Portland Oregon Website Tips and Tricks

WordPress as a CMS

By admin, on December 3rd, 2011

Host Pond is offering a free training class on how to build your own website with WordPress. Wednesday, December 14th at 5:30pm. In this free WordPress as a CMS class, you will learn how to:

install WordPress
navigate around the WordPress control panel
configure the basic settings
install custom themes and layouts
create and edit pages
add and configure sidebar widgets
put pictures on your website

This is an IN PERSON class in Portland Oregon, and not a webinar.

Signup by clicking HERE.

New flash like slide show plugin for WordPress

By admin, on September 23rd, 2010

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been these past weeks, wonder no longer. I have been hard at work developing a new flash like slide show plugin for WordPress.

This new plugin offers an easy way to configure the following settings for your WordPress image gallery.

Slideshow height and width
Transition Effects
Transition Time and Speed
Background Color
Thumbnail Location (or None)
Thumbnail Height
Description/Title Alignment
Clickable HREF Links for Images
Auto or Manual Slideshow

To read more, visit the website for the plugin at http://galleryobjects.com. Or, to download the plugin, see the WordPress plugin site at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gallery-objects/.

Is your website valid and functional?

By rpowell, on August 18th, 2010

: W3 Consortium

Did you know that having broken links on your website can have a negative impact on your rankings in the search engines? Not to mention the fact that you may turn away potential customers as they will have lower confidence in your services or products.

Thankfully there is a quick and easy way to check the links on your website as well as a way to verify that your website is using accepted standards and protocols. And it’s FREE!

Use the following free tool to locate potentially broken links on your website.

http://validator.w3.org/checklink/

Be sure to check box to “Check links documents recursively”. A depth of 2 or 3 is good for starters.

Use the following free tool to verify that your website uses valid and accepted Markup.

http://validator.w3.org/

WordPress Basics : Free Class : Thursday, August 26th 2010 at 5:30pm

By rpowell, on August 11th, 2010

Host Pond Web Hosting is proud to announce its second free website training class on Thursday, August 26th at 5:30pm.

The first class fillled up. Don’t miss out on the second class.

Come to this class if you’ve never worked with WordPress before, or if you want to learn how to change headers, graphics, and logos of your WordPress site.

The first 30 minutes of this class is devoted to some very basic web hosting concepts, like uploading files and pictures to your website, and to defining some of the basic terminology used when dealing with hosting a website.

For further information, or to register for this free class, click HERE.

Photoshop for the Poor, or just plain Cheap

By rpowell, on August 5th, 2010

At $700, Photoshop is reserved for professionals and those with lots of spare cash. Did you know that there is a free alternative? The GNU Image Manipulation Program, lovingly referred to as GIMP has an active developer community, and is updated regularly. It can do pretty much anything that Photoshop can do.

GIMP has documentation in 10 different languages, including English, French, and German.

If you would like to see a free in person GIMP training class offered, please feel free to say so in the comment fields below. If there is enough interest, then I will most definitely setup a GIMP class.

For those that don’t know, Photoshop is the defacto standard software used to create and manipulate digital images. You may often hear people say, “oh, that picture was photoshopped”. This means that someone has altered the picture in some way. This statement is used whether the Photoshop software was used or not. Perhaps we need to start a new trend and say “Oh, that pictures has been GIMPed out”

WordPress Basics : Free Class : Thursday, August 12th 2010 at 5:30pm

By rpowell, on July 31st, 2010

Host Pond Web Hosting is proud to announce its first free website training class on Thursday, August 12th at 5:30pm.

Come to this class if you’ve never worked with WordPress before, or if you want to learn how to change headers, graphics, and logos of your WordPress site.

For further information, or to register for this free class, click HERE.

pdxwebtips.com officially launches

By admin, on July 25th, 2010

PDXWebTips.com has officially launched! Look here for tips on building and maintaining your website, as well to learn about Search Engine Optimization and to read relevant news.