Tag Archives: WordPress

Wedding Decorator redesigned!

It took me most of December, but I finally brought Wedding Decorator into the new decade. I hadn’t redesigned Wedding Decorator since 2008. I think in between 2008 and now, I may have tweaked the header a little, but that doesn’t do much. I’d planned to redesign Wedding Decorator sometime this year, but when it became apparent that, yes, I would definitely be having a baby, the timing was perfect — I’d use some time during my maternity leave to do the redesign.

Continue reading

Lost in a WordPress redesign

I desperately wanted to take my eyes off my laptop screen, but I wanted to write a little bit here. Yes, I’m in the midst of a redesign, but not for this site — this site’s already done! No, I’m in the middle of redesigning Wedding Decorator, and the fact that I’m doing it on my laptop while sitting on my couch in front of my TV is kind of driving me bananas. It doesn’t help that WordPress has changed drastically since the last time I redesigned my sites in 2008.

Continue reading

Back in working order

I had all these blog posts in mind this weekend, but I think my brain sort of got overloaded with all the stuff I had to do for my site on the backend. Basically, I’ve been wanting to switch from GoDaddy’s hosting to HostGator, which I use for Wedding Decorator and have been happy with. I finally got off my butt to do it when GoDaddy charged me nearly $100 to auto renew for two years. So I had to first backup my site, download my files and upgrade my HostGator account so it could take unlimited domain names (the Baby package). I followed the directions of various blogs to get my WordPress files transferred properly to HostGator, but there were a few snafus — I initially put my files in the wrong folder, then it turned out an .htaccess file was blocking my images, etc. It took plenty of IM conversations and emails with HostGator’s tech support guys to figure it all out, but its all in working order now and I’m happy as a clam. And my site loads much faster at work compared to when I had my hosting on GoDaddy.

2 WordPress workshops wrapped up

Since the blogging All-Stars panel last year, I’d been planning to put together a WordPress-for-journalists workshop. Most of the planning credit goes to my coworker and co-board member Leezel, who scouted out computer rooms at Cerritos College and Santa Monica College. The beginner’s workshop went very, very well — it was a packed room, with a good mix of professionals and students (although I think students still outnumbered the professionals). Despite the lack of WiFi, the existing Mac set up made it easy to get plugged in from my laptop. Since I was basically teaching WordPress.com, it was easy to teach from my prepared outline.

The advanced workshop…not as easy. The real headache was being unable to get on the campus WiFi (even though it was labeled “open”), so I had to type in all the addresses of the bookmarks I’d saved. Also, out of 20 people, only four of whom were professionals, just nine showed up. And even 3 pages of outline was not enough preparation for a workshop that covered domain names, hosts, connecting nameservers, installing WordPress through a host, setting up a database, explaining FTP, SEO, Adsense and text link ads. Sigh.

However, the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive and I’ve got these two workshops under my belt. I guess, if anyone wants an encore, just let me know.

New year, new look

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, or you’re just a little oblivious, I’ve redesigned yet again, this time, with a single column theme, which I’ve actually never done before, even with the original, html site that so many got to know and love. Ha. Anyway, as I describe in the updated About page, I actually started to hate my old theme with its three columns. It felt so busy, when dude, I really am not writing about anything consequential here. Seriously. So I started looking at single-column designs and managed to mix it up — redesigning the style of one theme that is super powerful with the styling of one theme that I consider totally gorgeous.

So if you haven’t figured out what’s going on yet, here’s a quick guide — what I used to have on my sidebars, like Flickr photos, a search field, archives, yadda yadda yadda, they’re all now incorporated into “sidebars” inside the one column. How cool is that?! If you stumble on anything that looks hinky, please let me know.

Thank yoo! Thank yoo very much. (I watched a lot of The Closer episodes during the making of this new design.)