www.reflectingthedesigner.com

I’ve finally gotten around to posting another free theme! This one is a theme I just did for someone, so it’s WP 3.0 compliant. The image below is a screen shot of the working theme, and has the following features:

• Two Column Design
• One Column Page Template also included as a check box option for each page.
• Sidebars include right sidebar, top sidebar, bottom sidebar, and dynamically widgetized footer
• Valid XTML
• Horizontal Menu (works great with new customizable menu found in WP)
• Vertical Menu also available if desired within the theme
• Built in Social Icons
• Built in div for Header Logo or Graphic

Let me show you what you’ll need to know in order to download this theme and edit the Header and personalize your social icons. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve followed some of my posts about how to edit the code of Artisteer generated templates, you might be freaking out a little that the updated version is so much different. Don’t worry. Artisteer has actually made things a little easier for you. Let me show you how. Read the rest of this entry »

As I was working on redesigning theStock411 WordPress blog, I implemented two fantastic WordPress plugins. One of these plugins is WP-Sticky. I’ve known about this plugin for a while, but had never used it. It’s a nice simple way to keep one post at the top of your blog at all times. Now, there are a couple of items to note if you are using this plugin after creating your theme in Artisteer: You must change a tiny bit of php if you want to hide the date. I found a couple of forums that had parts of the following information:

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Well, I’ve been very busy on some projects recently as well as other “life” stuff that have kept me from being able to post as much as I’d like to. I just completed a full WordPress website for a company that I did a WP blog for several months ago. They wanted their whole site transformed and consolidated into one WordPress Site. It was a huge process as I had to set up WordPress in their current hosting location, transfer the old blog over to it, and completely design and add content to their site from top to bottom.

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Here’s a brand new theme with some extra goodies thrown in. It is a widget ready theme that includes a top menu and a fun scrolling brick wall background. Click here to download this theme. The first screen shot pictures exactly what the theme looks like. Notice that there is plenty of space in the header for you to add your own png or gif to personalize this WordPress theme to fit you. Please see my post on how to add images or buttons to your header for simple instructions on how to do this. Note: instructions are at the bottom of the post.

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Well, as you can see if you’ve visited my site before, I’ve just updated the theme again. I like to create new design themes for my own site both for variety as well as to demonstrate some nice Artisteer, Photoshop, and WP tweaking techniques. I’ll list a few of those techniques in this post.

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These are some buttons I designed for a Western themed sites I did recently (email me if you are interested in seeing the working site), and I wanted to make the buttons available to you for FREE for all 4 button images. I offer more free buttons (and will continue to add to this collection) on my Blogger Scrapbook Site. These, however, are a very special design with a rustic wooden feel and are perfect for a Western Themed or Rustic Themed blog or site design. The image on the right depicts all of the buttons as they are displayed on a site that features a wood background. These images were designed to be scrolling images on the side of the screen, but they can be incorporated anywhere you desire to put them on your site.

How to Download these Buttons:

Simply click on the picture to the right, and you’ll be directed to a zip folder containing the buttons that you can download to your computer.

How to add these as scrolling buttons to your WordPress Site: Read the rest of this entry »

Adding a scrolling “Back to Top” button is a very nice feature for your blog so that people don’t have to keep scrolling to get back to the top of the page. I have already posted on how to do this for your BlogSpot blogs, and you can view that post on Blogger Scrapbook by clicking here.

Adding this button to WordPress takes a few more steps, but is still relatively easy. Now, I got the basic information from a site called instantShift, but they don’t have all of the information you need to actually add a button yourself. But, not to fear, I have been working and tweaking until I figured out exactly what you need to do in the simplest way! So, here goes!

• First of all, create and upload an image you want to use to your WordPress ftp, and save the url to it’s location.
• Secondly, log into your dashboard and click on Editor, then Header.php.
• Look for the following code: </head> <body>
• If the body element already has an id, copy that id name, but if it does not, give it an id by changing it to the following and  save your template: <body id=”top”>
• Now, go to your Footer.php and find the following code <p> class=”art-page-footer”></p> </div>
• Directly after that code, add this code: <div> <a style=”display:scroll;position:fixed;bottom:10px;right:10px;” href=”#top“><img src=”THE URL TO YOUR IMAGE HERE”/></a> </div>
• Change the URL to your actual image url, and you can change the position on the screen by changing the red elements above.
• Make sure, that if your Header.php already had an id associated with the body, that you replace “#top” to that id instead making sure to keep the # and quotation marks.
• Save your template, and you are all done!
• If you also want to add a text link to the bottom of your posts, all you need to do is add the code below to the bottom of each post that you write (just make sure that you are in HTML mode and not Visual): <a href=”#top”>Back to Top</a>

I just did this for my own site, and it works great in IE, Firefox, and Safari. Hint: You can use this same trick to add buttons to your footer that link to your RSS feed, or other items. Simply change the “#top” to the http address where you want the image to link to, and of course, you’ll need to add the correct image and image url as well.

Please leave a comment if this was helpful or if you have any questions, and feel free to contact me if you are interested in any customized graphics or buttons. I do have some free pre-made and hosted back to top buttons available on my Blogger Scrapbook site.

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Based on a comment I received earlier today, I thought I should do this post. Many people think that WordPress can only be used for blogs, or that you need to know some complicated code in order to turn your current WP blog into a full site. Both of these statements couldn’t be further from the truth. This site is a perfect example of that, and here are a few simple things you can do to turn your WP blog into a full blown site.

• Create a static home page - This is so simple! Just create a page that you want to be your home page and publish it. - Next, create a blog that you want your regular posts to be located on and publish that page as well. - Thirdly, on click on the Reading button under Settings on your Dashboard and choose to make your home display a static page. Just choose the page you created for the static page and choose the page you created to display posts for well…your posts.
• Label your blog something other than “blog” if you don’t necessarily want a typical blog as part of your site. Here are a few examples. - Resources or Products: if you offer services or items that you want to display based on category. You can create a page for each category as well, and your main Resources or Products page will display all of your posts. - News: use more like a blog to display your latest news. You can always choose to display only 1 or a few posts at a time, as well so that only the newest post is displayed like a regular page. - A specific theme. If you only update information on a very specific topic, than label your blog posts page that: movies, music, photos, etc.
• Use the text widget to create a graphic image or images on one or both sidebars. All you need to do is upload the desired image to your site, than copy and paste some code into the text widget. Let me know if you have any questions on this.
• Use the Display Widgets plugin from WP which allows you to hide and show widgets on only certain pages (note that this only works with the standard widgets as well as any text/image widgets you add).
• Make links from your pages with the Page Links To plugin from WP. This does just what it says; it allows you to create a page and link it to any address desired. For example, if you want to make a page out of specific categories, simply click on that category and copy and paste the url into the page link you want that page name to be.
• Other simple ideas include removing the words “Archive” from when displaying pages that are archives of posts, including a graphic signature to your home page. You can find out how to do these in previous posts of mine.
• Add a small store through your PayPal account by adding buy now or add to cart buttons by products you post to your site. All transactions are done through PayPal which is super easy and convenient for you. The buttons can be created completely through PayPal and you’ll get the exact code to copy and paste onto your pages. You can also use the E-Commerce plugin, but I’d recommend using this only if you have a more extensive store as it takes more work to set up and takes more space up on your site.

There are a ton of other things you can do, but those are the quickest and easiest ways to turn your blog into a site! Please let me know if this was helpful or if you have any more questions on turning your WordPress Blog into a regular website. also, contact me if you are interested in a completely original and customized WordPress theme design with setup.

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I don’t think I can describe just how much I dislike Internet Explorer. For over a year now, it hasn’t worked on my laptop, so naturally any software or programs that use IE as the default would not work on my system. I just upgraded my OS to Windows 7 (which I love!) and I finally have IE working again. Now that I am back on IE, I’m able to see what my site looks like through it instead of just Firefox. I was very disappointed to see that my image on my sidebar doesn’t show up! Also, two of my gallery images in my Photo Editing Gallery only display as thumbnails, but not as actual images when you click on them!!! So frustrating! Especially when everything works great in Firefox.

So, I’ve tried the WP forums to see if I could resolve the image no show issue. I made sure my permissions were set correctly in my ftp server. The code is correct in the text widget, and I even converted the main image to RGB (that was posted in one of the forums) and reuploaded it just to be sure. Still no luck! So, if anyone else out there knows what might be going on, please let me know! I’m realizing that everyone who has visited this site using IE has never seen it the way it was intended.

Hopefully, I will find a solution to this problem, and if I do, I’ll be sure to post what that is. Until then, I guess my site will have to stay a little on the plain side if you are looking at it in Internet Explorer.