My web person disappeared! It’s something that I’ve heard many times. How can the developer or the client prevent this from happening?

There are lots of scenarios, but the most common problem (assuming the web developer is not an all-out thief) is probably unrealistic expectations due to poor communication. Communication is key. When a client says that they don’t know how to explain what they are asking for, I ask them to search the web for an example. The less the web developer has to guess, the more likely that the client will end up with what they want.

How much should I spend? Budgeting your time and money.

When quoting the price of a job, both parties have to remember that time is money. The situation is most likely to fall apart on low-budget jobs. The biggest disappointments happen when the developer is desperate enough to quote a price that is unrealistically low and/or when the client expects the developer to spend an inordinate amount of time earning a small amount of money. A few years ago I accepted a low-budget job. The client chose a stock template that we would slightly modify. We were clear that on a certain date he would give me all of the text. When he sent the text, he asked me when his web site would be finished. I said “tomorrow”. He seemed very surprised. I had to tell him frankly that in order for me to do a job at that price, I couldn’t spend more than a day on it. The job turned out fine because we set realistic expectations.
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One of the great things about WordPress is how easy it is to create photo galleries.

The first thing to do is look at Settings > Media and make sure you are happy with the image sizes that are specified there.

While adding or editing a page or post, click the Add An Image icon. If you use the Flash Uploader, you will see that you can select multiple files. The images for your gallery can be in multiple folders or all in one folder.

In the HTML editor, you can add the shortcode [gallery] anywhere in your post or page. In Visual mode, there is an Insert Gallery button.

You can click the Add An Image icon at any time to see the images in the gallery, and also to remove them or change the order.

To get the most out of your image galleries, you will probably want to install a Lightbox plugin, and if you plan to post large galleries, you will want a Pagination plugin. I have found that jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries and ByREV Gallery Pagination for WordPress, but note that I had to leave AJAX caching turned off to make the latter work without conflicting with another plugin.

Voila! You now have a photo gallery and you didn’t manually resize any photos or write any code!

Examples:

Gallery on a WordPress Page

Gallery in a WordPress Post

This article copyright © John Nasta 2011 – All Rights Reserved

It can’t be denied that for a serious business web site, regardless of whether or not it is done with WordPress, a custom theme design will always be preferable to a stock template.

I posted similar information on the wordpress.org forum and people have asked me to elaborate. I am posting it here so that it can be edited later.

The first step is to have a basic understanding of web site design and a program with which to lay out your design. I prefer Photo Shop because it allows me to turn layers on and off to isolate graphics and to create variations on the theme that can easily be turned on or off. Once I have something that I want the client to see, I save it as a JPG file.
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Arinesce is a simple fixed width two column, left sidebar, widget ready WordPress theme that supports threaded and nested comments. It now also supports random header images.

Blog name & tagline can easily be moved to the top of the sidebar to allow room for Google AdSense® ads above the main content.

The default colors are black, white, gray, blue, brown, and purple. The stylesheet is easily customizable to create your own color scheme.

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WordPress web site owners often come to realize that they want to change the URL of their web site, whether it is because they want the site to be accessible from the root folder (without using a redirect) or because they want to change the domain name of the web site.

If you’d like to do this, first ask yourself if you feel comfortable editing the code in your theme files, and if you feel comfortable using FTP to upload the edits to your web server. Remember to use a plain-text editor to make all of your edits, not a word processing program like MS Word. If you can do those things without hesitation, you’ve made it over the first hurdle.

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