Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

How does your WordPress website or blog  look on your visitor’s screen? Do you know how your site looks on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, on a PC or a Mac – it is something worth checking.

Cross-browser compatibility has always been an important consideration and until we are all using the same browser on the same machine, it always will be – though things do seem to be settling down more now and we have fewer headaches than in the days of Netscape vs Explorer, for instance. Good web designers know to check that their work looks good across all browsers as standard, but as more of you are enabled to create your own websites, you also want to know how to check your cross-browser compatibility.

Thankfully there are tools available to us – of course there are!  I tested the Blogmistress site at BrowserShots and these are some of the results:

Try it out on your website, just to be sure… (and don’t panic if things don’t look as they should – that happens and may only need a small code change to have you cross-browser compatible).

Another option, if you have frequent tests to carry out, might be CrossBrowserTesting – you can run their free trial before committing to that level of service.

Now while you’re about it, you’d may as well consider your site for usability and accessibility – both are as important as ever and we can become complacent about such, especially those of us using WordPress and relying on the system to comply with certain standards.

Usability is something that you really want real people (as opposed to pretend people!) test out for you. If you want us to cast an eye over your site, drop an email to hello@blogmistress.com and we’ll do that for you – we’ve considered usability to be an essential consideration for every website we’ve worked with. If you want to know more about this, I’d personally recommend the book Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug – still the most easy to read, common-sense book for everyone with a website of any kind.

Accessibility may not be as hot a topic as it was a few years ago, but is still essential, and really warrants a whole blog post of its own (as indeed does Usability). To get an idea about it all though, you’d do well to visit the RNIB’s guidelines – they know what their members need and want!

There are tools available at W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, but that can become overwhelming and automated tools do have to be considered from a human perspective too.

And you have a useful post tomorrow from Sarah on accessibility options that you can implement with relative ease – so pop back and take a look at that, or subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Any questions or comments, please add them here, or send in an email to hello@blogmistress.com

Purely for purposes of demonstration, I’ve installed the “Let it snow” plugin.  Yes, it’s topical and festive, but…

Are you reading this or are you watching the snowflakes drift prettily across the image above?

Whatever you build your website with, if you include anything that moves, that is what will grab and hold your visitor’s attention. So it had better be really essential to what you want your visitors to know.  If it’s not, ditch it – keep it simple and your message very clear and immediate.

I think I’ll leave this in place for the next couple of weeks, though – just to help get the message across

And thanks to Aen Tan for the plugin and to Sean Duran for the tweak that means you only see this on the home page!

The default for WordPress is to have the blogs page as the “home” page – logical considering that’s the primary intended use for WP. However now that we’re making wider use of this wonderful platform, we sometimes want to have a static home page – as for this website.

You can tell WordPress to take your visitors to your static “home” as follows:

1. Create a new page – call it Home (or Hello or Welcome, or whatever you want really – as a standard, though, we all know that the Home page usually gives us a good starting point for a website) and publish that page.
2. If you are going to include a blog, create another page and title that “Blog” or “News” or whatever you want – publish that page too.
3. Then in your WordPress Dashboard,  go to Settings, Readers, and then choose your new, chosen page to be your “front page” to display, and also select the new blog/news page for your Posts page.
4. Save Changes, and your mostly set.

With some design themes you may find that this leaves you with an extra “home” page in your navigation; it may be that your chosen theme has a Home link coded into the header.php file, so you then have to remove that piece of code. Either ask someone of a geek persuasion to quickly do that for you, or have a look yourself. I found the WordPress support forum topic on eliminating one of two “home” buttons useful. Basically, from within your Dashboard, you need to go to Appearance, Editor and select the Header.php file (usually – not always, but most often) and find a line of code, between <li>…</li> tags  that includes the text Home.  Now if you’re not sure about this at all, don’t touch it and ask me to pop in and take it out for you.