WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials | Web Training Wheels

Handy Web Design Resources For The Non-Designer

I consider myself creatively impaired when it comes to visual design. I know generally what I like and what I think works, but I’m not good at actually creating it from scratch. I leave that type of stuff to the pros and absolutely think that just because you can use Photoshop, or make a website, that does NOT qualify you as a designer!

But once in a while, I need to sort of cheat and pull off some design-y type things and I have found several online tools that help me do this in a competent way. Plus, most of these tools are just super-fun to play with!

Web-based Color Palette Tools

Need to pick a font color for a website that will match the overall look and feel? Or maybe you need to introduce an additional color that will match. These handy tools will let you upload a logo or any image and generate a color palette of complementary colors.
Color Palette Generator
This is very simple to use – just paste in the url of a logo or image and it will generate some colors.
Adobe’s “Kuler”
tool does a few more things. It has some preset color schemes which can be useful if you’re starting from scratch, or you can create your own based on a color you select, or an image. It also presents versions of the color schemes based on mood or other criteria.

Planning Your Website Effectively- WordPress Is A Tool Not A Strategy

Online Marketing, WordPress

One of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome is because it makes building powerful websites pretty easy. Pick a theme, add some content, hit Publish and there you have it. Lack of technical know-how is no longer a barrier, and the array of shiny, sexy themes that are available along with the inexpensivenss of it all can make it dangerously easy to under-think the process of building a website. But while WordPress and its eco-system have made many parts of the process simple and taken the grunt work out of making a site, the one thing that YOU still have to do, is the analytical thinking and planning behind your site.

For your site to be an effective business tool, it must reflect the core goals and missions of your company. Whereas many of us start the planning of a site by looking at the available WordPress themes and letting those designs sway our decisions, we really need to be starting from a more strategic point of view and making decisions about themes, plugins etc, based on the bigger picture.

So before you put pixel to screen, or start buying themes, consider the following.

6 Common WordPress “Gotchas” To Avoid

WordPress Tutorials - Basic

I teach people on a daily basis how to use WordPress, from the ground up. A few face-smackingly simple issues come up time and again.

1) Pasting from Word will make your posts look funky

Anytime you copy and paste directly into the WordPress editor, from Microsoft Word, another website, or any other outside source, you run the risk of it looking, well, a bit funky ,when you publish it. This is because other applications, especially Word, have their own set of formatting that gets carried over when you copy/paste. Usually this ends up conflicting with the formatting and styling of your theme. You may not realize there is an issue until you publish the post and something looks off – the fonts don’t quite match, or the spacing is strange. 9 times out of 10 in these cases, it’s because you copied/pasted from Word. To avoid such issues, simply use the 2 clipboard buttons on the second line of the post editing toolbar with the T and the W on them.

Creating Password Protected Pages and Areas in WordPress

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials - Intermediate

I had a client recently who needed to create private, password-protected sections on her WordPress site. She wanted each of her clients to have a private page with information related to what they were working on together. Easy! Password-protection is an in-built feature of WordPress, in case you didn’t know.

When creating a page, you simply click “Edit” next to Visibility in the Publish box on the right. Choose “Password protected” and set the password as you choose.

WordPress Widget To Display A Twitter Hashtag

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials - Basic

Need a Twitter plugin that does a little more than simply display your own Tweets in the sidebar? Tweet Blender does a ton of stuff:

Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user or a list of users (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple lists AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.

Easy Ways To Create Columns, Grids and Cool Layouts in Your WordPress Post

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate

Tutorials

LAST UPDATED: August 2016

Have you had one of these fights with the WordPress post editor? Have you tried creating neatly aligned rows and columns of images? Or perhaps attempted to place 2 videos next to each other? Such tasks can seem simple in concept, but can be maddening to attempt.

Basically the WordPress editor by default is just not good with allowing you to do anything column or grid-based, unless you hand-code the HTML, which defeats the purpose of using WordPress, amirite?

Fortunately, by installing one simple plugin you can quickly and easily attain more flexibility with your page and post layouts.