Posted by Ben Cook as WordPress Wednesdays
Ever since we released the Blogging Experiment theme for sale, we’ve been getting more and more questions about how to do different things in WordPress. Unfortunately, I’m not anything close to resembling a web designer and most of the questions go shooting straight over my head. As I’ve mentioned before, the themes were designed and coded by StudioJMC inc. While I can answer a few questions about the functionality, I’m definitely not the person you’d want giving coding advice about how to achieve a certain look and feel from your WordPress theme.
However, as many of you know, the owner of StudioJMC just happens to be my father. So, I’ve convinced him (read as: begged until he agreed) to take some time away from designing to answer as many of your WordPress related questions as possible. Being the fan of alliteration that I am, I’ve decided to call the feature WordPress Wednesdays and you guessed it, the posts will appear in this space every Wednesday starting next week and will continue for as long as we have questions.
So, if you have a WordPress related question, either drop them in the comments of this post, or email them to me using our handy contact form. Be sure to leave as many details as possible to help us (and by us I mean my dad) answer your questions accurately and don’t forget to include a link. If your question is chosen to appear in a post, I’ll throw you a link as our way of saying thanks. A link and an answer, what more could you ask for?
9 Responses
Jason Peck
February 20th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
1This question isn’t very specific, but I would think it would be helpful for a lot of people. Is there a good way to integrate shopping cart/store functionality in Wordpress?
Steven Bradley
February 20th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
2Jason there are a few shopping cart plugins available for WordPress.
I haven’t used any so I can’t offer a specific recommendation and I’m not sure what functionality is included in each, but they should all make integration easy.
Rebecca Laffar-Smith
February 20th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
3What a wonderful idea and KUDOS to your father for agreeing to answer readers’ questions.
I don’t have any specific questions myself since I AM a web designer and already know most of the answers.
(I’ll be reading anyway to see if someone asks something I don’t know the answer to or if your father has a solution I didn’t think of.)
If however, you’re looking for a few topic suggestions (that can be turned into questions and answers) then my suggestions include:
How do you customize your site colors/header/sidebar/footer/specific pages/etc.?
How do you add widgets/plugins?
How do you change your theme?
How can you add another sidebar to your existing theme?
What plugins/widgets do you believe are MUST HAVES? (notify comments, recent posts, top comments? etc.)
How do you install or activate Akismet and should you?
How do you create unique Meta Tags (keywords, descriptions) for individual posts?
How do you edit the way your blog shows your page titles?
*ponders* Is that enough to be going on with? These are the sorts of questions I had when I first began using Wordpress. The answers are out there, especially if you’re willing to tinker with the CSS, PHP and go over and over the administration to find the right result. There are of course MANY more questions.
Give me a shout if you run short.
This sort of feature could be a blog in and of itself. lol
Speaking of themes for sale, will you be adding new themes too? You could increase your income by offering more themes for sale.
Ben Cook
February 20th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
4Wow Rebecca that’s a fantastic list! Thanks very much.
We are planning on adding more themes to our offerings yes. In fact, I’ve been working on a mock up of what I hope is our next one for a few days now.
Ellie
February 20th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
5Look forward to seeing this new series!
Kevin
February 21st, 2008 at 8:23 pm
6Here’s a topic for Wordpress Wednesday. What plugins are best to 1) keep visitors on your site 2) highlight the most popular content 3) increase interaction with your visitors 4) increase page views 5) help the ability to monetize.
Hopefully that should be good for a post or two
I look forward to reading this series of posts, thanks to you and/or your dad!
Mike Huang
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:35 am
7I had no clue your father is the coder/designer *SHOCKED!*
-Mike
Kevin
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:26 am
8Strange…There’s a link in my comment for the word “monetize” but I didn’t put it there.
Ben Cook
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:01 am
9@ Mike, yeah, who knew the old man could still be productive
@ Kevin, that’s the Link a Dink plugin at work. I used to sell phrases to advertisers but have since stopped. I posted about it here at some point, a search for Link a Dink should bring up the post.
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