Useful Wordpress plugins

3 Comments Filed Under: Wordpress Plugins

Any Wordpress plugin is useful if it does what you need, and saves time.

We all have our favourite Wordpress plugins: here’s some of mine.
Feel free to tell me YOUR favourites. I’d love to know.

  • Page Link Manager

    • Adds admin panel to choose which pages appear in the site navigation

  • My Page Order

    • A Wordpress plugin to let you set the order of your pages

  • Lightbox Gallery

    • Add some sparkle to your image galleries. Really impressive visual effect.

  • All in One SEO Pack

    • Create meta tags for your blog; description and keywords

  • Google XML Sitemaps

    • Help webmasters to get their new stuff crawled by Googlebot faster than before

Wordpress Themes

One Comment Filed Under: Wordpress

These are some of my favourite Wordpress themes.

I like them because they are clean and easy on the eye, or have visual appeal.
What do you think?

Glossy Blue

GlossyBlue

High-tech glossy Mac style wordpress theme with Web 2 Mini icons. Check out Nick La’s home page. Beautiful. Style and class.

demo | download

Deep Red

Deep Red

A two-column layout wordpress theme with a touch of red. Nice varying shades of black and grey; an interesting and different layout.

demo | download

Beautiful Day

Beautiful Day

Two-column wordpress theme, very customisable - like the css layout and design. A very nice theme.

demo | download

Cleaker 2.1

Cleaker

Three-column wordpress theme. Again, clean, nice icons, stands out.

demo | download

Learn CSS

No Comments Filed Under: CSS

This year I decided to increase my CSS knowledge and do some short courses. I felt that being iin a structured environment would push things along. I have done a lot of reading at sites such as those on the right (Westciv, w3schools, etc), and read a couple of books and a stack of pdf’s.

The first book I read was

Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design (Wrox Beginning Guides)
This book is the perfect introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
The first course I did was in February 2008, called Advanced Website Design Using CSS, which I completed in Melbourne, Australia, at a place called Dynamic Web Training.

This is the book we used: really good to have in your collection. . .


CSS Anthology by Rachel Andrew

If you click on the book, it will take you to Amazon.com where you can
read some reviews and buy it at a great price.

This is basically what we covered:

  • use CSS to control the appearance of text, images, forms, and tabular data;
  • build navigation systems with CSS;
  • test your CSS-based designs in different browsers;
  • replace table-based page designs with CSS page designs (both fixed width and liquid);
  • create a style sheet switcher that allows users to select the design they prefer

Then in March I completed the CSS Mastery course, which is the next course offered if you pass the Advanced Website Design Using CSS course.

This is the book we used in this course: another really good one to read. . .


CSS Mastery by Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Cameron Moll

If you click on the book, it will take you to Amazon.com where you can read some reviews and buy it at a great price.

We covered these areas:

  • Use advanced CSS selectors;
  • Understand the cascade, specificity, and inheritance;
  • Use background images to create round-cornered boxes and drop shadows;
  • Use PNG alpha transparency;
  • Create complex buttons and rollovers;
  • Apply conditional comments and band pass filters for Internet Explorer;
  • Create liquid and elastic layouts;
  • Employ a variety of hacks and filters to hide and/or show CSS to specific browsers;
  • Learn a systematic approach to bug hunting;
  • Squash a range of common CSS bugs