WordPress users:
If you enjoy some of the features of WordPress.com, but want to self-host, check out the new JetPack plugin for WordPress:
A great collection of features, designed to take the wordpress.com experience to your own site.
Have you tried it yet? How is it working for you?
On occasion, I want to customize my WordPress login screen with some of my project branding. This is especially important when I’m working on a site that manages subscribers. It’s also a nice little touch to add to client sites, to give the client a sense of ownership.
I was surprised at the number of web-tutorials that encourage editing “wp-admin/css/login.css”, or overwriting the WordPress logo image in wp-admin.
In practice, try to avoid ever editing an item inside the wp-admin and wp-includes folder in WordPress. Any changes made to those files, are likely to be overwritten the next time you upgrade WordPress.
The WordPress login screen changes can be made in your theme folder.
Here’s how I did it: Continue reading “Branding Your WordPress Login Screen”
I got my last site design from a cake.
I can’t come up with a color palette for the life of me. It’s just not in my DNA. So, when I started working on a recent pet-project, I found myself floundering through the branding.
So, I’ve started turning to fashion and interior decorating to make my sites work.
On that pet-project, I plugged Google with a few key words that tied into the “emotion” I was looking for on the site, and ended up finding a picture of a beautiful brown and blue wedding cake. The cake, and the setting it was placed in, was exactly the feel I wanted for my site.
I pulled the photo into Photoshop, and used the Color Table tool to extract the key colors (see here for a great tutorial on how to make that happen)
So… friends who have some more design experience… what else do I need to consider when putting a palette together? I’d love to learn.
I led a session at the recent Word Camp MSP event. This session was designed to help those who are just getting their feet wet with WordPress, understand what a plugin is, and how they can help their installation of WordPress.
It is important to note that not every plugin is appropriate for every installation. Each site’s goals and content need to be taken into consideration before extending WordPress. However, after bouncing the question around to a number of peers, these are some of the plugins that have bubbled to the surface.
Here are the plugins we featured:
What about you? What are your “Must-install” plugins on WordPress?
Others that came up (these were peer recommended, but I haven’t used all of them,)
Here’s a great article from the New York Times, looking at a recent study by usability expert Jakob Neilsen.
It’s a good reminder that use of generic photos/stock images may make the developer and the client feel good about the site, but may have little positive impact on the end user.
Key quote:
“big feel-good images that are purely decorative” are mostly ignored online, while stock photos or generic people are also intentionally disregarded. In contrast, when users know that a picture of a person is real they will engage with the image for extended periods of time.
