This article supports my recent presentation at PDX WordPress Meetup titled “Organizing Your WordPress Site.”
Please note that I’ve included articles from ClarkWP Magazine, the student run and managed site for my Clark College WordPress classes, as reference material throughout this article.
Before beginning to structure and organize, or reorganize, your WordPress site, there are some WordPress terms you need to know.
This is a tutorial on how to link to the various features found on a typical WordPress site.
Wish to promote an author your site? Need the link to their author pageview? Wish to link to a specific category? Want to share the link to your WordPress site feed?
There are many times when you may wish to link to a feature or function on your site. Here is a list of the various areas you may wish to link to from posts, Pages, Widgets, and in emails and social media posts to help people find information on your site.
We call them “links” but the proper names are hypertext link and the link is created with an HTML Anchor Tag.
A well-formed link in HTML looks like this:
<a href="http://lorelle.wordpress.com/" title="Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress."> Lorelle VanFossen</a>
It features the link to the destination, the title selector to describe the destination of the link, and the anchor text, the words visible on the page to the reader.
This is called a well-formed or properly formed link as these three items are required by US and international law for web standards and web accessibility.
To copy a link, there are two methods. The first is the most commonly used technique.
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WordPress serves as a web publishing platform and Content Management System (CMS). There are a variety of layouts and site organizational structures to choose from when setting up a WordPress site. These are known as site models.
There are three core site models: blog, static, and hybrid.
There are pros and cons to each one. Let’s look at each one.
In the old days, websites consisted of static web pages, one web page for each article. Today’s CMS platforms like WordPress offer the same static feel and structure as a design decision.
The challenge of using WordPress as a static site takes a little thinking around the whole posts verses Pages and categories verses tags content organization options. In general, most static sites will never use posts only Pages.
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There are many ways to subscribe to a WordPress site. There are also many different types of subscriptions.
Here is an example list of the various ways a person can subscribe to your site’s posts.
A subscription is different from a share. Sharing is a one-time event. The shared article information is not an act of subscribing to or adding the site to your social web stream of information. A subscription is not just support but a choice by the reader to keep up with that site’s activities.
Subscribers are your site’s fan club.
This tutorial will focus on the three types of subscriptions, email, follow, and feeds, to help you promote these subscription options on your WordPress site.
As you add subscription options to your site, check out what your site looks like through email notifications, follows, and feeds. When you design a WordPress Theme, it is important to design for all the ways a site will be viewed and accessed.
For example, the image to the right in this article is a screenshot of a post article on Mashable, a popular online magazine featuring tech news. The designer has incorporated social media sharing, sharing stats, and encouragement of social sharing and subscriptions into the design of the site title area. The little worm-like line to the right of the sharing icons is a trending chart. It shows the popularity of the article based upon the social sharing, showing you the possible creative options.
As you go through this tutorial, examine the traditional examples used to promote sharing and subscription options, but consider how to creatively incorporate sharing and subscriptions into the design of the WordPress Theme. If you are designing for the public with a WordPress Theme, remember that users will customize menus and widgetized areas with their own ideas on where and how to place these icons and links. Give them options but have fun with these as well.
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In “The Brute-Force Password Attack on WordPress Sites” on Lorelle on WordPress I explain the recent brute-force password attacks are on WordPress and other PHP-based web publishing platforms and offer tips on how to protect and secure your site.
If you are participating in any of my WordPress and web publishing courses, this article will be added to the required reading list on security.
Footnotes are often requested in my workshops and classes. I’ve published “Creating Footnotes in WordPress” explaining how to do this in WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress.
Footnotes have been replaced by links, but there may be times when you wish to link to a footnote in a blog post.
Here is a list of the pros and cons of using footnotes from the article.
Links cover one or more words thus are easier to see and easier to click over a larger area. Footnote links are tiny, hard to see, and hard to click, especially if you have mobility issues.
Footnotes are familiar to academics, scientists, and researchers. If you are publishing such papers or writing for that audience, it would be natural to include traditional footnotes.
There are also times when you may need to cite a source that isn’t online. How would you site a paper or reference that is not online? A footnote serves to cite the source while not interrupting the natural flow of the content with explanations in parentheses.
Three techniques are described in the article.
You may use WordPress Plugins that make adding footnotes to posts easier, or you can create them manually.
The process of adding footnotes manually to WordPress involves using jump or page links with the footnote numbers within the content to “jump” down to the footnote list at the bottom of the post.
I’ve included an example of how to create footnote jump links to take the reader to the footnote list and not a specific item in the list, and how to create a footnote jump link to a specific footnote in the list if there are many footnotes in the article.
Images, graphics, photographs, drawings, cartoons, badges…our websites are filled with imagery.
This article addresses the techniques used by WordPress for aligning images and image sizing and links in published content. Check your publishing platform for their methods.
There are several terms we need to develop to help you understand how images are used in WordPress. The most important terms describe the images within WordPress based upon how they are used and generated: original image, published image, media file, and attachment image.
The image uploaded to your site is called the original image or image file. When uploaded to WordPress, a minimum of three sizes are automatically created and stored in the wp-content/uploads/ directory on the server. The images are grouped by year then month by default.
The image sizes available for displaying in your content are thumbnail, medium, and full-size. Depending upon the image’s original size, large and x-large may be available. Full-size is the original uploaded image size.
When an image is used on a web page in WordPress, it is typically viewed within the content area of a post or Page. For the sake of this tutorial, we will called this the published image. WordPress makes available the three size options by default.
The WordPress Media Uploader redesigned in 2012 now features Attachment Display Settings options. They include setting the alignment of the image, the size of the published image, and the Link To feature. Continue reading
WordPress 3.5 is due December 5, 2012, and brings with it the new Media Manager, a much anticipated improvement to the Media Uploader and Media Library in WordPress.
Check Out the New Media Manager in WordPress is an extensive article and review I’ve published on Lorelle on WordPress. It features a step-by-step tutorial on using the new Media Manager for uploading and managing your images, video, and audio on WordPress, as well as a few of the unusual quirks in the new feature.
If you have a WordPress.com site, you will be able to test drive the new WordPress Media Manager. Those with the self-hosted version of WordPress will need to wait until December 5 when WordPress 3.5 is released or become a beta tester.
Most WordPress users spend their blogging life in the Visual Editor, the WYSIWYMG editor. Yes, it is the What You See is What You MIGHT Get editor.
While WordPress does what it can to make the Visual Editor emulate what your content will look like once published within your WordPress Theme, it has limits.
One of the limits is that is appears hard to publish HTML in a blog post. It isn’t. You just need to switch to the HTML or Text Editor on the Post/Page Panel.
Before you can publish code on your WordPress blog, there are some things you must know.
There are 66 HTML codes permitted in WordPress posts, Pages, and widgets, codes you can use to make lists, links, blockquotes, images, headings, whatever content you wish to add to your site. Continue reading
In 2005, WordPress became modular separating the design and architecture from the core programming code.
Today, a WordPress Theme contains files called template files that hold the architecture of the site and template tags, code that initiates actions within the site and data from the database. The design is applied through a stylesheet, holding the instructions for the colors, images, and look and feel of the entire site.
This tutorial covers the basics of the structure of a WordPress Theme and standard customization options.
Like all websites today, a WordPress site contains a background area, header, sidebar(s), content area, and footer.
The background area is considered the canvas that the site’s structural and design elements rest. It is usually a solid color, pattern, texture, or a design that does not overwhelm the rest of the content and design elements.
The header area content is set from within the WordPress Administration Panels through the Settings > General for the site title and site tagline.
The header art image is set from within the Appearance > Custom Header Image. WordPress now permits a wide range of images and image sizes to be used as the custom header image, and permits some level of cropping and positioning.
The sidebar(s) contain navigation, information, and design elements that complement the site’s purpose and content. In WordPress, this information is held in WordPress Widgets, modular content elements that can be moved around in the various sidebars, footers, and occasionally the header area. These are accessed and modified in Appearance > Widgets.
The footer is located at the bottom of the site. It usually features the name of the WordPress Theme and its author to give them credit, and the words “Powered By WordPress” with a link to WordPress or WordPress.com. It may also feature footer Widgets accessed through Appearance > Widgets > Footer.
The content area holds the content of the page depending upon the request of the user to view the front page, a Page, a single post, a search, categories, tags, author posts, archives, and other multiple post pageviews. Continue reading
To schedule a post or Page to publish at a time before or after this moment, you may use the Schedule feature in WordPress.
If the post or Page is a draft, the Publish button will change to read Schedule.
If the post or Page was published, it will say Update.
Click this when you are ready to update or publish the post or Page. Continue reading
There are many ways to present a post or article on a web page. This tutorial will cover the basic formatting, styles, and structure.
The structure of an article or content on a web page is the same for any web publishing platform. This article focuses specifically on WordPress but the principles apply whether you are on Blogger, Google+, LinkedIn, Drupla, Joomla, Facebook, or a forum.
If an article is long, and this is, and divided up into separate sections, a table of contents consisting of jump links that jump down to the section the reader wishes to get to first, or second, or whatever their reading preference might be.
The table of contents maybe a list within the article or featured in a box aligned to the right or left of the content area with text flowing around it, best left to those with some HTML and CSS skills.
I recommend that you test your own WordPress Theme by writing a test post following the examples in this article, or you may use the Sandbox Post for Testing WordPress Themes. It is a text file with HTML code representative of all the HTML tags found in a blog post.
Before we begin, I will be making references to the formatting toolbar found on the post and Page Edit Screens. It is blow the post title area and directly above the content textarea where you will write your post.
By default, you see only one line of buttons in the Visual Editor. The last button on the row is called the Kitchen Sink or Toolbar Toggle. If you click it, a second row will drop down. Continue reading
With the release of WordPress 3.5 soon, expect to see the WordPress Links feature, also known as the Blogroll, gone.
I’ve written more about this in “Blogrolls Gone in WordPress. How to Save Your Links” on Lorelle on WordPress.
The article includes an explanation of why as well as tips and techniques for exporting and saving your WordPress links, and how to display them in new ways within WordPress.
How to Log Into WordPress from Lorelle VanFossen
There are many ways to log into your WordPress or WordPress.com site. Here are some of the standard techniques.
Once you have logged into WordPress.com, you will be on the Global Dashboard panel.
From there, you can view your blogs, write a fast post, and access your various blogs.
From the address bar in your browser, you can quickly log into your WordPress site by typing in one of the following:
The latter, “login” is the fastest way.
This will bring you to the login screen where you can login or request a forgotten password.
Once you have logged in, you will be on the Dashboard panel of the WordPress Administration Panels.
If you have enabled the WordPress Widget called “Meta” and dragged it to a spot on your site’s sidebar, you and members, contributors, and authors may log into your site through the front door, so to speak.
This is a tutorial from the HTML Fundamentals Class I taught at Clark College in Summer 2012. It applies to HTML and WordPress.
There are five basic forms of links on a web page.
Links are the gateway to the web, the interconnected parts of the web that allows a web user to easily move from document to document.
A link consists of the following HTML tag structure.
<a title="Link to article title." href="http://example.com/article.html">Anchor Text</a>
a: The HTML Anchor tag.title: It is required by US federal law and international law that all links have a descriptive title property. The value text must describe the destination link in a way that will inform the user of what the destination material is about and help them decide to click through. It should be no more than a few words and written in sentence form, a simple instructional form such as “Link to article on links.” This is read out loud by screen readers.href: The Hypertext Reference is the destination link. In general, it is typically an absolute link written with the full http: address such as http//example.com/article.html.
Learning from Lorelle 