There’s a great article about Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts at Lorelle on WordPress .
You might think to yourself that you don’t want a blog, but WordPress can be used for much more than that. It would be reasonably easy to create a website powered by WordPress that looked nothing like a traditional blog. WordPress gives you the ability to easily post information in an orderly manner. Organized by time, date, and category. Using the methods listed in Lorelle’s article, you could customize your site by essentially giving each category different CSS characteristics. This would give you a wide range of formatting and organizational solutions for your site.
JavaTechniques is a nice site with, to quote it’s author, “a small, but growing collection of Java howto’s and examples“. It’s also a nice example of how to put together a collection of content over time with WordPress as the CMS.
Have you noticed the attribute “ilo-full-src” appearing in your code when when working in WordPress with Firefox? You likely have the ImgLikeOpera extension installed. Disable it and everything should work fine. I don’t know why it’s causing the addition of this odd bit of code, but it seems to be doing just that.
As you can see, I changed the WordPress theme. Still fiddling, but since this site is rarely visited, I figure it wouldn’t really matter. As in previous versions, the CSS and page structure is mine, while the PHP is a mish-mash of the two default themes and some of my own work. Hope you like it.
I’ve recently been playing with a free PHP Script. I’m incorporating a little of the dynamic content of the blog into the main page using a PHP script pulling in the RSS feed. It’s a very user friendly set-up. The documentation leaves a little to be desired, and the sample template had to be completely redone for my use, but the actual script is quite impressive. If you’re looking for this sort of thing, it’s well worth your time. The superior quality of the script far outweighs the negatives of the documentation and template.
To get the results I wanted, I changed the template file to PHP and removed all of the extraneous coding. Changing the template to PHP allowed me to remove a lot of the HTML in the template, making for cleaner ocde when it was pulled into the home page. Then all that was left was to add the proper CSS selectors and it was ready to go.
I’ve updated the theme on this site. The original theme I used was an experiment of sorts. I wanted to build a site with page edges that weren’t straight. As you can see in the picture below, all four edges of the page in that style were jagged.
An interesting experiment, and I’m glad I tried it, but it was a little distracting. This new style is a lot cleaner looking.
How often do you visit a website and find that it isn’t functioning properly?
Lack of functionality is a very common problem that I see. A site needs to function reliably and consistently, regardless of the platform and browser choices of the viewer. Too many designers seem willing to sacrifice functionality in exchange for one web gimmick or another. Building a website is more than just slapping the pieces together and praying. Test, test test, and then do it again. Here is a short list of things that need to be checked. It is by no means complete.
- Have you checked Mac and PC? How about Linux?
- Does it work in IE7? Firefox? Opera? Safari? Did you forget IE6?
- Have you checked all of the pages, even the obscure ones?
- If it’s a blog, have you verified that the RSS feeds are working?
- Are all of the images loading? Even those called by the CSS?
- Could any of those images be made to load faster? Dial-up viewers would appreciate it.
Don’t let minor problems with your site cause major problems with your viewers and your clients. Good design is great, but if you can’t make it work, it’s useless. Make sure that your functionality is as good as your design.
