Susie

Thanks, Eddie. I'll let you know if I need more help.

I was hoping you'd respond, Ben. I'll email you now! Thanks!

Is there anyone available today that could help me with a couple backgrounds? I have a PSD and I can't figure out how to make the main background repeat seamlessly. Also, I need help with a shadow on the main container.

And aside from what Andrea mentioned, I noticed a mistake in your code. You need to close the opening <li> tags.

Thanks to both of you. BeeDev, that did it! Thanks!

Oh, I see. Sorry for my misunderstanding. In the WP dashboard, go to Pages > Add New. You may need to click the little arrow that appears on the right of the navigation background to open up the options. Again, inside each WP dashboard, go to Pages > Add New to create your new page. To create a sub page, select the Parent when writing your new page (on the right side of the page in the Attributes section). Hope this helps.

Thanks for looking. Actually, that was my attempt to fix it. It didn't change a thing. I put it back to what the main stylesheet has and the problem still exists in IE7. I just tested in IE6 and the problem is there, but as far as I can tell, it does not exist in IE8.

http://tinyurl.com/y69mrj3 I've been up since 3:00am, so maybe my sleep deprived brain is shutting down, but I cannot figure out this padding issue that I see in IE7 (possibly other versions, too). I'm looking at the main navigation and the top of the border that is not showing on the inner border. If you view it in other browsers, you'll see what it should look like. I'd love an extra set of eyes to take a look at this.

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_table.asp http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/13/top-10-css-table-designs/ http://veerle-v2.duoh.com/blog/comments/a_css_styled_table/ You can target any column by giving it an id or class.

I'm not sure I understand your question, but you will need a separate WordPress installation for each website. Each client's website will be on their own server and you would work on them separately.

You can try googling for "wordpress zencart integration" to see what you come up with. I've never used zencart, so I can't say how well they might work together. If you are looking to add e-commerce functionality to a website that is powered by WP, you might want to look at these plugins: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/ - I have experience with this one. I've found it buggy and difficult to customize. However, it's been a few years and maybe they've improved in it updates. http://shopplugin.net/ - I haven't tried this one yet, but it comes highly recommended to me. http://www.phpurchase.com/ - I've sampled this one. It seems like a good one if you don't have a large number of items to sell. Unless I missed something when I gave it a try, it seemed like it was more for placing products/buy buttons on WP pages/posts rather than setting up an actual cart system.

Also, to help you get started, you could start out with a blank 2 column theme and customize it with colors, graphics, etc. Here are a few: http://www.refueled.net/blank-wordpress-themes/ Or if you'd like to learn how to write your own theme from scratch, there are video tutorials right here at Killersites.

I use WordPress as a CMS all the time. As Andrea mentioned, I have a few in my portfolio. Also, my own website is powered by WP. WordPress isn't just for blogs anymore. I'm reworking some of my pages and this will be included as a way of explaining using WP as a CMS. To use WP in this way, you can simply go to Settings > Reading and then set your "Front Page" to a Page instead of where the Posts (blog portion) are displayed. And the website you showed as an example would be very easy to create using WordPress. The best part is that your client (or you) can easily edit the site without having to mess with the code.

Use CSS. If you use inline styling and have several tables, making changes to the design will be a major headache. To get you started, here are some CSS-styled tables. http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/index.php And here's another gem in my bookmarks. http://cssglobe.com/lab/tablecloth/

A couple summers ago, I had something like 5-6 projects going at the same time. It was a little crazy at times, but it worked out for me since a couple of the clients were slow in sending me their material. So, while I was waiting on a couple, I was able to work on others. And what I basically did was work on one until I got to a stopping point and needed their approval before moving on. While waiting for approval, I'd pick up another. And so on. But my projects weren't heavy - just design and CMS integration. No heavy programming or anything. Now I schedule custom projects for 2-4 week periods and maintenance projects for 1 week periods. I physically add them to my calendar so that when someone contacts me, I can let them know which weeks are open. If I happen to finish early with a project, I'll move someone up on my waiting list and start their project early. Or if I finish early and feel like I need some time between projects to work on my own stuff or whatever, I keep the next client in their time slot. So far, it's working out pretty well. The only thing that trips me up is when my clients are slow in sending their info. I've seen some designers say that if when it's a client's turn they are not ready with all materials, their project will be rescheduled. I need to do something like that instead of being so flexible.

I love my droid phone. I've had touch screen phones before that I needed to calibrate every so often because it became unresponsive to my touch. When I got my droid, I was concerned that there wasn't a calibrate function on it. Now I see why. It has never failed me and it's always responsive to my touch. I can even type pretty fast and accurately on the keyboard without it being in landscape mode. But I digress. The phone is fast and now it's becoming one of the major players, so more and more apps are available. I love the iheartradio app and have it installed now. Love it!

This is such a silly question, but I am having such trouble. How can I draw 2 diagonal lines (essentially an x) in the middle of a square so that the ends of the lines are in the corners of the square??? I've tried using a text x, but the ends don't go all the way to the corners. I've tried using a square brush (with 0% roundness), but it only lets me draw lines left/right and when I transform the line to be diagonal, they become distorted looking. This should be so easy. ETA: Nevermind. I found a great tutorial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7e25kHwtkw

Perfect. Thanks, Ben!

http://tinyurl.com/398qr3c I need a new set of eyes to take a look at this. I've been trying to fix this since yesterday and I can't get it. I need to remove the background from the search widget. Because it's in the sidebar, it's showing that background. I only need to have the 1px border that is around the whole widget. The background is coming from this: #sidebar .widget-wrap { background: url(images/sidebar-bg.png) repeat-y; } And I wrote this to try to get rid of it: #sidebar .widget_search { border: 1px solid #27007e; background: none; padding-bottom: 10px; } What am I missing? (P.S. I know I have some issues to sort out in IE. This is a work in progress. )

Thanks, Eddie. I will definitely bring up the bee issue with my client. I have a lot of other issues in this whole design to work out, too. My client decided to have his graphic designer create the design and have me develop the site. Well, the problem is that the graphic designer is not as experienced in web design and didn't take into account certain things about designing for the web.

Thanks so much, everyone. I SO appreciate your input!! I think I'm pretty close now (need to tweak in IE and possibly others). I didn't think of using "top right". Now I just need to figure out the drop shadow and bee. I'm thinking the bee could be absolutely positioned somehow. Would you agree?

Yeah, it's on the #nav li a: #nav li a { background: #ff7101 url(images/nav-border.png) no-repeat 80px 0; } I will have to look into adding a span. I'm not quite sure how to do that with a WordPress menu..... Thanks for the idea.

Thanks, everyone. I'm trying to process all the suggestions and figure this thing out. The only thing that needs to change on hover is the font color. I just implemented that. Also, this is a dynamic menu since the site is powered by WordPress, so I don't think sprites would do it here. I need the menu to change automatically as my client makes changes to the site. One more time, I wanted to try using a background image on the list items and I'm using this line of CSS: background: #ff7101 url(images/nav-border.png) no-repeat 80px 0; I figure since I only need the slash to show on the right of the menu items, it might work this way. But as you can see ( http://tinyurl.com/398qr3c ), it's not quite right. I don't know if it's because of the way I sliced the image or the various padding/positioning that I'm using. And for some reason, the slash isn't even showing after the Home link. I would love to decrease the padding between the menu items and have that slash just show on the right side of each link. BTW, this isn't my design and there's not a lot of freedom to change it, so I need to make it work. Thanks again for any ideas!

I've attached an image to show what the menu should look like... How would you go about slicing and coding this? I thought of using the white "slash" between menu items as a background on the a items. That didn't work. Then I thought of setting them as list-style-image and that didn't work for me either. I'm stumped. Not to mention....I have no idea how I'll get that bee in there. And the shadow under the menu is giving me fits, too. http://tinyurl.com/398qr3c

Oh yes, the height (and width) are more than enough.