Stefan Mischook
May 14, 2008
This first article is meant to give you a global picture about creating WordPress themes. Let’s start by answering a few common questions.
Do you need to know PHP to create or edit WordPress themes?
The short answer is no. It would help to know some PHP but many theme designers don’t, and they do just fine.
Do you need to understand MySQL to create or edit WordPress themes?
Again, no. Mysql is the database that drives WordPress and is a key component … nonetheless, it has no impact on creating themes. So don’t worry about it.
What do you need to know in order to be able to edit or create a WordPress theme?
I would say that you need to know three basic things:
- HTML/XHTML
- CSS
- The WordPress page hierarchy and behavior.
I think the first two are obvious, but the last needs some more explaining.
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May 13, 2008
Hi,
This is just the first of many new video tutorials on Flash CS3 (and the upcoming Flash CS4) and Actionscript 3.0.
Video: Nested Movie Clips in Flash CS3
Summary of the video tutorial:
Using Nested Animations in Movie Clips with Flash CS 3
By: Santo Romano
Tutorial level: Beginner to intermediate Flash users.
Flash version: Flash MX, MX2004, CS2, and CS3
When creating simple animations in Flash, the main timeline is often the best place to position your animations. However, when these animations are repetitive, the best way to handle them is to utilize the movie clip symbol in Flash. Unlike the other symbols you’ll find in the Flash environment, the Movie clip symbol is perfectly suited to handle this kind of work. Rather than creating multiple key frames over and over again, it is much better to nest the simple animation inside of a Movie Clip, and to let it handle most of the work.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
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May 11, 2008
I can’t tell you how many times that my programming experience (in Java, PHP etc) has guided me in my web design work … and strangely, even in other aspects of my life not at all related to topics ‘nerd’.
… Ah, nerd wisdom prevails in all aspects of life.
🙂
Anyway, here yet again, is another example where programming guides me: this time, it’s all about web design and code.
–
Over the last few years, the consensus in the web design community has been to streamline code. In real terms, that comes down to:
- collapsing html
- collapsing css
- … and consolidating css code into one file, to minimize the number of server hits.
… The idea is to speed up web page load times and to reduce web server loads.
This is an important goal and something all web designers should be concerned about. The problem is that if you are concentrating on optimizing your CSS or HTML to speed things up, you are concentrating on the wrong parts of your websites.
The fact is, that most of the optimization opportunities is actually found in your images, Flash movies and other multimedia content – not the code.
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May 9, 2008
Hi,
First things first: thank you for Akismet!
… I just wanted to offer my sincere appreciation for the WordPress anti-spam plugin: ‘Askimet’.
This nifty plugin has saved me countless hours (and possibly days) of work by filtering out hundreds of spam post each and every day!
I can easily say that for me, Askimet has proven to be the most important plugin for WordPress.
… Just in the time it took me to write this post, Askimet has caught 7 spam comments!
If you see a spammer, smack him!
It is clear that blog spammers are among the worst of Web citizens. They are the hyena’s of the Web, trying to steal traffic they don’t deserve.
Blog spam protection tips
Being a high value spam target (the juicier the traffic …), I can offer the following advice:
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May 8, 2008
One of the Web’s most popular places to get an idea of a web site’s traffic is Alexa.com.
There is one major problem though: Alexa is not accurate at all.
Alexa gets a lot of it’s traffic data from its’ Alexa toolbar and other nebulous source they don’t identify. So that leads me to think that they still get most of their data from the toolbar.
Sounds OK, except for one glaring problem – who uses the Alexa toolbar?
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May 5, 2008
One question that is put to me from time to time is:
“… how can you budget the amount of time it will take to build a website?”
This can be a tricky thing because there are so many factors involved:
- How fast do you work?
- Is your client going to be really picky and ask for many revisions?
- Are you likely to come across time consuming bugs?
Ultimately, you will have to learn how fast it takes YOU … to build a website.
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May 1, 2008
Hi,
When I was working on the redesign of the killersites.com, I found (as a starting point) that the templates that ship with Dreamweaver CS3 useful.
Dreamweaver CS3 starter templates
Dreamweaver has a nice collection of bare-bones web templates. One thing I found cool about these templates, is that they contain a lot of notes that describe why they (the web-nerds at Adobe) have certain things in place – like the specific code they used to deal with a given CSS layout issue.
… This is another good way to learn more about CSS.
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May 1, 2008
Up until Flash CS3, I think Flash had been slowly drifting into becoming a niche market technology. But now, Flash CS3 (and the Flash player 9) puts Flash back into the game as an important player.
… This means that it now makes more sense for web developers to learn Flash technology. I go over some of the details below.
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April 29, 2008
I can’t stand articles that make you read two pages before getting to the point. With that in mind, let’s look at how I think css code should be organized.
In a nutshell: css code should be divided up into at least 4 separate pages:
- page-structure.css
- text-styles.css
- misc.css
- ie-styles.css
How about we call this the ‘killer’ css structure.
🙂
Before I go into the details of what each css file contains (if it’s not already obvious), I want to quickly cover WHY you might want to use this basic css structure for all your websites.
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April 28, 2008
Hi,
I’ve been a busy little bee lately.
This past week, I finally got around to re-skinning killersites.com. Yes, after about 5 years of using the same basic layout, I finally decided that an update was needed.
I think when someone said:
“… killersites.com kinda looks … 2000 ish.”
… I was pushed over the edge and began the design work. You can see the new layout on the home page now:
www.killersites.com
Later on, I will be rolling this out throughout the rest of the web site and on other sites as well:
– killerphp.com
– how-to-build-websites.com
etc …
To build this new look, I spent about 50 hrs and about 15 public revisions. As I went along, I released early drafts of the new look for people to comment on in the forums. You can read the thread and see the progress of the redesign here:
killersites redesign discussion
Now that I’ve got this in place, I can go back to creating new videos.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
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