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A WordPress business theme is a theme that generally doesn’t put a blog front and center. It might certainly have a blog element to it, but you won’t see the “latest posts” taking up much (if any) of the screen space on the front page of a business theme — at least not above the fold (i.e. the top part of the site you can see without scrolling down).
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S. For those non-Americans reading this, as you probably already know, it’s our harvest festival and a time where most eat a large meal consisting of turkey and lots of other things. As the name suggests, it’s also a time to give thanks.
And so today I thought I’d look back to the beginning of the year and see what has transpired in the world of WordPress to give thanks for.
Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments section.
Thanks for a Healthy, Growing Child
Most of us simply don’t have the artistic talent of a professional graphic artist. I can say that with certainty. All you need to do is take a quick look around the web. Even with professionally designed WordPress themes all over the place, the minute one of us non-artist types takes a hand to our sites, the results can get ugly.
Although there are lot of nice gallery plugins out there, the truth is that the default built-in gallery for WordPress is actually fairly nice. It’s simple, it’s clean-looking, and it gives you easy control over things such as the number of columns, the order of the images, what type of page the images link to, and more. (See How to Insert a WordPress Photo Gallery for exact instructions on inserting a gallery.)
The Responsive Select Menu plugin lets you automatically turn your “WordPress 3 Menus” into an easy-to-scroll select box/dropdown menu. (A “WordPress 3 Menu” is a menu created through the WordPress admin area: Appearance > Menus. Many people typically use these menus in their top navigation spot, as well as other places.)
The Plugin in Action
Let’s go ahead and jump right into some examples to show you what it looks like.
Here’s a look at a normal top menu in a mobile device using the WordPress Twenty Ten theme.
Watermarking your images tends to serve one of two very important purposes. It can either discourage others from taking your images and using them as their own, or it can offer you a nice opportunity to advertise yourself if others do happen to take your images. In fact, you may even want others to take your watermarked images and place them far and wide wherever they like. It’s akin to free advertising.
Panels that slide in and out on your site provide a number of benefits. First, the tab to open them usually attracts attention that a normal link or a widget wouldn’t. People are naturally curious and will click on them just to see what will be revealed. Second, they let you display much more content on the same page than normal. Many users are willing to look at additional content if they don’t have to leave the page they’re on to do it.
Reviews are one of the most popular types of content on the web. In fact, they have literally changed the way people shop. But they have also changed the lives of content creators. Because of their popularity, reviews are something that content creators can target with confidence as a value-provider (provided the review actually provides value, of course).
Every year in the month of November, a challenge takes place that thousands of writers from all across the globe participate in – National Novel Writing Month, more commonly known as NaNoWriMo.
The idea is simple – write at least 50,000 words on a novel between November 1 and November 30.
If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, then you may want to either let others know about your progress on an already existing WordPress blog, or you may even want to set up a WordPress site in order to make your work public.
In either case, we have a few plugins that may help.
In Version 3.1 of WordPress, a new theme feature called “post formats” was added. Post formats allow you to change how a post is styled by choosing a pre-determined type such a quote post, a gallery post, an image post, a link post, an audio post, etc.
You choose the format you’d like by selecting a radio button located on the right side of the screen on the Post/Edit page. Here’s an example of post format types.
