Jenn Mears Web Design

My latest project has been one of those things where you say “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can do that.” only to end up thrashing around on Google and in various forums, trying every keyword combination possible to make Wordpress do something that you thought would be fairly simple. (more…)

So I had an interesting synchronization happen last month. I met with a parenting group in Salem about possibly helping them put together a new web site and the site’s administrator asked me if I thought Wordpress MU would be a good solution for handling the group discussion feature. I had to ask him to explain what it was, and it sounded interesting, but kind of overkill for something that could probably be handled by comment moderation in Wordpress.

But the idea of using multiple blogs on one site was interesting and I thought it might work for another client who wanted to build a web site around the idea of one umbrella corporation and three companies under that corporation. (more…)

So, you want to set up a web site…

I have had a few clients whose initial contact with me is along the lines of, “I’ve reserved a name with a hosting company, and now I have no idea where to go from here.” Since I’ve been there myself, and have spent a lot of time on the phone with clients answering questions about C-Panels and bandwidth, I thought it would be a good idea to write something like a field guide to hosting companies. (more…)

When you start to browse for a theme for your new Wordpress install, do you get curious about what exactly you are looking at and what it means for your site? Here’s a guide to deciphering a sample theme page:

Word Press Test Site: Once you have set up your site, this is what your site’s name will look like, i.e. Jenn Mears Web Design

Just Another Wordpress Weblog: This will be your site summary. For example, “A site to learn more about how web design actually works.”

Page 1, Page 2: This is what Page links on your site will look like. Pages are considered “permanent” content and are treated like the pages of a conventional web site.

Page Child: A sub-page of a Page. Example: Page-About Us, Page Child-Company History.

Categories: A listing of the types of Posts that your site contains. Posts are like magazine articles. They are archived by the database you create in your WP installation and can be arranged for browsing according to either Category or date.

Archives: A chronological listing of all your posts.

Blogroll: A list of links related to your site that you can edit. It’s called Blogroll as a standard, but can be changed to say something else, like, Our Partners or Other Great Design Sites.

An Image In A Post: This is what the title of a Page or Post will look like.

Meta: This can be a list of links to sites related to Wordpress and/or your link to log into the WP control panel.

For anyone who’s ever wondered what phrases like “pinging Technorati’s rss feed for Diggs” mean.

Delicious: Del.icio.us is at heart, an online service that lets you bookmark pages on the web under a user name. Whenever you save a page’s URL, Del.icio.us’s user interface asks you to tag the page with keywords. These keyword tags are used to index the page in a searchable database. Entering a keyword such as “design” in a search will reveal all pages tagged with that keyword. The fun comes when (more…)

What is RSS and why should I care?

RSS is an acronym for several variations of the same idea. Some people take it to mean Rich Site Summary. Others like the meaning RDF Site Summary, but for the majority of users out there, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. (more…)

Since I’m currently working on 3 different sites that require working with Google’s map feature, I’ve had a chance to find a few quirks in their map interface. (more…)

It seems like it should be easy enough. Your client wants to put a few ads for local businesses into the sidebar of their site. So you upload an image for the ad into your “images” folder, open up your “sidebar.php” file, find out where you want the ad to show up, write some html and Voila! Hey, wait a minute, there’s no image, just the “alt” tag showing through. What up?
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…but didn’t even know to ask:

What is it?
It’s an online content management tool. That means that you are able to make changes to the site via a web browser.

How does it work?
You have to download Wordpress from the website and then upload it to your hosting server. Once it’s on your site, you can upload photos, make web pages that you can edit once they are published, and keep an blog on your site for quick news items or articles or interesting links.

What’s so great about that? (more…)

I’ve been acting like a squirrel on crack with Del.icio.us over the past 2 years. In the course of trying to grow a web design business from something done on the side, when I’ve got free time on the weekend, through the part time graphic design job with the difference made up with web clients, to taking the plunge into the full time freelance world, every time I researched a different aspect of the web, I would hit Google and bookmark every decent article I could get my hands on.

The following list is the first of (hopefully) many where I share the best of the best on various topics such as Search Engine Optimization, hosting, web technologies and this one, blogging.
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