WordPress for the End User – Part III: Writing Posts

This is a basic WordPress tutorial for end users. WordPress has many of capabilities but only a few areas are important for most end users. Part III will cover Writing Posts. See Part I for Adding Users and Part II for Adding Pages.

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WordPress for the End User – Part II: Adding Pages

This is a basic WordPress tutorial for end users. WordPress has many of capabilities but only a few areas are important for most end users. Part II will cover Adding Pages. See Part I for Adding Users and Part III for Writing Posts.

Read more…

WordPress for the End User – Part I: Adding Users

This is a basic WordPress tutorial for end users. WordPress has many of capabilities but only a few areas are important for most end users. Part I will cover Adding Users. See Part II for Adding Pages and Part III for Writing Posts.

Read more…

Our websites are built right!

There are a lot of businesses that offer to build websites, but only a select few can claim the following:

  1. We don’t just claim to use modern web standards, we actual do; including all the industry buzzwords like Ajax, HTML5, CSS3, etc.
  2. We ensure that all visitors will have a pleasing experience, no matter what computer or browser they’re using (even outdated ones).
  3. We build on top of well-supported open source software like Drupal and WordPress. This mean that your website will be secure, up to date, and easy to maintain. (It also means that you can find someone else who knows how to take care of your site, in the unlikely event you choose to stop working with us or one of Donny’s deer puts us in the hospital.)

Know someone  that wants a website that’s built as well inside as it is outside. Send them our way.

The Mercy House Website

Several years back we created a new website for The Mercy House. The old website was outdated and sorely lacking meaningful information. As a mission oriented church located in Anderson, Ind. they needed an updated website to keep in touch with church members and the surrounding community. We created an informative website using Drupal, which was the best free content management system (CMS) at the time. Looking back on the website now, it is very drab; but at the time is was rather indicative of the mood of a small, young church struggling to get by.

oldtmh

After a while, as leadership changed, it became more difficult to keep the website updated. It was no longer meeting the needs of The Mercy House and no longer reflected the overall mood of the community. It was time for an update.

When speaking with the pastor about what he wanted there were two main ideas. It needed to be easier to use and update than the current website; and it should have, “Lots of large background images.” The former problem was easy; we rebuilt the site using the up-and-coming WordPress CMS. The latter desire (large background images) was more difficult. When using large background images a designer runs up against a couple different problems. The first is size, if an image is too large it slows down the loading of a website and annoys the visitors. The second problem is that of window resizing. If your image is a fixed size and a visitor opens his browser window to a larger size what does he see? Does he see the image repeat itself? Does he get a stark line where the picture ends?

How do I make it look like a gigantic image while keeping the file-size reasonably small? This is why I love being a designer. It was a tricky problem but as seen below, I finally came up with a solution. The background image is technically the size of an average browser window, however about three-fifths of the image is actually just white. Lots of white reduces the size of the image significantly. It also solves the window-resizing problem. Since the right and bottom edges are solid white all we need is white for an extended background.

newtmh