Christine Rondeau

Find the Words to Match Your Code Poetry

1 November 2012 by Christine Rondeau

A few weeks ago, 200+ WordPress enthusiasts geeked out at WordCamp Vancouver and then attended the first ever BuddyCamp. For me, the highlight of the weekend was listening to John James Jacoby’s (AKA JJJ) presentation about proper documentation. His talk reminded me, that last year at WordCamp Toronto, Chip Bennett also gave a great presentation discussing documentation, and over in Montreal, Joey Kudish discussed the merits of becoming a better developer by writing better code. Weird how you need to hear the same thing three times to finally actually “hear it”. Well after WordCamp Vancouver, I finally started and I’m now documenting my themes properly.

I don’t know about you, but back in 2004 when I started working with WordPress, I didn’t pay much attention to standards, documentation, or the proper way to do things. But now, it seems as though the entire WordPress community is now working towards adopting the same standards. [Read more…] about Find the Words to Match Your Code Poetry

100% Guaranteed SEO Bullshit

4 October 2012 by Christine Rondeau

Earlier this week I woke up to find not one, but two spam emails in my inbox offering “100% Guaranteed Seo Results”. I’m not sure why gmail decided that all of a sudden I needed to see these, but I just marked them as spam and proceeded to read the rest of my emails. However, a few hours later, a random email landed in my inbox: [Read more…] about 100% Guaranteed SEO Bullshit

WordPress Themes: One Size Never Fits All

20 September 2012 by Christine Rondeau

When introducing WordPress to my students, there’s a lot of confusion about themes. I’ve also come across this on the WordPress support forums. Beginners just don’t know which theme to start with or which one will be best for their project.

With so many themes to choose from, it’s easy to understand. Knowing which theme is perfect for you depends on your level of expertise, your project and budget. This might seem a bit strange, but deciding on which theme to use is very similar to choosing where to go on holiday.

[Read more…]

Making the Transition from HTML to WordPress. Where do you Begin?

30 August 2012 by Christine Rondeau

A few weeks ago at our local WordPress Meetup, we were having a round table discussion and someone asked

“How do I start? I currently have an HTML site and would like to convert it to WordPress, but I don’t know where to begin.”

That question took me a few years back when I was first dipped my toe into WordPress theming.

I had been designing websites for years, had just learned CSS and ditched my tables, I had a blog, but I was looking at my other pages and thought how do I integrate this other content with my WordPress site?

Thinking of Content Differently

When learning web design, you first learn that CSS allows you to separate presentation from content. WordPress takes that concept even further by separating the HTML from the content and storing all content in the database.

Once you’ve grasped that concept, you also need to know the difference between the various WordPress content types.

Posts – are displayed on your blog and appear in reverse chronological order, i.e. the latest posts are at the top. Your blog posts can be categorized in a series of ways and thus can be used for news, press releases, events, reviews, articles, whatever you wish.
Pages – on the other hand are for your static content. Contact information, about page, services, etc…
Comments – these can be turned on or off and are also stored in your database and associated with your blog posts.
Media – any document, file or photo that you upload in your WordPress site is uploaded in the uploads directory and it’s information is also stored in the database.
Links – Should you wish to use your blogroll, this other WordPress content type is there for you.

When you plan your WordPress site, the first thing you’ll want to do is simply upload your content. Create your pages, decide if you want a blog or not and make sure you’ve got everything in place.

[Read more…]