Antonio Riveras » Wordpress

Reasons I choose Wordpress

Antonio Riveras — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:32:53 +0000

I’m a huge Wordpress fan. Every project I work with ends up being a Wordpress site. I can be honest and say that it’s the only CMS I know how to work with besides CushyCMS and that’s the main reason I choose to work with it.

Even so, I have more reasons than the previously stated.

Lots of Plugins
Easy to tweek the code
Lot’s of themes
Huge online community and support

I also believe that Wordpress will grow to be the biggest and most common CMS in the market, even for those who don’t know about web and internet. Thanks to Google and the love it has for Wordpress, many people are starting to switch over to Wordpress from Joomla and other systems.

What CMS are you using and why?

From Photoshop to Wordpress

Antonio Riveras — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:51:00 +0000

It was only about a year ago that Wordpress was introduced into my life. All the positive feedback I read on forums and blogs made me order the book Wordpress Complete and start learning everything there is to create Wordpress Themes. Wordpress is an excellent tool if you’re a designer or developer and want the opportunity to create a flexible web site.

When creating a Wordpress theme the steps look something like this:

Photoshop –> XHTML/CSS –> Wordpress.

How does each step look like then?

Photoshop

I start off by designing the website in Photoshop. This is were I decide where the web sites header, menu and content is placed as well. Appropriate guidelines are set so I can begin to slice up my images.

Photoshop to XHTML/CSS

When the design is done it’s time to slice up the images so I can code the xhtml/css. Thanks to the guidelines I can quickly use the crop tool and start slicing and saving each image. This step is fast, I just save all the images with appropriate names under a well-thought folder structure.

XHTML/CSS

Now that everything is slice up it’s time to start coding the XHTML/CSS. My primary tool is xHTML-Kit. Everything is coded from scratch with the help of a modified version of Eric Meyers reset.css.

As a preamptive measure I code just about everything that’s going to be displayed on my wordpress site. Some people only code the basics and then return to Wordpress, start implementing the functions and then return to finish off the coding in xhtml/css.

That’s not the way I do it. I do the complete styling (css) of the html that Wordpress renders and then I implement all of the wordpress functions. This process is much smoother, but you need to know exactly how Wordpress renders the HTML.

XHTML/CSS to Wordpress

By now I’ve designed my Wordpress theme, slice up all the images and coded everything in XHTML/CSS. Now it’s time to make this template into a Wordpress site.

Since I’ve already styled everything I just need to divide the page into header.php, footer.php, siderbar.php and index.php. When that part is done I start implementing all of the functions.

The functions I implement depend on what my Wordpress site looks like and how it works. The primary functions are the loop, displaying categories, dates and comments.

I’m basically finished now. I might have some minor adjustments to make, but the core of the site is done and ready to be installed as a theme.

SEO-plugins for Wordpress

Antonio Riveras — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:51:33 +0000

Wordpress is a great platform for anyone who has a website. It’s very flexible and comes with a ton of plugins so you can enhance it’s power. Plugins come in many forms and variations. These plugins are for optimizing your wordpress site for the search engines.

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything, from helping you choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and alot more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links lets you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions Google, this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and much more

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, prevent indexing of your login page and other features.

Use these plugins and you’ll get more visitors to your blog. I use All In One SEO for my blog and it does wonders with the traffic I get!