Here are the slides from my presentation at WordPress Birmingham last weekend. I am also going to be doing it again at WordCamp Atlanta in a couple of weeks. I will also try and add the video after we get it processed.
In this post, I am going to walk you through making some of the customizations that we used to create the Isvari Yoga site with Thesis Theme for WordPress. So here we go…
Genesis is the parent theme of a Theme Framework by Studio Press that comes with a boatload of child themes. Wondering what the heck is a Theme Framework and how does it differ from a regular WordPRess theme? I just happen to have a post on that exact subject which you may want to check out first. I also have a couple of posts on other theme frameworks such as Thesis Theme.
The Genesis theme’s child themes, were based upon the theme files of the Genesis Parent theme. The child themes are available from StudioPress to purchase and are ready to use as is or to customize and make Grandchildren theme designs.
When you use a Genesis Child theme you must upload both the parent, Genesis and the child theme to the wp-content/theme folder though FTP. You then must activate only the child theme. As long as the parent is in the wp-content/theme folder it will be ready for you to start working with it. Once the theme is active you can go to the theme options and select the options that you will need. [click to continue…]
The buzz around the WordPress Meetup Groups no longer is which theme should I use but rather, which theme framework is the “best” to use to learn to develop WordPress sites. But before we can even get into that, lets answer the question, “What exactly is a “framework”?
What the heck does that mean? The official WordPress Codex definition is “a theme that is designed to be a flexible foundation that can serve as a parent theme for building child themes.” [click to continue…]
Creating photography websites is easy for the designer and the end user if you build it using WordPress. With a photographer or an artist who is constantly creating new work, it is very important that they be able to add their new pieces and update their photography website themselves. Too often they have someone build a static website for them and are left with a site that they cannot update themselves. Even if they got the site for free this is no bargain when they have to pay a web designer $50 to $100.00 a pop to go in and add new work. Now, there is technology such as WordPress that allows an end user to go in and add photos and write content as easily as adding a post to Facebook or writing an e-mail.
WordPress is open source, so that means it is a free and the code is available to developers and designers to extend its functionality with plugins and themes. You can certainly have a custom theme developed but [click to continue…]
Many of you are designers who have access to the entire Adobe Creative Suite that includes Photoshop to manage and manipulate graphic images. But non-graphic designers who have been at a real disadvantage when they want to make even quick tweaks to images. Now, using Aviary, you non-graphic design folks can work on or create a new graphic or even an audio file!
reigndeer.egg by betsapp91 on Aviary
I have been using Aviary for a couple of years to take quick screenshots of websites or images from the web. I noticed recently that they are now affiliated with Google Apps and the entire web-based software is totally free! This powerful suite of design tools includes such apps as an: [click to continue…]
Back when I got into WordPress, I learned the hard, slow way to customize my WordPress sites. There just weren’t as many resources as there are today and the program was not as evolved as it is now. Back then, you had to know how to FTP files to WordPress rather than uploading themes and plugins through the admin as you can do now. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to FTP a file to my WordPress Installation. I rejoiced when someone finally told me to do it with Filezilla. Yup, I learned the slow painful way. At the time I was just working on my own sites and if I couldn’t figure out how to do something, I would just skip that idea and do it another way. And there are still plenty of ways to get to the same result with WordPress, which makes it a really fun development platform.
To save others from my frustrations, I thought I would pull together some of my posts that may fill in some gaps for you and get you further down the road to beginning to customize WordPress themes. Graphic designers especially should learn to modify existing WordPress themes and create customized sites for their clients. Most small business clients these days would rather have their site built from a theme customized by a designer than to pay the price of a designer to design a site psd file and then pay a developer to code it. [click to continue…]
Customizing WordPress With Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme
I often use Thesis Theme for WordPress which is a premium theme by DIY Themes. Thesis comes rather plain vanilla out of the box but comes with a great theme options admin panel which makes putting a site together go very quickly. Thesis is regularly updated and it has been tested to the hilt. Because so many people use this theme as the bones for their site, there are a lot of tutorials and thesis hacks out there, just a quick Google Search away. Graphic designer’s like to use it because it is somewhat of a blank slate. But a lot of folks use it as is, right out of the gate. Clients love this theme since it has a lot easy to use options and it never breaks. Here are just a few of our New Tricks website customizations using Thesis Theme. [click to continue…]
I am Co-organizer of the Atlanta WordPress User's Group Meetup. We meet the third Wednesday of each month and try to have a little something for people at all levels.
Check it out! We now have almost 900 members!
Click here to check out The Atlanta Wordpress Users Group!
Follow me here on Google +
