WordPress Tips Archive

The goal of many web designers is to maximize the amount of money they earn on a regular basis. As with any profession, it is often nice to work less and make more so that additional time can be spent with friends and family. If you are trying to figure out a way to increase your hourly rate, you are not alone. Whether a web designer has been working for months or for years, it is possible to make these dreams come true. Bringing in more than $100 per hour is a realistic goal for anyone that has a strong web designing skill set. Thousands of designers have found ways to market themselves for higher prices. A common thread between these designers is the use …

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Website designers always intend to make the hefty dollars for hours they spend working. With the new ones coming and asking me for the ways to increase their income per hour, there is certainly a scope of improvement in increment everywhere. Let us look at the options. Designing is definitely a creative art and depends upon the needs of the client but also your skills. While many website designers know that they are capable of doing quite alot, they at most need to be shown a way. A $100 or $125 per hour, are not a something you simply can dream off; my friend, it’s a reality, and if you were just thinking of it for a while, start practicing it now. In actuality, this …

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After having installed and set up WordPress, most users run into difficulties related to the user interface or the navigation scope offered. These WordPress features were rather limited initially, but with several add-ons in the form of plug-ins, many of these shortcomings have been rectified to a large extent. The plug-ins have aided in enhancing the quality of the WordPress interface and in expanding the scope of WordPress navigation abilities. These are some of the available extra plug-ins. Interface features Carousel Gallery The original gallery offered by WordPress is a stationery one and jQuery features allow the static gallery to be transformed into a flippable one to the user’s advantage. Admin trim interface This plug-in helps in managing clutter in the administration interface and helps …

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If you want to get your business going then you should be working on a good search engine ranking in order to drive traffic to your website. Most people nowadays are using WordPress, which basically does much of the work for placing you in the page ranks, however, there are some SEO features that are not considered or implemented in WordPress, and can be installed to enhance your ranking. You have an extensive choice in the type of plug-ins you wish to install, according to how much you good you want your search engine ranking to be, although it is advisable to keep to a minimum of plug ins to avoid a server crash. Here are some useful plug-ins you can use of WordPress, which …

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Building a website can be a stressful process and sadly, a dull one. There is a lot of repetition involved, and if you’re working as part of a team a lot of head scratching. Especially if you came into a project late on and you are trying to decipher some code. The solution to keeping hair on your head is to keep as much of the design process as possible, systemized This is as you can imagine, incorporates two elements into the build: Implementing design rules into the web design process, and using processes to speed up the repetitive tasks involved in web design, such as creating templates that can be reused. Collect code Having a repository for code is essential and you should already …

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CSS is an amazing web tool, but it can easily get messy or sloppy.  To get the best out of it, you must stay organised.  So no more sloppy code, or unrecorded hacks.  Your education in organising your CSS code is about to begin. Keep organized.  Rather than dropping in classes and id’s at random, try and keep things structured.  Declare generic items first, followed by the not so generic items, and keep to that pattern.  That way other developers are going to be able to follow the code, which is one of the great advantages of using CSS. Title, sign, date.  Ensure that people know it was you that did the design.  This is helpful if another designer needs to clarify something with your …

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In part 1 of our tips for laying out content in web design, we showed you four ways to display content in a web design.  Though these tips are very useful in their own right, we have another four that we wish to bring to your attention, and we are going to start with a technique called progressive design. Progressive Design:  The idea behind this technique is that a user follows a natural flow over several pages to obtain the information he or she needs.  This is normally navigated by buttons like “click next”, and so on and so fourth, and is often used for completing forms, where sections are displayed one after another.  Another use is if your site wants to demonstrate to the …

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In our last two articles that focused on the dilemmas of freelance web designers, we looked at general tips, http://www.dreamtemplate.com/blog/web-design-tips/tips-for-new-freelance-web-designers/, and tips for effective project planning, http://www.dreamtemplate.com/blog/web-design-tips/freelance-web-design-and-project-planning/. This article looks at why bad planning is so common, or more accurately why underestimating the amount of time a project will take is so common.  Hopefully, once you have read this article, you will have a much clearer and better understanding for your future freelance web designs, and so you will be able to avoid project planning disasters. There are in essence four reasons why projects overrun.  These are: Bespoke features for a specialised industry. Grey areas or unknowns in the design. New, or unfamiliar technologies are required for the design.  Some may never have been used …

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 WordPress, as you are no doubt aware, has exploded in popularity over a very small space of time.  It has become a business in its own right, with developers selling themes at every opportunity, and coming up with ever more daring, imaginative and practical designs.  And why not, money is money, after all.   Despite this, there are still a lot of free wordpress themes for web design, still out there on the web.  So we thought you might like to know where to find them, and have provided the links, so finding them will be easy.    For those of you unfamiliar with the blogging tool, WordPress is simply a content management system, which enables users to upload information, which is then displayed on …

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As the regular readers of this blog have guessed, at Dreamtemplate.com we do like WordPress for our blog pages.  Indeed, WordPress, has taken off and is being constantly improved and modified, more or less all the time.  Should we though, be using Joomla for our blogging pages.  Are they really the same tool, or is there differences we should be considering.    Well there is no doubt that WordPress is easy to use, and easy to pick-up.  You do not need to be a seasoned ICT professional to be able to use it, and around forty minutes is all it takes to train someone who is a novice, to be able to use WordPress effectively.    The general feeling is that WordPress has everything logically …

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