WordPress Themes I Use

Posted on October 3, 2010 by MJ

Several People have asked what themes I recommend.   There are several great themes available depending on your particular needs.   What I do recommend is highly customizable themes because they allow you to make color adjustments, font size and color adjustments and other types.

Highly Customizable themes

  1. SWIFT 5.29 by Satish Gandham
  2. Techozoic Fluid by Jeremy Clark
  3. Feed Me, Seymour 1.1.2 by c.bavota
  4. Magazine Basic ~ Not color wise but allows you to set up a magazine format
  5. Weaver (works on the TwentyTen Framework)

The above image are 9 WordPress blogs that are either mine, or I have helped set up.   Now look closely because while there are 9 there are actually only 3 themes.  1 through 6 are all Weaver.  Weaver does have an all white theme, but I like a bit of color, but the all white would be #3 minus the blue.

7 and 9 are Techozoic Fluid and 8 is the Magazine theme.  We (my writing partner and I) like the magazine format for the daily success and motivation tips.  We brought in color by adding color to the side bar and of course through the daily pictures.

Now for those who are curious about the above sites… some I will mention some I won’t because they are not mine and not ready.

  1. is MJSchrader.com my home page.  it replaces LoveRockstar.com.  The slogan is “Making your inner rockstar shine!”
  2. is my blog connected at MJSchrader.com/blog
  3. my old personal blog with a trial theme
  4. 50WomenProject.com which is the new site I am very excited to share, it is what I am working on currently.  “Transforming Women, One Woman at a Time“
  5. BlueLemonadeStand.com which is currently being overhauled and revamped, and is my Shirt Design store.  “When you want something a bit different“
  6. My mom’s website
  7. Here, RockstarGuideBooks, but I just changed it to Weaver because I wanted to use the WordPress 3.0 menus
  8. 365OnlineTips.com with Daily Success and Motivational Tips.
  9. A site for a client but I love the way she’s got the site looking.

With my mom’s site and my client’s I will announce here and on Facebook when they are ready.  They are really working on hard on getting everything looking great.

So those are some themes to look at and some sites if you care to check those!


Live Laugh Love

MJ Schrader

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How Does Your Website Look?

Posted on October 2, 2010 by MJ

This may seem like something that is not important, yet how your site looks can mean the difference between your readers staying or leaving.  It can be the overall appearance, it can be little details.   Your site appearance being inconsistent with your message could also be a determining factor.


http://MJSchrader.com


You want your WordPress site to look recognizable and be comfortable. If the blog has annoying colors or looks juvenile, your readers may turn around and leave. If your readers can not read the blog, such as what happens when the background and the font color are too close or are a hard to read combination, then readers will leave.  The cigar theme on a healthy living blog makes your readers wonder what kind of healthy living are you really going to cover.

Are you cluttered?

If your website has too many things, people will not know where to read, where to visit or where anything is.  The readers will be too easily distracted to stay and read your posts or if it is really cluttered, they may just leave the website.  And you know that Pay per click ad you just put inside the post?  Well, people have learned one of two things, to ignore it or ignore the writer, a non-win or lose situation.  If you are not going to win, why have it?

Do you have WordPress?

There are great themes that allow you to customize almost every color on the website. This allows you to match your vision and work to make certain it is appealing to visitors.  I will cover those tomorrow.


Live, Laugh, Love,

MJ Schrader

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Tips to Keeping Your WordPress Website Safe

Posted on October 1, 2010 by MJ

There are several steps to getting a WordPress website online. While WordPress is one of the easiest formats to work with, it still has details that make it work better. These settings and features can be the difference between a site that is acceptable and a site that is good.

How did you start?

Get a domain name related to your subject. Using a keyword is great if the site name is not too long or confusing. Make certain you have a good website host. You would hate to learn when you lots of website traffic that the web host is down regularly or has serious problems.

Are you secure?

When you set up your WordPress blog, make certain your user name is not admin. If it is admin make a long complicated password and create another user for you with a name and password you can remember. Almost every WordPress website has the same login page, admin was the standard user for years, this makes an easy combination for a hacker.

Do you have the latest version?

Try to reduce a hacker’s ability to hack into your website by making certain you keep your WordPress version up to date.  Also if your theme says the version of WordPress at the bottom, do yourself a favor and remove it or have someone remove it if you do not know CSS coding.   Better yet, get a new theme.  Any theme that does show the version of WordPress that you are using is probably an older theme and may not be reliable.

Are you backing up your website?

Make certain to get the WordPress Backup plugin and use it.   Setting up will take just a bit of time and will allow you to back up automatically without worry just read WordPress Plugin For Gmail Backup to learn more.


These are tips and hints that should help keep your WordPress website safe and online.

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Video ~ NextGen Photo Gallery Plugin for WordPress

Posted on September 24, 2010 by MJ

NextGen has now become the most requested plugin on WordPress.org with over 2 million downloads.

Why is it so popular?

It has a small footprint, meaning it doesn’t use much memory or power and is easy to use.   Yet like anything online there is a learning curve, hopefully this video will fully explain how to use this plugin.  Remember you must use the galleries and must have pictures in the galleries for these to work correctly.

Galleries are made up of pictures which you can load individually, as a zip file or point to a folder.   Pictures can be moved around after you have uploaded with the manage gallery feature.

Albums can be several galleries together.

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Creation of WordPress Website ~ Free Tools

Posted on September 10, 2010 by MJ

What does it take to get a website online?

Since I stopped writing daily posts here, I have been working on building three websites at once.   One is the project page and two are replacement sites for 2 I have currently.  They need updating, changes to reflect some changes.  During this time I am also working on 3 others’ sites.  My mom’s and 2 friends.

When I started doing sites, I didn’t know what I was doing, so there was no pattern.  After dozens of sites, there is a specific pattern that I have never written down.  At least until now.  Someone asked me how do I recall and what was my list.  After some thought; here it is, of course this depends on if it is my site or for someone else, or the particular needs of the site.  The things marked with * are what I do for my site.

* Get Domain Name
Transfer Domain Name to Web Host
Addon Domain Name at host
Install WordPress via Fantastico
Use File manager to copy standard plugins (8 to 10) to the new site.
Go to site, make necessary WP upgrades and plugin upgrades.
Activate current plugins
Go to site, install site particular plugins, activate, check working status.
Set up plugins.
Check working status again, adjust settings as necessary.
Go to appearance, install themes, select “Theme options.”  Then choose theme that matches theme of the site. My list of favorite themes is below.
Customize the theme ~ Colors and fonts  (according to their requests or my “vision”)
* Make adjustments to colors, make more adjustments to colors
Create a header graphic.  Check it on the site.  Modify as necessary.
* Get site appearance checks (ask at Social Networking site where you have a small following if they like the way it looks) Modify based on their comments.
Customize the theme further in the code editor 
Create a favicon.   (Free tool)
Add and move widgets to appropriate places
Check the website appearance and correct
Add autoresponder ($1 trial)
* Write About page
* Write necessary beginning posts
* Write necessary pages 
Check website details and correct


You will notice I correct quite often.  But when you add plugins, and widgets, and add components you may see things are not working out quite right.  And with appearance, you may notice the big things the first times, and see other details while working on set up.  Some details will only show up on rare occasion.  Very weird to have a red and white set up and suddenly a purple line show up. But those details give the site a complete look.  Such as the favicon.  (that little icon right beside my site name up in your address bar.

Now you know what I have been up to since I stopped daily posting at Rockstar Guide Books.

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader



Good Customizable themes

  1. GoodTheme
  2. Themes by itxitx
    1. Bombax
    2. Albizia
    3. Calotropis
  3. SWIFT 5.29 by Satish Gandham
  4. Techozoic Fluid by Jeremy Clark
  5. Feed Me, Seymour 1.1.2 by c.bavota
  6. Magazine Basic
  7. Twenty Ten (New WordPress 3.0 theme)
  8. Weaver (works on the TwentyTen Framework)

EXTREMELY Customizable, to the point they have too many details for me.

  1. Twordder
  2. Lead Producer
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Problems with Resizing Images in WordPress Themes?

Posted on September 8, 2010 by MJ

As stated before leaving this I continue to work with WordPress.  In fact currently  I am creating 3 new WordPress Websites, which resulted in me stumbling across a problem.  On one blog I used a picture from my Photo account.  No matter what I did the picture showed up full size, blasting away the writing and over powering the post.

Research time!  It seems the Twenty Ten theme had a little mistake, they changed a line of their code.  With the invent of Twenty Ten and the ability to make child themes (think skins or mostly appearance only changes) several themes were created that use Twenty Ten theme, thereby picking up this problem.  In addition there may be other themes with this problem.

If you have trouble with your blog images going back to full size, this may help.

CAUTION!!  THIS REQUIRES CHANGING CSS!!

If you are at all uncomfortable, ask someone else to do it.  Use this at your own discretion.

Here’s what you need to do, go to the editor under appearance.  On the right side select  style.css then scroll through the codes until you find:

/* =Images
-------------------------------------------------------------- */

#content img {
	margin: 0;
	height: auto;
	max-width: 640px;
	width: auto;
}

remove the line with width: auto;

Now your images should work fine.  If not you can remove the heigth: auto; as well.

HINT:  Copy all of the code in the area where you are working.  Paste in notepad.  You can always delete your changes and paste the original code back into place!!


Hope that helps my fellow bloggers keep their images the way you like!


Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

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Blog Boost End and a New Beginning

Posted on September 1, 2010 by MJ

Today is Video Wednesday, and today’s message is a very heartfelt one. Shortly after the Ultimate Blog Challenge started, I heard a song. One with two very popular musical artists singing about abuse.

I won’t say their names, because it really doesn’t matter. Unfortunately in a few months some other artists will be singing a similar song that says abuse is ok. This was the final straw in avoiding a calling I have had for years. I can no longer stand by and let the cycles of hate and abuse continue.

While that calling came almost 3 weeks ago, and I stated to myself that I would finish the Blog Challenge before leaving this blog behind. Although I nearly quit just 4 days before the challenge ended.

Each day, each post has become harder and harder to write. Some of you may know that I also write for 365 Online Tips. This is a daily success and motivational site. There is another motivational site in the works. I am actually looking for some women who are willing to make commitment to helping women.

But for those of you who are friends on my personal website, you probably have read that I am thinking of getting out of making websites and even out of WordPress. Well, the decisions were made as to what I was/am going to do as of almost 2 weeks ago.

Now it is time to confess….

Rockstar Guide to WordPress will soon no longer be available for sale as an ebook. I am working on getting it published. It will be sold on Amazon and hopefully on Kindle as well. It will be available at a much lower price and I am looking to get some other authors to add some chapters to help people with their websites. This is extremely important because half of the profits will be going towards special organizations and that new project mentioned earlier. It will need some funds for scholarships and such.

So…

  • If you want to add a chapter to a WordPress book, please comment.
  • If you are a woman and would like to participate in a special project to help others, please comment. (make certain that you use email box because it will be a private message)
  • If you are a man, and would like to help get the project going, please comment.
  • If you would like me to continue doing Freebie Fridays, please comment.

I still enjoy WordPress and very much enjoy tech stuff, I just won’t be able to do daily blogs or commit to WordPress projects.

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Final Set up Mingle Forum Plugin for WordPress

Posted on August 31, 2010 by MJ

Yesterday covered installing and setting up the Mingle Forum Plugin. Today is going to cover skins and how to add your forum to your website.

Adding to your website.

Create a new page. You will want to use a name that lets people know there is discussions, forums or talk on the page. On the page type [mingleforum] and then press publish. This will create a forum on that web page. With this you will have a great website forum on your WordPress website without the hassle other sites would create.

Changing Skins

Blue may not work with your theme. Or you may not like the default skin. While the colors of the Mingle Forum skins are still somewhat limited you do have choices other than blue. You can visit Get Forum Skins.

From There you can pick from the reds, blues, green, orange, blacks, and pink that they have available. You will need to download the skin, or skins you like.

Using your favorite method, (I prefer File Manager) you will upload the skins to /wp-content/mingle-forum-skins/ The advantage of this method is with changes and upgrades you will not need to reinstall several times.

IF YOU WANT TO BREAK IT

If you change the name of the folder, Mingle Forums will not work. If you delete the Default skin or change the name of it Mingle Forums will not work.

What if the folder does not exist.

Then you can create a folder using your file manager or FTP. You will want to create it exactly as the name as listed above.

Installing the skins

Go back to your WordPress Dashboard and activate the skin you want to use. Now you are ready to go with a forum that looks just as you need!


Good luck!!


Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

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Forum Plugin for WordPress Websites

Posted on August 30, 2010 by MJ

Perhaps you need a forum on your WordPress website. Fortunately there is a very nice Forum plugin that is fairly simple to use*. Note the star… Forums are not exactly the easiest things to set up, thus fairly simple does not necessarily mean simple.

This WordPress forum plugin is called Mingle Forum. If you are on Mingle, it works great with it or stands alone. It is highly customizable. There are skins, categories, rankings for users and much more.

How to Install

Simply go to WordPress plugins, click add new. Type Mingle forum in search, then install. You will see a new box appear called Mingle Forum. Scroll down to it and open for the sub categories.

Mingle Forum

This subcategory you can mostly leave alone. There is very little you will want to change, unless you want to change the name or number of posts that it takes for users to go to the next level.

Skins

Only a blue skin comes pre-installed. Other skins will have to be downloaded and installed in a particular file on your file manager. This is something you may want to leave to your tech person, unless you are the tech person.  It will be covered in more detail tomorrow.

Categories and Forums

This seems backwards to me. When you add new you create a category. Then once you have created a category you can “add forum” which will be basically a subcategory. You could conversely create another category. These will be the main boxes, and the “forums” will be the sub boxes.

Moderators

You can be a moderator. Once you have users you can set up individual users as moderators. You can set someone up for all forums or some.

User Groups

When you add new, you can give a name to groups of users. After you name the group you can add members or remove members.


About

Just like it says some information about the plugin.


Final Touches

That will be covered tomorrow

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Finding Easy Website Content

Posted on August 29, 2010 by MJ

Finding content for your website or blog can seem impossibly hard.    There are actually several ways to find and get content that are pretty easy.

1.  Ask fellow bloggers.  There are bloggers who want to write guest posts, some may be your friends, or you can look for ones that have blogs are similar to yours.    You may be able to ask them for a post or two or even a regular spot.  Some bloggers will be glad to step up.

MJ Schrader, EzineArticles.com Platinum Author 2.  Use articles from Article websites.  Ezine articles is a great place to get articles.  You can find over 300 articles I wrote just by checking my author bio. You will find fabulous articles on WordPress, online tools,  success, motivational.   You can search by the terms you need with the author name to get articles by a certain author.

3.  Check out Public Domain works.  There is a lot of good information provided by the government or older than copyright laws that is available for public use.


Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader


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