If you are totally new to WordPress, and even newer to the idea of a PHP driven website, we have the information you need to help you learn about how this all works. The more you understand about the basics, the jargon and terminology, the core structure, and the process, the easier it will be for you to get a grip on what it takes to ask questions about WordPress to get the help you you, and what it takes to customize your new WordPress site.

One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is the ability to use plugins to expand the capabilities of your blog or website. Since WordPress has such a large community of plugin developers, it means that you can make your WordPress website do pretty much anything you want it to. If you’ve ever thought about a feature that you wanted in WordPress, chances are that if you look around, you’ll find someone who has created a plugin to integrate that feature.

Ben Bleikamp “I’ve been designing and building WordPress blogs for a few years now and I’ve noticed that I always seem to get a relatively high PageRank without much effort. I also notice that I get a decent amount of Google traffic, even when I’m not writing, for terms I never intended to rank well for. I’m not an SEO expert, so I attribute this to the SEO-friendly WordPress habits I tend to practice. Here are my big secrets – and seriously, it’s nothing special.”

Use this technique to pimp your website, making it a bit more funny and attractive for your visitors.
First things first: You’ll need an account at Feedburner to make this work. If you don’t have an account, register now and make sure your RSS is now directed through Feedburner

One of our primary goals as designers is to constantly improve the usability of our websites and blogs.  Content, while very important, doesn’t help readers if they can’t easily get to it.  In this post, I’d like to outline several ways to quickly improve a blogs usability.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can easily add thumbnails, lead image, and other extras to individual posts in WordPress. These images can be shown on the front page, archives, search pages, etc – but appear outside of the content, giving you full control of their placement and style.

In this tutorial, we’ll assume your web host doesn’t have a one-click installer. Maybe you’ve got a bare-bones host, you’ve decided to host your own site, or you’re simply setting up a local installation to see what WordPress can do. At any rate, fear not — getting WordPress working on your server only takes a few minutes. Of course, you’ll need a few skills in the bag first, like a knowledge of PHP and a comfortable working relationship with MySQL databases.

Creating a WordPress Theme, The Homepage Following on from the recent article on “PSD to HTML”, this tutorial will look at taking a HTML/CSS template and turning it into a functioning WordPress theme. There is so much you can do when creating your own theme we couldn’t nearly cover it all. So, we’re going to look at how themes are structured, creation of the core files and splitting up that index.html file.

I was recently contacted by a reader of this blog who needed help with installing the MyBlogLog widget that displays on this site, into his own blog. So, I decided to write it up as a blog post to explain to him and anyone else that might be wondering.

An often-used feature on WordPress blogs is the ability to style comments made by the post’s author differently from the others – helping replies to stand out. Here, we will edit the default WordPress to add some subtle styling to author comments.