you use often, take a look at the list available here and see if you can’t pick it up tools you require.

Think Vitamin

Now that is an unusual name to find JavaScript suggestion but yes they do have a few.
It is a “Web Practitioners Blog” so when you get inside you will understand.
Here they give you good advice about combining code to save on server requests and items like that. Trouble is things keep being updated so your scripts become old fashioned and out of date. When that happens you need to up date too.
They recommend not using gzip as IE has problems with it and give you suggestions as to how to get around the problem of it is not working correctly.

How browsers work

The Coding Horror is a blog which has a few oldies but goodies that need to be read as to how java and search engines work. Although it is old, it keeps getting updated so don’t miss out on what they have to say. Jeff Atwood keeps up to date with his knowledge and it’s good to learn from people who know what they are talking about.

Scintillating ideas

anum — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 21:58:22 +0000

I am sure as a new comer to WordPress, you have landed here with all sorts of ideas of what you want to do but quite often no idea how to set about achieving them. I know the first time I saw WordPress I threw up my hands in horror. I was very much an old fashioned person who knew how to use Dreamweaver and load my pages on to a website and the idea of plug-ins was totally foreign. Here we have hundreds of people taking one tiny patch of grass and manicuring it with nail clippers.

The joy of that is that an item is looked at from all sides. More often than not more than one person has the same idea and two or more different answers come up. This results in us having more than one option to look at to achieve the result we want. There are a few items that really need to go on to the must have list though and when you are new you might not find them easily unless you are pointed in the right direction.

1. I suggest you check out the step by step guide to installing a plug-in. Unless you have done it before you might be like me and hold up your hands in horror.

2. Activate your Akismet Plug-in on WordPress. There is no need to install anything as it is already part of the platform. All you need to do it activate it. This will prevent your blog from being spammed. You will need to go to the site and get your activation key. It is free for personal use and a small charge for businesses.

3. The next is a plug-in which you will need to download and install as per the guide above. This is All in One SEO. This comes in both a free and a pro pack. This optimizes your blog for search engines and is very important. The difference is that there are no adverts with the Pro and it costs $39. It is well worth the cash for the pro version as SEO is one of the most important aspects of any website. If you wish for on going support the costs range for the amounts of months you purchase. For example if you buy a months support you pay $10 but if you buy a years support you pay $49. This is a saving of $71.

4. If you want to keep in contact with people visiting your blog you will require some means of contacting you. For this you will need a contact form. A simple and easy one to use is Contact Form7. This is a free plug-in and has been translated into multiple languages. It uses the Akismet anti spamming method. You can apply your own needs to the form and place it where you wish on your website blog. I would suggest you use the above the fold method which all marketers on line recommend. This is one of the hot spots on your page and will get more sign ups. The layout of your page is important as to where viewers’ eyes fall. This is an interesting feature which several websites research.

Putting Twitter to Bed

anum — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 20:21:58 +0000

Twitter is a legend in its own right nowadays. Its phenomenal growth over the last few years is nothing short of amazing. Who would have thought that an idea like only using 140 letters could catch fire like a bush blaze and spread across the world in such a short time? If you aren’t on Twitter nowadays you are dead in the water. Its one of the must have tools in your web 2.0 array. There are several tools that are available to integrate various aspects of Twitter in your blog. It is a good idea to mix and match them to get the best out of the twitter connection. Twitter does bring a lot of people to your blog if they enjoy your tweets. Working with a blog and all the social networking programs can take a lot of your time if you are going to do it properly and actually make a business out of it. It is fully possible to do but don’t let anyone fool you that it is quick and easy. Even setting up a domain takes a lot longer than most people realize.

Probably like most people you have had trouble in the past getting to grips with putting a quote that you liked on Twitter into your blog. There have been many ways to get around it but nothing quite like getting the actual tweet to come into your blog just as it was. Enter the BlackBird.

The plug-in for Twitter BlackBird Pie allows you to actually take the shortcode and embed it in your relevant post. This can be done in other language besides English.

What the plug-in does is embed the actual tweet in the same text color and uses the actual profile link in that color. It makes use of the hash tags and all the other aspects of twitter in real time. You can use it for multiple tweets in the same post.

You should have a Twitter Tools Plug-in which makes integration between your blog and Twitter possible.
What you really need to do is make a category and call it something interesting. You are then able to enable your own posts to appear on your blog. If you don’t want them to appear as individual posts you can organize a compilation of either daily or weekly groups of tweets. This can be done in the plug in by enabling it in the settings.

The ability to put Tweets in the Sidebar.

There is a widget in the twitter tool that makes this possible and you can then show your tweets in the sidebar. There is also a physicality to archive all your tweets and this gets done every 10 minutes.

Unfortunately only a single account is able to be used on blog and there is not an auto delete as yet.
WP Quote Tweets

This plug-in is a little simpler than the previous one in that it requires more knowledge to use it. You have to create writable folders and things which make it not as user friendly as Black Bird.

Using Imagination for Images

anum — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:57:26 +0000

Coming up with new ideas as a way of showing images can be a tough job. Let’s face I there are not a lot of things we can do that haven’t been done before in some way. But it is good to be able to decide which of the many ways will suit the theme of the blog we are posting to. So many things on the net become stereotyped in the way we present them that we really need to use both ingenuity and imagination to be able to produce something different. And to be able to produce something both different and unique is an on going goal of mine. Obviously I mean that in a good way. You don’t want to produce something that is unique but such a mess no one wants to look at it.

Some of the plug-ins that are available to use to create images in our blogs are listed below.

WP Get Post Image

This plug-in is a developers plug-in which enables them to incorporate the upload of images via WordPress. It is not meant to be used by the general theme users.

Flickr Gallery

Flickr gallery will show your current photos and will enable you to cache them in a database for quicker loading. You can only use one photoset but it will collect the photos by tags. The program also deals with videos by embedding the flash movie player. This is your standard gallery of photos and doesn’t really do imaginative things. You can paginate the galleries however. It will also allow you to insert a single photo into content of your blog. The one good thing is it allows you to collect your photos from your Flickr collection. This plug-in uses the lightbox.

Grou Random Image Widget

With this widget it enables you to show a random image from your folder images. This means the page loads are cut down as only the image is changed. You can do a fade in and out image load. There are 9 different picture frames you can choose from and you can also link to the full image if you so wish. Rather a neat application.

WP Image Tagger

To get good marks from out teacher Google and their spiders we need to tag our photos. This means the spiders understand what the image is about. That is of course if we have thought out our tags properly. Tags need to be relevant to the content and the subject of the blog. In order to tag the photos easily we use the plug-in which not only allows you to tag them but it also places them in categories and integrates the tags into the whole system of the blog. You can then associate them to your photos with the editor and also list the images available on your site and are connected. It makes it possible to do a search of the images on your blog by the tags. It gives a greater possibility of telling the viewing public what is available to see on your site.

Customize your Menu

anum — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:43:24 +0000

Menus are extremely important to a website or blog as they basically show you what is there and where to find it. If it’s too difficult to navigate you will lose your visitors. When I think of menus I tend to think of bright Christmasy style things that are not at all stereotyped. I like the bold and appealing to catch the eye. I guess I am an extrovert. Unfortunately that is not usually the case with websites. WordPress menus in particular are, on the whole, rather on the dull side. Rather quietly and without too much fanfare, they have brought in customized menus on WordPress.com.

Besides using the top menu options with drop downs ext. WordPress have given you a Widget which you can develop up to three sub levels deep. You can use more than one widget if you have a number of different features. e.g. Categories or posts etc.

You can extend the widgets to other sections and have them on other pages and use the new menus there too.
You can use this for numerous different categories and sub categories.
In addition to this widget you can create menus up top on the top menu bar and have a category menu drop down which you can then use to point towards pages where you use the widgets as well.
Some of the latest of the themes support these custom menus and you need to look out for them before choosing a theme. One of these is Notepad.

One of the items you can do with this is to create your menu for navigation. This you do by making a name and then clicking on create menu. Once you have your menu you can create extra pages and categories in it. All you do is find the relevant pages and tick them then click add to menu and it’s done. Don’t forget to save them.

Additional links.
To add new links you will require is to have the http: name. Label it and then add it to the menu.

There are additional ways of changing the menu titles. The little arrow on the end of the title that appears to be a drop down is where you would click and it will allow you to change the name and give it a navigation title as well as an attribute.

If you wish to change the ordering of the menu this can be done by doing a drag and drop method. The only problem with this is if you have thick fingers or drop things in the wrong place. Ask me I have done it. If you do you have to pick it up and drag it again.

If you choose to create more than one menu on a theme, you can customize each separately. Just make sure you activate the correct one by choosing from the drop down and saving it.

Finally be sure to choose one of the themes that uses customized menus or they won’t work. All you will get will be a little red warn box.

If that happens, you can add the custom menu widget to the sidebar. A final word, remember, WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org.

Building a website on a free website

anum — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:17:26 +0000

There are several free websites on the internet that will not only host your small site for free but will also supply you with the tools for actually making the website. They have templates and the tools needed to do many different website types and are generous enough to share them. Of course many of them are aiming at you growing and increasing the size of the site so that you will in turn end up by paying the hosting fee for the monthly use of their website.
When you start you are given the choice of supplying your own domain name and using that but by using their platform to create your website you are really stuck with them until you are ready to build a completely new site from scratch.
If you use their template you can’t just up and move to another site. All your info is already on their site and although you can remove it you can’t just transfer your site from their hosting to another without totally recreating it.
This is one big drawback of using a free website. Another is that some of them do place adverts on your site. Not all of them mind but some of them. This is their way of monetizing the space they are lending you.

We are going to take a look at a couple of the sites that have this offer available.

This is Sprout inc

Sprout is Advine and Advine is a ad builder for adverts on your site or adverts for Apple and other phones and allows you build add only once and continue to use it. You add assets into the program and then you select the add copy which gets included. It’s a basic drag and drop opportunity with a resulting advert that is interactive with the audience. The result comes out in Html5 as well as flash. In addition to this Sprout is an advertising agent who will build your interactive ads for you for places like Facebook and other social networking sites as well as all manner of services.

Viviti

Viviti is an easy web builder tool on a free or paid hosting site. The free version offers you 5 mg of storage with 5 pages. This is a total basic with no protection site. This site is paid for by the adverts they place on your pages. If you want anything extra you will need to pay to host 1 site @$10 per month. This gives you unlimited pages and 1 GB of storage as well as password protection and stock photos and no adverts. There are more packages available. You have a 15 day free trial available on all plans.

The last one we are going to look at here is Yola

Here we have a free option which again can be extended into a paid site at the cost of $49.95 a year. The paid version includes a free domain name which will be registered to you. There is also an option to get a Your Name website for $17.95 a year. Its is a pretty simple website builder with many available templates for you to use as well as the add-ons like tags and checking web traffic.

Inspirational Photo Galleries

anum — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:11:02 +0000

Photo galleries really do bring a great deal to a website. People on the whole are very visual and love looking at photos. The better you can present them the more people will return to see the latest in your collections. Of course taking good photos is part and parcel of the presentation but with a little practice you will soon be producing well taken and edited photographs. There are many tools out on the web to edit your photos and even more that allow you to present your photos in a variety of different ways. I have a collection of plug-ins for presenting them in different ways on your website.

The first in the lineup is Altpwa

The download for this product is on Cnet.ro and it comes in a zipped file. The photos were a little slow in loading but I think that was because there were so many on one page.
It is also possible that the photos were not optimized for the web. This is generally one of the mistakes people make. It is important to optimize as best you can for faster loading. Full directions are given on the download page.

Awsome Pix Gallery

Unlike most plug-ins this one doesn’t require you to set it up in your theme and has all of its own tables. It is literally a one click operation. Photos can be dragged and dropped into place. You can also watermark the photos with this and interlink with posts. This one definitely joined my list of must haves. It works easily to add or remove photos and you can even make custom gallery and change the ways it displays and resizes images. You can add a section to your sidebar in order to hide it so as to show more images. This is a tool you won’t want to be without. This is an ongoing build so be sure to add it to your favorites so you can return and check for more updates. There is a full set of instructions and also a set of videos to watch. This is a very professionally presented site. AWsom PixGallery. It is more than just a gallery as it enable automatic watermarking of your photos and also enables you to place captions on your photos or graphics by using a visual editor. There is also the ability to create auto thumb nail. It is a fairly simple plug-in to use and is controlled via the admin box of your WordPress.

Am I Works

Presented by AmIWorks this is a light box that you can use on your site. It’s always nice to add a more professional approach to a photo site and a light box is something most photographers will use all the time.

Berry Tube Gallery

This plug-in gives you a way of presenting a gallery of Youtube videos in your sidebar without even being registered with Youtube. It’s an interesting way of entertaining visitors without too much hassle.