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- 10 Steps to a Client Friendly Wordpress CMSNovember 15
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What is not to love about Wordpress? It is extremely extendable, an open source project, has a selection of thousands of plugins, in addition to the support community being simply massive. Wordpress has proved itself as a great blogging platform and content management system.
For us developers and techies the out of the box capabilities is more than we ever need to manage, edit, and add content in any shape or form. However many of us don’t simply build website for ourselves, and we have to think about our clients as well.
While Wordpress has a user friendly interface it is still blogging focused, and there are some usability enhancements that could be desired when those who are not technically savvy (which fits the bill for most clients) will be the primary users.
In this situation there are a few steps to improving the interface to make it easier for our clients.
1. Tweak the Admin Panel
The administration panel is with out a doubt focused on blogging, which makes sense since Wordpress is a blogging platform. Any time you aim to create more content, “Post” is always listed before “Page” and even the labeling “Write” feels more journalistic than page focused.
While it is not a perfect solution, there is a great plugin out there that greatly enhances the layout of the latest versions of Wordpress called Leopard.
With icons and a simple sidebar it
- Improve your typography on 3.7Crea.tvNovember 15
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I just put up a new design related post on the 3.7CREA.TV blog related to typography.
Simply put it is the grouping of two typographical elements, then using different methods of traditional design to create contrast. The contrast places emphasis on the important element of type, letting the secondary element command less attention. The result is an improvement in the communication of the overall design message.
You can read it here: Improve your typography with “typographic contrast”
- Branding your Wordpress Admin PanelNovember 12
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If you are like me, you find Wordpress to be a perfect fit as a CMS for small sites. Despite the fact that it originated as a blogging platform, it is flexible enough for simple pages or complex functionality and editing.
I have found that many clients like the nice subtle touch of branding their wordpress administration panel. There used to be a plugin that made this process easier but it doesn’t seem to work with the latest versions of wordpress. Luckily this process is simple even with out it.
What are we customizing?
By default, in wordpress 2.6+ there are two spots that the Wordpress logo shows up. At the footer in the administration panel, and the login / logout page.
The first step is easy, we simply need to find those images and change switch the logo to our own. This is merely a matter of downloading the images, altering them, then re-uploading them to the server.
Both images are located in the /wordpress/wp-admin/images directory, you are looking for:
logo-ghost.png and logo-login.gif
They look like this:
Let's start with the login page. Open up logo-login.gif in your favorite image editor.
At this point all you have to do is replace these files with a copy of your logo. To keep
- A Quick IntroductionNovember 12
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First of all I want to thank everyone who is currently either a reader or subscriber of this great blog. As I am sure all of you have realized, Dejan has sold the site so that he can concentrate on new projects.
As the lucky new owner and want to give myself a quick introduction. I want to start off by saying that I only decided to approach Dejan about purchasing the site after I made sure that I could stay true to his readers in terms of the type and quality of content that came out of this blog.
I was excited to find that Dejan wrote about a lot of topics that I myself have written about on my blog. Up until now, all of my writing has been about a broad range of topics on the 3.7CREA.TV blog (hopefully some of you have come across some of my more popular articles). Stylized Web presented a great opportunity to focus my writing about wordpress, css techniques, and other development related posts where I could keep 3.7CREAT.TV focused on design instead.
So a quick background on my credentials, and then I would love to hear what topics and posts you enjoyed the most from Dejan so that I can continue to create content that you want to read.
My name is Ross Johnson, and I own a small three person web design / development company called 3.7 DESIGNS out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I teach web design / development / UX related classes at a
- Future of blog designOctober 22
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Before i get started, this is going to be just my vision, so if you agree or disagree join in for discussion. When i say design i'll be thinking of theme structure-organization so not the graphics design and current trends (which are handwriting and drowning, glossy is out and grungy is also soon to be out).
From the version one of WordPress (blogging itself, will refer to it as WordPress) you'll have to agree that nothing much is changed, no intention to change a purpose of it, showing pots and writing stays the primary goal of course. So all the themes go like this, some posts, categories, latest stuff (comments, tags etc..) right oriented sidebar... Ok, now let's think of the list of things what a usual theme should have, same as above posts, list categories, list archives, list comments, blogroll a place to advertise, subscribe.
Times are changing, as the design, but the structure stayed the same (you might show featured post, put your latest posts in like a grid or something no difference...) and now we have more and more magazine style websites offering lot's of content-news, daily updated with teams of writers so original structure doesn't work anymore, for example let's say you have 2-3 new posts a day in different categories with different authors. I hope you can see the problem here.
The soluti