Web design

web design skills, usability, tools, techniques, and styling

web design skills, usability, tools, techniques, and styling

WordPress 2.7 Complete

December 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Create your own web site from scratch with WordPress

WordPress 2.7 Complete. WordPress started out as blogging software, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it is open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra modules for the basic program. These are plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do.

But like many other OSS programs WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from April Hodge Silver is welcome. She starts out by explaining some basic concepts and parts of WordPress as software. This might appear a little simplistic, but in my experience it’s quite important to grasp some of the fundamentals of a content management system. For instance it’s not immediately apparent that all the parts of what will eventually appear on screen as a unified page are kept separate. That is, the title, sub-title, text, pictures, captions, tags, and meta-data are all stored in different parts of the database – for good reasons. And of course the appearance of this information on screen is controlled separately too – from a style sheet.

She then describes how to make a WordPress installation of your own, and how to set up all the basic configuration of the system. You can get WordPress.com to do all of this for you, by hosting your installation. But they do not give you permission to install the extras with which you can customise your site (and make money from it).

Posting a blog entry is very, very easy, and WordPress also makes it as easy as possible to control and format what you write. But she explains all the options clearly, including the way in which you can add graphics to make your pages more visually interesting.

All of this means getting to know the control panel and its multiple menus, and her explanations are very helpful, because it isn’t always possible to tell what function some item performs simply from its title. What’s the difference between a page and a post for instance? The name alone tells you nothing.

One of the really good things about WordPress is that most of the content of any site is organised using what are called management tables. These are lists of all the basic information known about any item, and because the data is tabulated, it’s much easier to understand and control.

The next part of the book deals with two features which really bring WordPress to life – themes (which is WP jargon for templates) and widgets, which are ‘sidebar accessories’ that allow you to personalise what shows up your sidebars – without having to learn any PHP or HTML code.

In fact the urge to have an individualised site is so universal that she wisely includes instructions for designing your own theme. It’s at this point you’ll need HTML design skills and a knowledge of cascading style sheets (CSS) – but she provides some basic coding to get you started.

And for those readers with a creative bent who have coding skills she also demonstrates how to create your own plugins and widgets. (A widget is just a plugin with extra functions.) But you’ll also have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and dive into the database at this point.

There’s an interesting chapter on using WordPress as a content management system. This explains in some detail the difference between static pages and normal posts, and it presents a different type of theme which is geared to the construction of a commercial site with product pages. Although they are not covered here, there are now excellent plugins offering fully-featured eCommerce systems.

WordPress is now up to version 2.9 – but I checked all the basic concepts outlined in this book, and they still hold good. Even the copious screen shots illustrating the guidance show exactly what you’ll see when you start using the latest version. This is an excellent guidance manual which I could have done with a year ago when I first started learning how to use WordPress. It would have saved me lots of time and speeded up the process enormously.

April Hodge Silver, WordPress 2.7 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2009, pp.277, ISBN 184719656X

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WordPress 3.0 Complete

April 4, 2011 by Roy Johnson

a blog, web site, and content management system

WordPress 3.0 (WP) started out as a blogging software program in 2003, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it’s open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do. But like many other OSS programs WP comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide is welcome.

April Hodge Silver establishes from the start that WP is now a fully developed publishing platform and can be used for running a blog, a commercial web site, or even used as a CMS. You can run WP on your own computer using it as a server (that’s the better option for advanced users) or you can let WordPress.com do it all for you, which means you have less control but is probably the better option for beginners or those who simply want their own blog. The ‘completeness’ of this guidance manual is that it covers all that’s required for both options.

The advantages and disadvantages of each choice are explained clearly. But in either case you will need the features and the configuration settings fully explained. They can be learned through trial and error, but the benefit of a guidance manual is that it will shorten the time involved and flatten the learning curve.

My advice in brief is this: if all you need is a blog, choose WordPress.com, but if you want to customise your site, have advertising, and take advantage of plugins and widgets – go for your own installation.

Once you reach the user-friendly WP control panel, the principles are the same for both users. Silver explains how to create a post (WP jargon for a page that you see on screen) and how to add graphics which will make it look more attractive.

The huge advantage of a program such as WP is that everything you upload is stored in a database, but you can control how it is summoned into your pages. A single graphic for instance can be presented at thumbnail, medium, or large size.

WP offers two editors in which you generate your content – one a ‘visual’ editor which requires very few skills or technical knowledge, and an HTML editor for those who know a little about coding. As soon as you start posting you’ll also start getting comment spam, but WP comes with a powerful tool called Akismet that deals with it automatically.

The control panel in WP makes all your work as easy as possible, but if you are not used to a CMS it can be difficult to conceptualise the relation between what you put in to the system and how it will appear on screen as the finished article. This guide does a good job at overcoming this problem by generous use of full scale screen shots, so you will know exactly what you should be looking at.

WP 3.0 now includes automatic menu creation. This can be used in conjunction with ‘categories’ to create the structure and the navigational system for your content. Silver then moves on to show how (free) widgets and plugins can be deployed to enhance a site. The great thing about these is that they are enhanced regularly, and can be updated with a single mouse click. And if you are really feeling ambitious you can even download a plugin to render your site ready for iPhone and iPod touch.

The central part of the book deals with the most important element of a WP site – the ‘theme’, which you lift off the shelf or develop yourself. This provides the basic structure of what your site will look like, it’s style, features, and behaviour.

Then comes the issue of developing your own plugins and widgets. As you can probably tell from this description, these issues are becoming more technically demanding, but you don’t need to know these techniques in order to create a successful site.

Silver finishes in the same technical vein – giving explanations for setting up an eCommerce site, then giving instructions for upgrading a WP installation. If you have opted for hosting on your own server, this will be invaluable, because WP is updated quite frequently, with new features and functions at every new version.

I spent a long time learning much of this the hard way – before WP manuals became available. And I certainly wish I’d had something like WordPress 3.0 Complete to hand at the time. It would have made my life a lot easier, and I would have known to get hold of the best online backup to save all my files whilst I was learning WordPress.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

April Hodge Silver, WordPress 3.0 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt, 2011, pp.322, ISBN: 1849514100

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WordPress for Dummies

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

from blogging platform to content management system

WordPress was first launched in 2003 as open source software designed for blogging – and it is still used as such. But as its popularity has suddenly grown exponentially, enormous numbers of add-ons and plug-ins have been developed to provide extra features. Because it’s built on a solid base of MySQL and PHP, these extra features have transformed it from an individualist tool into a major communication platform. So much so that it’s now become a content management system (CMS) which offers an alternative to Joomla and Drupal. Releases of the software are named after jazz musicians. WordPress for Dummies is a guidance manual on how to use it.

If you want to see the sorts of web sites which use this combination of WP + templates – look here, here, and here. This is the best of the current guides to using WordPress. The strongest point in its favour – apart from the very direct ‘for Dummies’ approach – is that it gives instructions for would-be bloggers , but also explains the more sophisticated uses of WP for those who want to build a web site using a content management system. The beauty of WordPress is that it can do both.

In fact WordPress is pretty thoughtful software – which is what’s made it so popular. All blog posts can be drafted, auto-saved, spell-checked, and stored prior to publication. The options for interacting with site visitors are endless – which is presumably why WP has overtaken Blogger. It really does have the heavy-duty functionalities of a full-scale content management system combined with the ease of use of a simple blogging platform.

Basically, this guide covers the three main options for WordPress users – the hosted service where you have a blog at WordPress.com; the free software which you download from WordPress.org; and the multi-user version. And the author, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, now makes her living designing WordPress templates – so she knows what she’s talking about.

I set up a test blog at WordPress recently [here] and can confirm that it took me less than five minutes from start to finish – and that includes uploading a picture and editing my profile.

WordPress successfully combines ease of use with a range of powerful features, so if you’re thinking of starting your own blog, WP seems to be the way to go. So the first option, of using WP for blogging, couldn’t be simpler.

Just in case you’re worried, WordPress has got nothing to do with Microsoft Word. It’s an Open Source program, and therefor free. You access the program without payment, and updates are available to you at any time without charge.

The second option of hosting the software on your own machine gives you scope to make use of lots of extra features. Many of these are free plug-ins which add extra functionality to the system. But even more important than the trimmings, this guide explains in detail the crucial installation and configuration of WordPress. This is the part most people are likely to find find difficult.

Ambitious bloggers and web designers will know that everybody wants to have an individualised theme – that’s the style and layout of what appears on screen. How to do that is explained here as well – including some rudiments of style sheets and PHP coding.

The third option is to use the most advanced, multi-user version of WordPress. This is for people who want a community of users and contributors. I came across one recently – a football enthusiasts’ site where fans email their reviews of matches directly from the game. Post-match reports are available even before they’re on the national news channels. There are three whole chapters on how to set up and administer this version of the software.

Lisa Wilson finishes with recommendations for free WordPress themes and plug-ins. All of these allow you to customise your site or blog, and add functionalities that only a professional designer could have dreamed about only a couple of years ago.

It’s almost impossible for these printed guides to keep up with the pace of software development. New features are being added whilst the book is with the printer. Just get the latest edition, and recognise that there may be differences in what appears on screen. Of course, you can always read the complete documentation at codex.wordpress.org – but if like me you prefer a proper book to consult, rather than reading off screen, then it’s all here. This book not only showed me how to use WordPress: it helped me to understand some of the fundamental structures of content management systems.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress for Dummies, New York: Wiley, 3rd edition 2010, pp.408, ISBN: 0470592745

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XML, HTML, XHTML Magic

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical web design tutorials using XHTML

Most books on web design cover coding and leave it to the reader to figure out how to use it in real-life projects. This book uses real practical projects as the context for understanding how to implement XML, HTML, and XHTML coding. It kicks off with a brief survey of where HTML and XML are up to at the moment. This includes the need for cascading style sheets. There then follows a series of applied case studies. Each chapter deals with a separate ‘project’ – a series of web sites with different purposes. These range from personal sites and blogs to weekly news sites, community sites with feedback, and even information sites driven from databases.

This is what I would call an intermediate level book. It assumes you already know HTML, and is introducing you to the next stage of style sheets and XHTML. It certainly shows you the important coding details. That’s to the book’s credit. The opening example of setting up a daily news site is an excellent tutorial in creating a multi-column table.

The contributors also show how to design pages which combine XHTML and Javascripts, how to control text within table cells, and how to produce printer-friendly versions of pages. They also show how to combine static and dynamic elements within the same table – allowing it to flow and expand to fit the screen. Clever stuff.

This book might have been called ‘Designing with Style Sheets’ – because that’s where most of its emphasis lies. In fact there is very little on XML. But then XML is the easy part: it’s controlling the appearance of what appears on screen that’s difficult.

This book will appeal to people who are comfortable with HTML basics, but who want to go further and explore what XHTML has to offer. The structure of offering eleven tutorials gives you the opportunity to either select one similar to your own web project, or to work your way through from beginning to end.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Molly E. Holzschlag (ed), XML, HTML, XHTML Magic, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2001, pp.223,ISBN 0735711399

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Web design

web design skills, usability, tools, techniques, and styling

Create your own web site from scratch with WordPress

a blog, web site, and content management system

from blogging platform to content management system

practical web design tutorials using XHTML

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