wpSnap Site Reboot
When I started helping wpSnap on some of their technical issues last year, I realized that there was a lot of room to improve with the way conditional tags were written and addressed to produce the site that has among other things, featured listings, blogs and other WP themes all meshed into one pile of data in the backend. So when I was asked to redesign1 the site last month, I went a step ahead and offered to redo the backend as well.
The most prolific of issues on wpSnap (and other multi-author sites) seem to have stemmed from a new feature that was rolled into WordPress …
10.05.2008 - 3:24 pm - Feedback » - Web Design, WordPress -
Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme - Part 3.2 “Conditional Navigation Menus”
The navigational aspect of a site, especially one that is database driven, should have menus that are dynamically generated as well- just like the rest of the sites content, but is seldom the case. The reason is not the lack of technique, but rather the importance of effective navigation and its attribution to the success of the site as a whole.
A site with poor navigation is just as bad as or worse than a site with poor content. Magazine style themes have overcome this barrier using JavaScript dropdown menus. But there is a simpler yet seldom used method that can be used and …
04.19.2008 - 11:07 am - 2 Feedbacks - Design, How to, Resources, Tips -
Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme - Part 3.1 “Navigation – Second Level Menu”
This tutorial is running longer than we initially anticipated, we will break section 3 further into sub-sections.
In our ongoing exercise to learn the nuts and bolts of a magazine style WordPress theme, we examine what has become by far the most ignored part of a theme design, the navigation menu.
As important as they are, they are often found floating in the header or worse the sidebar and almost never used to its fullest. Today we will attempt to change that. We are dedicating the next few sections just to discuss navigation menus, its varied uses, and the …
02.11.2008 - 7:22 pm - 13 Feedbacks - Design, How to, Resources, Tips -
Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme - Part 2: DOMTab, Tabber, more
In continuing our efforts of slicing and dicing a Magazine style WordPress theme, we come to a very interesting juncture with Java interfaces. This probable is the most ubiquitous feature of most all magazine themes. If you think about it, it makes sense that magazine style themes use this non-obtrusive code to help manage content. These sidebar tabbed interface gives you the most bang for you buck in terms of digital real-estate.
Granted that it will not necessarily minimize bandwidth usage by loading the page any faster, but nonetheless provides an alternative to having the entire content load …
01.19.2008 - 2:43 pm - 31 Feedbacks - Design, How to, Resources, Tips -
Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme - Part 1 “The Loop”
Let me say it for the millionth time “content is king” and we all know that, don’t we?
Since content is the most important part of a site, your WordPress powered theme must emphasis on content presentation. Most cookie cutter themes come with a post list that runs based on the time your posts were published, in other words a chronological list of posts irrespective of its importance. Let’s face it, not all posts are created equal. Some posts are special, some are important and then some not quite so. Why then should all posts get the same treatment?
Magazine styled themes do a …
