Tutorials

One great way to improve the look of your site is to use custom fonts, before we were limited to only a few web-safe fonts. If you wanted to use a fancy font you had to use an image, and the only way search engines would see that text, no matter how important, was if you specified an alt tag. Thankfully,options to replace any text on our site with a custom font we specify.   There are many methods to accomplish this but in this post we are discussing Cufón; which uses javascript to replace the text with whatever font you choose. You can implement this manually or use a plugin.  The plugin I am using on this site is called WP-Cufón and this tutorial is about that plugin.  Another plugin to use Cufon is the All-in-One Cufon.   I have also written a tutorial on using TTF Titles, that method is no longer very efficient or SEO friendly.

This guide is meant for both beginners and advanced users, and many of the steps after the plugin is installed and set up will work with any Cufon installation, as the code to product the effect is the same regardless of how you get the code to your site.  If you are already using cufon and just want to see some fun styles to try then jump to the Advanced Tips section now. continue

You may have found the perfect theme for you, but after using it for a bit you decide it needs another sidebar.  Instead of switching themes completely you can add one yourself.  It isn’t for beginners, but if you know how to access and edit your php and css files with a basic understanding of CSS then you should be able to accomplish this just fine.   Of course if you have an problems or just want some one else to do it, I am here to help.

For the purpose of this tutorial we are going to use the default wordpress theme as an example.  It starts out with one sidebar.  In this tutorial we are simply adding one sidebar to the left of the current sidebar, it will not be wigitized so you will need to add your own content using HTML.  You CAN make the 2nd sidebar wigitized, it is a bit more complicated then I plan on including here though but you can try this tutorial to give it a try. continue

One small change you can make to a wordpress blog is taking advantage of a custom font. There are several ways to accomplish this, using SiFR, TTFT, Cufon, as well as some other plugins.  On this blog I am using Cufon, which I prefer – we will go over how to use that in another post.   In this article I want to go over using TTFTitles to help a fellow blogger, Cindi from Moomette’s Magnificents implement it in her blog.

To start you need to download and install TTFTitles, you can get it here or search from the “add plugins” page within your admin.  Once you have downloaded and installed it you may need to set certain directories as write-able, and the admin page of ttft will tell you if you need to do so.   Now you need to upload the font you would like to use for your post titles.  Some of my favorite places to get free fonts are DaFont, and Fonts for Peas. continue