As promised – here’s a quick rundown of how I tweaked the default WordPress theme to match my own website. Pretty much everything was achieved by editing either the style.css or header.php files.

The changes to the basic proportions of the page were made by increasing the #page and #footer divs from 760 to 900pixels and adjusting the right sidebar content to be 250px wide (to match my own ‘content_sub’ div) and expanding the rest of the content to fill the gap. …read more

The week before last I went on a ‘Blogging For Business’ course held at the Leitrim County Enterprise Board in Carrick-on-Shannon. It was a one-day course, but a lot of useful info was crammed in – WordPress, RSS feeds etc – I’d recommend it to anyone who maybe is just starting out setting up their own business website, or is looking for new ways to drive traffic to an existing site – probably not so useful if you’ve been running your own blog successfully for while – but ideal for beginners.

I’ve have made a few tweaks to the default WordPress theme – and well, it’s nearly there – as (hopefully) you can see from this page. I haven’t checked the layout integrity in many different browsers, and I expect there will be some strange things happening on sub-pages to this blog (for example – if any comments come in). And I’m also not sure what will happen if I start adding or editing widgets – but hey, it was my first effort and I think it has matched up with my main site design pretty well. There’s still plenty still to do – fiddle with the look of some of the links (particularly RSS related bits) and I haven’t really set up the sidebar yet. …read more

OK, in order to work out how WordPress sites are put together, I’m going to have to put on my Graphic Design Geek hat. (Yes I have one of those. It’s a black beret, by the way.)

I’m intending to blog about the changes I’m making as I go along. …read more

Here’s a thing. The default installation of WordPress I’ve just done is set up in such a way that the URL of each individual post is what they call ‘ugly’ – it contains numbers and question marks, rather than containing the actual text from the title of your post. And apart from being ‘ugly’, these links are not particularly Search Engine friendly. …read more

OK, you may remember seeing a little image in my last (first) post. Well, getting that to appear wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d hoped. When I first tried to upload an image from my computer, I got an error message:

failed to write to disk
…read more

I thought it might be useful to document the process of setting up this blog on my site as I went along.

Step 1: I found this page on WordPress.org which details the procedure for installing WordPress on your own site (this assumes that you have your own domain, and FTP access to upload all of the WordPress files to your own site). Now, being a graphic designer, and itching to get on with the task of customising the page to make it look all arty and such, it’s fair to say that I only read the instructions briefly, so this might all end in disaster, but here goes… …read more