Category Archives: Web design

How to test your new WordPress themes

Before you change or update the theme of your WordPress site, it’s a good practice to test that theme first. That way your site’s visitors aren’t greeted with a broken site.
Unfortunately, WordPress offers no built in testing solution, so you generally have two options:

Try out your theme on a test version of WordPress running either [...]

Added Google Analytics for stat tracking

Today I setup Media Grease to use the free Google Analytics service. Google’s system gives webmasters detailed statistics about how their website is used. You’ll know how people got to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, where they live (roughly), and so on.
Stat tracking of this sort has been around for [...]

Coming up with Media Grease design ideas

Over the next couple of days I’ll be coming up with design ideas for Media Grease. Whenever I have the time, I start the design process with sketches on actual paper (this goes for both print and web):

Once I’m comfortable with something I’ve put on paper, I’ll start “sketching” the design on the computer in [...]

‘Blank’ theme installed

When working on the design of a CMS powered website—like this one—you generally have four options:

Modify the default installed theme/template/skin to your liking
Find a theme that’s close to the vision you have for your website, and modify that one to your liking
Create a theme from scratch
Find a “blank” theme with minimal styling to use as [...]

FeedBurner feed setup

I just setup a FeedBurner feed for Media Grease which you can access at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mediagrease
Using FeedBurner helps in a couple ways. When people and bots check your feed, they are hitting FeedBurner’s servers and not yours. FeedBurner has a number of feed customization options that aren’t built into WordPress, like the ability to have one [...]

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1

I’ve just upgraded Media Grease to WordPress 2.5.1 from 2.5. I’m a little surprised they haven’t made upgrading easier. If you need to upgrade your blog, the upgrade instructions are here.