Michael McCarthy Law has been in development for a while now and readers will soon find that it was worth the wait!

Meant to be much more than a simple “shingle site” for a Personal Injury and Estate Handling firm, MML is aimed at educating both current and potential clients, an approach that more and more businesses are finding to be beneficial to both parties. Creating this site was an exercise in conditional tags, one of Wordpress’s most powerful site architecture tools. Certain pages were designated by the client to live in the top navigational bar, while pages dealing with the various areas of practice were to have their own listing in the left sidebar. The theme is a customized version of CognoBlue 1.0 by BlogsDNA, which was a pleasure to work with, clean, flexible and consistent across browsers. Feel free to stop by Michaelmccarthylaw.com and take the grand tour!

Step 2.
Open up the “Kitchen Sink” mode (This is done by clicking that button on the right end of the display that has all those tiny squares), and click the arrow next to the underlined “A” to bring up the Color-Picker.

Step 3.
The initial Color-Picker window contains just a few of the hundreds of colors available. Click on “More Colors” to bring up the full range of options. By default, the window opens to the the full spectrum Picker, but there are other options as well such as the Palette (web-safe colors) and Named Color (standard colors such as “Red”).

Step 4.
Notice how clicking on any point in the palette brings up a series of letters and numbers in the lower right side box? That’s the code you will need to display that color. Choose a few colors and write down their corresponding code. Now, when you want to customize your CSS file, you will have the right code on hand to display the colors you want. (See example below)

Tip #1: Before you even start to look for help, create a Wordpress Support account by going to http://wordpress.org/support/ and clicking on “register” in the top left corner. This gives you a profile on the support forum where you can go and track your threads and replies and other users can learn a little more about you. Another nice feature is the RSS feed for your thread so you can track responses from your Google homepage or Netvibes or what have you.

Tip #2: Now that you have a Support username and login, you can start your search. First, enter your search keywords into the upper left corner where it says: “Search Wordpress.org”. This is just to make sure the answer you seek isn’t already in the Codex or Support forums. If your answer doesn’t turn up, then focus your search in the Support Forums by typing your search terms into the search box in the lower right of the page. It’s a good idea to make as thorough a search as possible before posting a new topic. If you don’t, not only will you be gumming up the forum with yet another question that’s been answered before, but the forum users who tend to respond with helpful answers will chide you in their answer for not being more thorough, if they answer you at all.

Tip #3: So, once you’ve gone through the first two steps, now it’s time to try Hot Topics. This is a tag cloud located underneath the search support forum box. Find a tag that’s the closest keyword to your issue and click on it. This takes you to a page that lists all the posts that have been tagged with that keyword. You’ll probably notice that some tags have hundreds of pages of threads to wade through. This is most likely because those who came before you didn’t do a thorough search, but you are a different breed!

Tip #4: OK, here’s the nitty gritty. If you clicked on a Hot Topics keyword, you’ll see that when you go to the page for that topic, the keyword is shown at the top right of the page and next to it is a link that says “Add New”. Click that, or scroll down to the bottom of the page. Eureka! There’s a window where you can add a new topic!
(This is also the reason that the Wordpress team doesn’t create a link on the support home page that says something like “post a new topic”. They want you to do your homework first.)

Tip #5: If you need to post a new topic, make sure you make your post title as descriptive as possible. “WP Newbie Help!” won’t cut it, but “URL for RSS feed not working in address bar” might. Make sure you know which version of Wordpress you are using. You can find out by going to the link in the upper right corner of your admin page where it says: “Dashboard”. If you have any special configuration for your WP install, such as in a subfolder of your site, make sure you mention that as well. Provide a link to your site so people can see the issue if they need to. Make sure you enter Tags (keywords used to find your topic) and choose a Section as well.

Tip #6: Keep checking back for responses to your post by signing into the forum and going to your Profile. If you manage to solve your issue, then make sure you change the status of your topic to “Resolved” this will “pay it forward” to other WP users. Good luck!

Once you are in your place where you edit, just be sure you are in html mode:

Create your post and highlight the text where you’d like to create a link by clicking the “add link” button.
Then, paste your link in the the popup window. Now here’s where the fun starts. You now have a basic html tag in your post like “a href=”placeyoulinkedto.com”. But since you are in html mode, you can make that link a different color by editing the tag like so:

Here’s a better capture of what your code needs to change to:

Of course, you can change the 6-digit hex code to anything you want. Used sparingly, it’s a good tool for getting your readers to really notice a link you want them to visit.

Pages are like posts except they live outside of the normal blog chronology and can be hierarchical. You can use pages to organize and manage any amount of content.

This, of course, makes perfect sense to the Wordpress-initiated, but if someone is new to the concepts of blogging, cms, and site architecture, it just comes across as geeky hoohah. Allow me to break it down.

I’m going to use my latest project as an example. It’s a cms-driven site about an organization devoted to Salem’s downtown business scene and includes a community calendar, a blog about Salem business events and pages about the organization’s various committees and sponsored events. Fortunately, Salem has an incredibly dynamic business community and there seems to be something going on almost every day of the week. It’s a perfect example of what Wordpress was meant for; a site that contains easy-to-update news about ongoing happenings as well as tons of information about Salem and the local business scene.

So what to put where? I guess it’s basically a question of which content is going to be useful at any point in time to the user and which content is time-sensitive. Say there’s going to be a fashion/home furnishings show at a local cafe. It’s something that will take place one night and you want people to come to it in abundance. The solution is to create a Post that will describe the upcoming event and assign it tags and categories so that it will be more easily found by the site’s readers.

Once the Post is published, it becomes a part of the “blog” portion of the site, that is, the page where readers can find the latest news posted about the site’s subject. A Post can be accessed in a variety of different ways. If it’s relatively fresh, it can be found in the posts contained on the blog portion of the site. If it’s been assigned tags (another name for keywords that describe the content of the Post) then if a reader clicks on a tag a Post has been given, say “benefits”, all other Posts with the same tag will be called up. If a reader clicks on a Category that Post has been assigned to, the Post will appear in that listing. The same goes for the chronological Archives function. All in all, a handy way for your readers to find and track all the events going on in your busy town.

So what about Pages? The way I try and explain this to people is that Pages are more like the traditional web site pages one is used to seeing. Rather than the more ephemeral information contained in the blog (Posts) section of the site, Pages are mainly a way to organize permanent information that you want your readers to always be able to easily see. For example, you want people to be able to easily find out what your site is about, so Wordpress even includes an “About” page in the initial site set-up. Other things you might want people to easily find are a way to get in touch with you via a “Contact Us” page or, in the case of the Salem site, ways for new businesses to find out how the organization can be of use to them.

So how does one organize Pages? They don’t exist in a chronological archive and they aren’t organized via Categories or Tags, so what to do? Pages are organized into a family structure instead. Main sections of content, such as “About Us” are the Parent Pages and then those Parents can have Children. It’s all controlled via the Options panel underneath the edit window in your Write > Page section of the Dashboard.

Is there a way to control how Pages display on a site? I’ve actually used a number of techniques to solve this. The first isn’t really a technique, it’s just letting the Pages fall into their place in the header.php, or the sidebar.php files or maybe both. That depends on the Theme you have chosen. It’s also possible to order the pages in the Options section where it says Page Order. If you do this, then you have to number all the Pages, or it won’t work.

And if you’ve chosen a Theme for its groovy layout or colors and then discover that the Pages don’t display as you would like, don’t despair. It’s fairly easy to control with a little HTML and CSS. I’ve done this on the Salem Main Streets site by taking out the list_pages template tag in the header and replacing it with a CSS-styled unordered list of links to the Parent Pages. Then, since all the Pages were listed in the sidebar still, I simply added the title Site Map to that template tag. So at least all the pages are still visible in their hierarchy without crowding the header. (If I was more of a geek, and had more time, I’m sure I could come up with a conditional tag that displays only a certain level in the hierarchy, but things have been hectic around here!)