How to setup a blog about two different subjects

James Riddett Leave a comment

Shannon asks…

“Is there a way to divide blogs into sub categories? I would really like to have a blog about dogs and a blog about travel all on my website. Do you know the best way to do this?”

© Ashley Coombs

© Ashley Coombs

First of all, it might be a good idea to create two separate websites/blogs, one for each topic. That way, you can appeal to dog lovers and travel enthusiasts with the name, style, layout, content and so-on of each site.

Google is apparently looking more and more at the theme of a website to determine relevancy, and therefore page rankings for related terms. It’s possible therefore that you’d be putting yourself at an immediate disadvantage by throwing these two quite different subjects together. I say possible, because search engine optimization certainly isn’t an exact science.

Also, if I follow your blog because I love your stuff about dogs, I’m probably going to keep hitting “delete” every time I receive a post about travel. This might not be a problem if your content is amazing, but unless the standard is ultra high, I’m probably going to unsubscribe and follow a blog that’s exclusively about dogs instead :-) Continue reading →

The perfect domain name!

James Riddett 1 Comment

Mike and I suddenly discovered yesterday that the domain name happy.guide was available!

Well, it felt like striking gold! PERFECT for our book and website called… Happy Guide :-) So we snaffled it up and put it to use right away…

And thankfully WordPress.com makes changing your domain name pretty effortless, redirecting visitors from the old address to the new address automatically. Yet another thumbs up for WordPress :-)

All the best,
James

How to have an empty sidebar on your WordPress blog

James Riddett Leave a comment

Ilko asks…

“Hello, for some reason I can’t remove the sidebar. When I remove all the widgets, some default widgets appears. Do you know how I can fix this? Thanks a lot :) “

On some themes, removing all the widgets produces just a blank sidebar. But on a lot of themes, removing all widgets causes a default set of widgets to appear in your sidebar. This is often something along the lines of Search, Archives and Meta.

I found you can get round this by simply adding a single, blank text widget to your sidebar. And I’ve just discovered this is also the official WordPress.com solution (see bottom of page) to this problem.

All the best,
James

Images not working on the front page slider of the InfoWay theme

James Riddett 5 Comments

Katharine asks…

“Trying to set up a slider on the InfoWay theme front page. The instructions say we only need to choose a tag. I did that. Then tagged one of my posts. It formed the slider and included the name of the post, but not an image. Is it because I had five images on that post? If so, how can i fix?”

It looks like you’ve followed all the setup steps except assigning a Featured Image on the post. The image size should ideally be 950px x 363px. When you’re editing the post, the Featured Image section is in the right-hand sidebar, probably at the bottom.

If you can’t see it, you may need to click Screen Options (top right) and then check the Featured Image box. It should then appear on the sidebar.

Here’s InfoWay’s official support page for anyone looking for more details…

http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/infoway/support

All the best,
James

How to make text flow around an image in WordPress

James Riddett Leave a comment

Olivia asks…

I am trying to figure out how to wrap text around photos and I found info that said I have to open my “theme directory?” and add css code to it? Where the heck is that? and why is it so hard to wrap text around a photo?

Good gracious no! It’s actually very simple, when you know how :-) When adding an image to a post, after upload, look for the “ATTACHMENT DISPLAY SETTINGS” on the right hand side. You might need to scroll down a bit, but there’s an “Alignment” setting. If you select Left, the text will flow to the right of the image, and vice versa.

You can change the alignment of an existing image by clicking on it, and then clicking on one of the alignment icons. Here, the “left align” icon is pressed (just above the first word “Lorem”).

Alternatively, you can also click the little pencil icon that appears over the clicked image, to bring up the full Edit screen, and change the alignment in the Display Settings. Hope this helps, let me know :-)

Here’s WordPress.com’s guide to image alignment, in case anyone needs more info:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/images/image-alignment

All the best,
James