WP is much more than a blogging platform.  It can be a full-blown CMS.  All it takes is some elbow grease.

With that in mind, the other great thing about WordPress is open-source coding.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that 90% of the functions, designs, and layouts you want for your WordPress site already exist somewhere else.  If you want it, chances are that someone has already made it happen.

When creating your template, do not reinvent the wheel.

My advice is to find a prebuilt template that accomplishes the majority of what you want on your site.  It does not have to be exactly what you want, just somewhat in the neighborhood.

Get that template in your hands (either paid or free), and use it as your “launch pad.”

Next, go out and find the missing elements that you want.  Perhaps there’s a cool way of displaying author information in your WordPress posts, or a snazzy photo gallery function.  Just go out there and find it.

Then try to figure out how it was built.

If the template was built by a design shop, head over to that shop and see if you can buy the template.

You can also head over to the WordPress support forums.  They are free and can often tell you exactly how to achieve a certain function.

Take those cherry picked items back to your site and incorporate them into the template you previously purchased.  Often, it is as easy as copy/pasting some code and doing some light weight CSS work.

That should cover 90% of your design needs right there.  The remaining 10% will be what you have to build out from scratch.

Instead of building 80% or 100% of your template by hand, you’ve just cut the workload drastically.  Now you can focus your energy on those totally unique customizations instead of stuff that has been built 100 times over by other developers.

If you have taken the plunge and hired developer to help you, the same exercise will come in handy.  Get out there and look for the things that you want to have on your site.  Find designs you like.  Share all of this information with your developer, and it will make their life easier.  You will get what you are looking for much quicker if the developer has samples to work from.

Everyone loves the convenience of shortcodes such as the built in WordPress gallery shortcode.  All you do is put [shortcodehere] into your post, and the gallery shows up

You may have used some plugins that implement their own custom shortcodes as well.  For example, if you want a poll in your post, your plugin may just tell you to throw something like this in your post:

[poll id=43]

That tells your blog to go get poll number 43 and place it into the post with all the proper formatting.

What if you wanted to make your own custom shortcode?

Easy enough.  For the sake of this example, lets say that you wanted to put a 300×250 square banner ad in the body of your post.  You don’t always need this ad unit, so you would like to have the ability to just place it in the occasional post or page quickly and easily without having to remember all of the code.

When all is said and done, all you want to do is add [square_ad] to your post, and your custom shortcode will handle the rest.

Here’s what you do.

STEP 1:

Locate your functions.php file in your themes folder.  If you do not have a functions.php file, just go ahead and make one.

STEP 2:

Paste this code into your functions.php file:

function post_ad() { 

return '<center>YOUR AD SERVER CODE GOES HERE</center>';

 }

add_shortcode('square_ad', 'post_ad');

Right there on line 3, you can see where I have labeled where to drop you ad code. So just take your Google Adsense code or other third party serving code ane place it in there.

Review the code parts.

function post_ad() {

In this first line of code, we are naming the function itself. This is not necessarily the name of the short code, but a way to reference the function. The post_ad part is the name. Call it whatever you want.

return 'YOUR AD SERVER CODE GOES HERE';

This is the important part. This is your third party ad code. However, it could be anything.

It could be a 3rd party script, a photo, or any other HTML that you want displayed.

If you do not want your item centered, no problem. Just remove the center tag parts.

Lastly, there is this bit of code.

add_shortcode('square_ad', 'post_ad');

The ‘square_ad’ part is where you actually get to come up with the shortcode to use. In this case, we would write [square_ad] anywhere on the page that we want this to show up.

The post_ad part is referencing back to the name of the function from a couple steps prior. This name should match the name of the function.

Finishing up.

Step 3:

That’s pretty much it! Pop that code into your functions.php file and upload the file. On your next post, you should be able to just add your new shortcode to your post.

That’s it! Give it a test drive to see how it goes. It should work out for you nicely.

If you are not the tech savvy type, I’d be willing to bet your site loads slower than it should.  Most amateur bloggers (and some professional ones) are not very good developers.  Here’s where I would normally make the case for hiring a firm like BlogCraving to handle these things for you, but this time I will spare you.

Let’s just jump right to the point and find out if your site is a load hog.

The speed test

Head on over to tools.pingdom.com.  This site will tell you definitively how fast your site loads.  All you have to do is put in your website’s URL and run the test.  It will show you the load time for every single element on your site.

Then, just scroll down to the very bottom of the report to see the total load time for your site. 

How did you score?

Don’t be shy.  Was it a big number?  If you are like a lot of blogs out there, you are probably right around 8 to 15 seconds.  It may not seem like much, but that is dog slow.  And if you are over that, yikes.

Ideally, you want to be under 5 seconds.  That shows a snappy site that people will be likely to enjoy (from a technical experience perspective).

Sites that load quickly have proven to receive much higher pageviews than slow sites.  That’s because users are more likely to click around on a site that loads fast.  Most users will not go on to page 3 or the 4th photo in your gallery if each page takes over 10 seconds to load.  It just become less and less enjoyable with each click no matter how good the content.

What do you do?

The answer to this question is an entire series of posts that we will get into in the coming days.  In the mean time, I’ll give you some tips.

1. Optimize those post images. You should really spend some time learning how to optimize your images for web publishing before you even upload them into WordPress (or your blog platform).  Lots of heavy images will surely kill your load time.  The Pingdom tool above will help you identify those big images.  Try Photoshop, Picasa, or even free services like SmushIt.
2. Cut back on external scripts and calls. We all know those free little add-on widgets are lots of fun to put on your site.  So are all those snazzy social media buttons.  Unfortunately, they can add a lot of load time because of all the external callouts they make.  The files/scripts themselves might even be a bit “beefy”.   Again, Pingdom will help you identify those problem services.  Once you know what they are, ask yourself how essential they really are and get rid of them.
3. Is it your host? Most basic blogs are hosted on shared hosting.  In other words, you share a single server with a bunch of strangers.  You have no idea who else is on that server with you and what kind of resource they are drawing.  Your host may have certain throttle points in place to scale down resource hogs.  Maybe you’re super hot site is one of the sites drawing too much.  If that’s the case, it may be time to look into alternative hosting solutions (this is a good problem to have because it shows that you are growing).
4. Dude, your theme is lame. It might be time to face the ugly truth that your site’s theme just isn’t that great.  Most free themes are free because they are not that great.  They may have some sloppy coding or CSS in them that do not make them scalable for growing sites.  They’ll serve you well to start, but as you become a bigger deal, your theme may end up holding you back.   If you’ve got some serious load time issues, I highly suggest you run (not walk) to check out the WordPress Thesis Theme.  It is incredibly fast loading, easy to customize even for non technical types, and has great SEO features. More and more sites are headed to Thesis because of how well it performs.  It comes out of the box pretty plain, but you can quickly make it much more visually appealing.

Over the next few days, we will take a deep dive into some of these optimization techniques as well as discuss things like Cloud Hosting, CDN’s, template optimization, and a lot more.

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Our BlogCraving eBook will provide you with an illustrated guide in full color on how to create your very own WordPress theme.  Whether you already have a PSD design or plan to make one in the future, this eBook will show you how to get it converted into a WordPress theme quickly and easily.

Update

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Basically, your site may not look the same in Internet Explorer as it does in Mozilla.  Your site may not look the same on a PC as it does on a Mac.  This can be very frustrating because new designs are often a labor of love.

There’s nothing more frustrating than finding out your design/coding only works correctly on Firefox or only on IE.

So without having to buy a Mac and a PC, and without having to install every operating system known to man.  Well, there’s an easy solution, and it is FREE!

Visit browsershots.org.  Enter your URL or page you want to test.  Then check off the browsers you’d like to use.  Click submit.

Refresh the page in a few minutes and the system will have uploaded screenshots of your site in all the browsers you selected.  Then, you can verify for yourself that your page is in fact displaying correctly.  If not, you’ll see that too.

Give it a try, and let us know how it went.

Ever want to make a HOT widget for your blog content? No idea how? Sprout Builder has you covered.

Sprout lets you create amazing looking widgets in any size or shape you choose. You can pick from some starter templates, or build your own from scratch. Feed in your content, and boom…you’re done.

The tool also lets you instantly publish your widget on Facebook, MySpace, etc. This is a sample widget they made (below). Pretty cool.

What does “favicon” mean? It means favorite icon.  They were originally made to be custom graphics used when people added a site to their browser favorites.  Distinct icons make it easier to find what you want when digging though a long list of links.

So how do you make one? Lets use the iCast Limited logo as an example.  We took what we call our pinwheel off of our logo and made it into a complete circle.  So that was the base from which our favicon was derived.

The specs for a favicon are that they must be 16×16 or 32×32 in dimension.  Most often, the browser will simply size down a 32×32 to the size needed to fit the bowser.  Generally speaking, a 16×16 favicon is restricted to 16 colors.  A 32×32 may be up to 256 colors.  However, it is always smarter to develope your art to the lowest common denominator.  So stick to the 16×16 with 16 colors if you can.

The favicon file format.  Once you have your favicon designed, there is a very specific file format that you must save the art as.  It cannot simply be a jpg or gif.  The favicon needs to be saved as a .ico file.  Also, the file must be named favicon.ico.  That’s required.

There are numerous free applications out there that will save your file in the .ico file format.  Easyicons 98 is a simple free program.  There’s also this site where you simply upload the file you want to use and it converts the file to an .ico.  It also renders an animated version if you want to use that instead.

If you are using Photoshop, there’s also a free plugin you can install.  That way you can use Photoshop to save a .ico file.

Publishing your favicon. The last step is to upload and launch your favicon.  The first thing you need to do is upload your favicon to your server.  It is best if you upload the file to the root level of your site.  In other words, upload it to the highest level you have, ususally where your index page is located.  Try to avoid burrying it in a deeper folder.

Then a little bit of code.  Many browers will instantly find your favicon once you upload it.  Others need a little help in the form of a meta tag that points to your favicon.  Here’s the code:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" >

Or the full path:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://YOURDOMAIN.com/favicon.ico" >

Place the code above between your <head>   </head> tags.  The href=”favicon.ico” part is the path to where you have your favicon saved.  So you may want to make it an absolute path by changing it to href=”http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/favicon.ico”. If you do decide to save your favicon somewhere else, simply change the address to reflect its location.

That’s it! Once you place the code and upload the file, refresh your browser and you should see the icon up there.  You may have to clear your browser cache or close out and reopen.  From then on, you will see it up there.  Enjoy!