This weeks inspired post will be looking at Hicks Design.  Hicks Design is design agency, who’s website features a Blog, About page, and portfolio.  Alongside this it has a few other features.

Hicks Design

It is a very nicely done Wordpress theme, that I think much inspiration can be taken from.

Personally I think Brain has achieved well with his Blog and it should be considered as a good source of inspiration for the future.

The unusual design appears to not use categories, but only tags as the organisational methods, with each and all other information hidden away at the bottom of the website. Inspiring?  I think so.  Unique?  Definitely.  What do you think?

Note: I am sorry about the bad quality of the Web FLV video.  By downloading the MOV version you will get a much better quality version of the video.  Both will be re-rendered this week and uploaded for a better quality playback experience.

For some real inspiration on what can be done with Wordpress, Komodo Media is well worth a look in on.

This weeks site shows what wordpress really can do, with a smooth and elegant design Discounted is an online store built off wordpress.  A truly brilliant example showing that wordpress does not need to power a Blog.

Discounted - A Wordpress Powered Online Store

1. Spell Check: This is a big thing for me.  I would like to new and improved on the fly spell check features.  It must be doable with JavaScript, but when blogging away from my Mac I do find the lack of Wordpress spell check features to be irritating as most Operating Systems or Browsers do not feature a built in spell check.
2. Search Engine Optimisation: Ok, their are Plugins available to help with SEO on any Wordpress powered website, but I would like to see something built in that automatically optimises my pages for me based on what is in the pages/post.
3. Security: This is always and always will be an issue for me.  The most secure the better, security can always be improved weather it means adding a salt to passwords or when Wordpress hashes them for storage or a new way of storing them, I will always be interested.  

1. Page Ordering: This is currently a pain in the arse.  I would like to see a simple drag-and-drop system for ordering pages (NOT POSTS) so that I can quickly choose what order I want them to appear in on the navigation
2. New Backend: I would love to see a new backend for Wordpress that allows much faster navigation, as well as a better organised “Settings” area where I don’t have to take four or five guesses before i land in the right panel.
3. Form Creation/Processing: Even if it is restricted to just contact forms, I would love the see a quick and easy way to create a contact form that allows your readers to get in contact.  Currently the plug-in’s out their a rather ugly and frustrating to use.
4. Are You Human?: Are You Human? is something I would like to be able to ask my visitors.  This way I could cut back on spam by including a simple CAPCHA on my comment form submission.  Seriously, that spam is starting to drive me nuts, and hides the Ham marked as Spam.
5. Site-map’s: This would help those new to Web Design and well as those of us who are more experienced.  Why should me have to download a plugin to do such a simple function?  I would expect any CMS to create a site-map for me.
6. Better Gallery Support: Photo Galleries are something that can be useful to include on your Wordpress website, especially if you use it to power your portfolio.  Better support for these would be nice, along with more control in order to customise them.
   
7. Related/Most Popular Post Widget: One feature that most Blogs (which is what Wordpress is designed to power at the end of the day) include is the Most Popular and Related Posts in the sidebar.  So why make us download plugin’s to do this?
8. More Template Control: This means that we want more control over what can be done with the template tags in Wordpress.  For example, why should I have to hard-code my navigation to create tabs?  I want to be able to insert more mark-up within the links in the navigation.
9. Multi-Domain Support: I would like the option to have one wordpress installation managing all of my Blogs.  Each of which is on it’s own Domain (i.e. InspiredByWordpress.co.uk, AppFlow.co.uk).  Although Wordpress MU has the ability to have separate Blogs on separate sub-domains I want separate Blogs on separate Top-Level domains.

What would you like to see in WordPress 3.0?

Entering

So, how do you enter?  Well the contest will run for one week only.  In order to win you have to follow @inspiredbywp and @AppFlow on twitter, and then simply tweet the following message: “I just entered a MarsEdit giveaway over at @inspiredbywp http://inspiredbywordpress.co.uk/2010/02/marsedit-giveaway/”

Or, because I’m nice, I created this link that you could click that does exactly the same thing.

Good Luck!

And that’s exactly how the guys over at Wordpress as treating it. As something special. As a new era. Two a lot of you, this may now be old news, but I have only today realised that I have not posted anything about this. This year, with the release of Wordpress 3.0 a new default Wordpress theme will be released.

The development for this new Wordpress theme can be seen on the 2010 development section of Wordpress.com.

When I opened my browser and navigated to this page, at first I was a little shocked. Yes, it’s a improvement, but no. I don’t like it. At all. That graphic, well you don’t want to know what it made me think of. The layout, feels to normal. It’s not ground-breaking ion any way. Yes, it’s simple. It’s clean. But it’s also boring. Nothing is going on.

Personally, I am going to be even quicker at changing it than I was with the last Wordpress theme. What are your thoughts on it?

Today, Chris Coyier published a post on punctuation in relation to tags.  Where should the tags go?  Inside?  Or Outside?

There is probably a right and wrong answer

Above is the first few words of Chris’s post on this topic.  I believe that here he is wrong.  I don’t think that there is a right or a wrong answer.  I think it is all down to context.  For example, if I want to emphasis an entire question then I would place the tags on the outside like so:

<em>What do you think?</em>

In this situation I have emphasised the entire post.  On the other hand if I am in the need of emphasising just a particular part of the question then the tags would go inside.

What do <em>you</em> think?

So, now lets take a look at the quotations that Chris used.

Was that really Meg Ryan in Cherry 2000?

This is the first question that Chris asked.  Personally, in this case I think that the tags need to come inside.  So, it would be formatted like so:

Was that really Meg Ryan in <em>Cherry 2000</em>?

So, why did I come to this conclusion?  The punctuation in this case does not make sense when applied to the question mark.  I think it has to be around the name only.

No, that was Melanie Griffith.

In this case I think it has to go outside.

<em>No,</em> that was Melanie Griffith.

Why did I choose outside this time?  In this case to me it feels like the comma is attached to the word “No”, and so as a result it must be included.

In the Third Robot War (see page 85) human were decimated…

In this final example it seems to me that it should go inside the brackets. Why?  Because you are emphasising the contents of the brackets, not everything around them.

In the Third Robot War (<em>see page 85</em>) human were decimated…

But hey, thats just my view.  What do you think?

On the 1st of January I announced that I would be launching a new big project this year.  This isn’t it.

I have been working on a new project with a good friend, Luke Barnes.  A few weeks ago we launched a new website, aimed at Mac users, focusing on increasing your productivity on your Mac.  The project is AppFlow.

To celebrate the launch of AppFlow we will be running a one week contest, a simple give-away of the GTD application, Things.

Image by Viernest

We all want to drive more traffic to our Wordpress Blogs.  In fact, the want for traffic doesn’t stop with Wordpress.  However you manage your website, your want traffic.  You don’t even have to be using a CMS.

So, as always the question is how can you get more traffic?  Now, getting traffic is one thing, but the real question is how you can get appropriate traffic.  If I had the choice between 20, 000 visitors that couldn’t give a damn about my content and one one visitor who would be interested in the content I would go with the single visitor anytime.  Why?  The single visitor would come back, and participate in discussion.  The 20, 000 would leave after a few seconds and never come back.

That is the difference between loyal visitors and other visitors.

Getting The Traffic

Getting traffic is all about links.  The more links back to your website you have the more likely one is to be seen by someone who will care.  The trick is to put them in the right place.  For example, posting links to this website on a cooking website might get me a few visitors, but surely posting a link to this site on a website that many Wordpress users use would be more appropriate.  Like Wordpress.org, for example.

If the cooking site got me more loyal visitors, I’d be shocked.

At the end of the day, we want people who care about our content, and those people tend to search for it.  Using search engines like Google, or Yahoo. But, this then brings a new question.  How to work up the ranks.  How do I get on the front page of result on a search engine.  That’s not so easy.

So, we want to up our ranks on the big Search Engines now.  That also comes back to links (you spotted the pattern yet?).  The more links back to your site you get, the more popular a Search Engine thinks your content is, and so it moves your content up the ranks, and eventually into the front page.  That the proper way of doing it anyway.

The other way is to advertise on a Search Engine.  That will put you on every page.  But it will cost.

Search Engine Optimisation also comes into play when people begin to search for content online.  But, links is just a small bit of it.  At the end of the day a Search Engine is just trying to serve to most relevant content to a customer (the person who searches) and allow them to proceed to view it.  SEO, at it’s roots is all about links and keywords.  And the more relevant keywords you have on your website, the better.  For example, in this case I need traffic who are interested in Wordpress, and so I use the word Wordpress a lot.

Some help to start you off

Here are some suggestions to help you get going with your own SEO project.

• Post links on forums
• Leave comment on other related Blogs, but don’t forget to fill out the URL field
• Advertise strategically
• Monitor the results (I would suggest a service like Google Analytics (I reviewed a Wordpress plugin to work with it a while ago)
• Use the All In One SEO plugin if you use Wordpress
• Use a Sitemap to help search engine robots (Wordpress plugin review)

Got any additional tips?  How do you promote and drive traffic to your website?

Image by Optical illusion

A year, well 6 months, since this website was launched on the 23rd of August 2009, and it is time to review the progress so far. As we all make out new years resolutions I will declare my plans for the next year here on Inspired By Wordpress.

The last 6 months

The last 6 months hasn’t been great by any means, but it’s been good.  This isn’t to say it has been awful either.  Lets take a look at the god and the bad from the last year.

Good

The first thing to happen with Inspired By Wordpress, was by far the best thing this year.  It was launched on the 23rd of August 2009, roughly 6 months ago.

Over the last 6 months a good base of posts has developed, filling a number of different categories.  The result?  This is post 30.  That may not sound like much, but lets face it.  It’s not bad for a first attempt by an amateur blogger.  Lets try for another 50 in the next six months.  Thats two posts a week for the next six months.

I launched the first dedicated theme for Inspired By Wordpress on the 3rd of November 2009.  This was aimed to give the website a much more personal feel, something which I feel is starting to come-on well.  It needs a few tweaks, for example I feel like the comments could be improved, but it will get there.

The first SceenCast was launched on the 5th November 2009.  This is only 6 minutes long, and shows the complete process for installing WordPress from scratch onto your own server.  Although there are many improvements that could be made, these will be worked on in the new year.

On November the 12th 2009 I hosted the very first Inspired By Wordpress contest, giving away a Code Collector Pro licence.  I do hope to be able to do more of these over the next year of so.

Bad

There are a few things over the last year that have let Inspired By Wordpress down.  For example, the lack of a posting schedule.  This means that posting has been a little too all over the place.  Over the next few weeks I will look at where I have the most time and proceed to create a posting schedule to bring a constant stream of posts.

Quality, this is the key to every website.  Quality, is also something that I feel could be improved here on Inspired By Wordpress.  From here forward I will develop a new style for posting.  I will write a post and then wait an minimum of 24 hours before publishing it, giving myself more time to go back and rewrite sections of it.  The result?  I hope this will bring Higher quality content to you over the next year.

I have made quite a big deal over the ScreenCasts on this site, only to get one published.  In six months.  Thats not too good going really, is it?  Thats why I need to get more rolling of the production line.  The problem has not been lack of ideas though, but more issues with my broadband.  It takes around four hours to upload a one hour PodCast.  That is why I have have been playing with various pieces of software over the last few months meaning that I now have a working solution to this problem.

2010

So, what does the next year hold for Inspired By Wordpress?  Well, I have already said that my posting schedule doesn’t exactly exist as it is now.  So, that first thing I shall do is trial a few solutions over the next two months and then post an official schedule in late february.

More ScreenCasts are on the way, currently I am planning time in the next few days to record and publish a few more.  These will cover various WordPress related topics.

The quality of the posts shall hopefully improve over the next six months as well, as I am putting new measures in place to help increase productivity and improve the work I do for Inspired By WordPress.

The final thing I plan to do in 2010 is to unveil my project.  This, will be kept behind closed doors, but if you follow me on twitter I will probably let something slip.  ;)

This should be  good year.  What are you new year resolutions and plans?  I look foreword to hearing your views on Inspired By Wordpress.  If there is anything you think I ought to do or would be good to see changed I will listen, so please leave me a comment below.

Happy new year!

Image by websuccessdiva

We all need to find the best possible image for our next big Blog post, but this is often easier said than done.  I has  a brainwave earlier today, something that thousands of bloggers have been doing for years, nearly since time began.  So, what is this brain wave?  It’s simple.  Flickr.

This is not fool-proof.  There are certain obligations that you have to make, for example you need to watch the copyright.  But Flickr certainly does make these things easy to manage.

Copyright

Where ever you get your images from, copyright is a huge issue on the web.  It doesn’t matter if you steal a photograph from an Australian photographer or and English photographer.  Either way they can find your website as easily as you found there picture, and when they do they will kick up a fuss when they find out that you have been stealing their photo’s.

In order to get around the issue of copyright we must use the Flickr copyright system.  This is called Creative Commons.  The Creative Commons section of the Flickr website explains all of the different copyright categories of the various images, as well as allowing you to search in each individual category.  I won’t bother explaining all of these here because the guys over at Flickr really have done a good job as making everything clear.

Searching Flickr

For all example here I will be using the Attribution License category.  Go ahead and click the “See More” link.  The page that you have just opened only shows content that belongs in the Attribution License category.  This allows you to search this category for more images.

Think about the subject that you are writing about.  Just one or two keywords will do.  Search for them.  You will be surprised at how quickly you can find appropriate images for your blog postings.

Summery

All in all I think that once you know how to use Flickr it is the best image source at any bloggers disposal.  It is a quick, easy and copyright safe way of finding images.  If you stick to the Attribution License just make sure that you give credit and link back to the user profile that you took the image from and you will be fine.

Why didn’t I discover this sooner?

So, how can things help you get more time to spend on your Blog? Simple really, it means that you are more organised. If you are more organised you can get things done quicker. If you can get things done quicker, you have more time left in the end for your Blog.

I can say this now, if it wasn’t for thins I would not be typing this Blog post now. So why is things so good? It is a well built application. It fits in nicely with the rest of Max OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard, and as a result it is easy to use, because it works how you would expect it to work. I admit, there are programs out there with more functionality, but I really do think that Things is one of the best because although it is basic what it does do, it does perfectly. Besides, sometimes, simpler is better.

So, back o the point of this post, how can things help you get more time to spend working on your wordpress blog? Well, the truth is is can’t. It can’t make you work any faster, but what it can do it help you work more efficiently and stop you from forgetting what needs to be done. And in the end, you will ind you have more time. It’s worth a try. Seriously.

Official Wordpress Desktop Backgrounds

Unofficial Desktop Backgrounds

This list is in no way extensive, but I feel that these plugin’s are essential to any wordpress Blog that I create. You may feel differently, you may feel that I have missed some and that others are not necessary. What do you think?

1. Google XML Sitemaps – This is a simple plugin that can generate a site-map for your Blog, perfectly compliant for Google, meaning that you Googles robot will not miss any of your website’s essential content. I reviewed this plugin a few days ago, more information can be found in the Wordpress repository.
2. Google Analyticator – This is quite a handy little plugin.  It simply adds the Google Analytics tracking code to your wordpress theme for you.  I also reviewed this one a while ago.
3. Role Manager – For those who wish to take more control over what users can do on their Wordpress powered website.  This plugin allows enough flexibility for any setup, allowing you to choose who can do what, and to create new user types.
4. WP-DBManager – This plugin is deigned to work with your Wordpress database.  It offers backups facilities, query facilities, optimisation facilities and much more.  This is a must-have plugin if you to keep your Wordpress website running at it’s best.
5. WP Security Scan – This plugin is designed to check the security of your website.  It will scan for any flaws in your Wordpress websites security, and then advise you on how to fix them.
6. WordPress Exploit Scanner – This simply scans your Wordpress database to check to see if it has been exploited in any way.  It will look for malicious links and JavaScript and anything else that shouldn’t be there.
7. All in One SEO Pack – This is one for every site.  If you are serious about getting your website into those that rank top in search engines then this is a plugin for you.  It allows you to customise every aspect of every page, from page titles to the individual page keywords.
8. Tweetable – Simply allows you to configure it to post all of your Wordpress posts to your twitter account.  Automatically.
9. WP Hide Dashboard – If you are allowing people to register with your website, then this will hide your dashboard from all users.  Whats the benefit?  Do you really want to be showing off all of your stats?
10. WP Super Cache – This plugin is ideal for high-traffic wordpress websites.  It will cache data from your database into HTML pages meaning that their is reduced strain on your server when experiencing traffic spikes.

So, exactly what does it do?  Well, quite a lot on top of building a a Sitemap.

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Is it easy to use?

If I’m honest, easy to use is an understatement.  Simply install and activate the plugin, and then click the “Rebuild the Sitemap” button in order to create your first sitemap, although this does take a while to build initially, from here on it is zero maintenance.

This, though, is just the default configuration.  In order to do anything more than just notify Google of updates and create your sitemap you need to configure the plug-in options.  You will need to configure it to notify Bing (formerly MSN Live Search, which was formerly MSN Search) or Ask Jeeves you will need to configure the plug-in.  Further, in order to integrate it with Yahoo search you will need to get a Yahoo developers key.

In order to truly give the best user experience they should enable all of this for you, creating a truly quick and easy user friendly install.

Does it work as expected?

Does it work as expected? Yes. If you want to see what it churns out, take a look at the Inspired By Wordpress sitemap which was generated by this plugin.

I can’t really pick a fault in the functionality of this plugin. It seems to work perfectly.

Conclusion

A pretty awesome plugin all in all. I can’t find any real fault in it, once set up you can just leave it to do it’s own thing. It’s not a complex plug-in in the slightest. Once it is set up it is quite literally set-and-forgett. Do you have any thoughts? Any alternatives? Let me know!

M Cubed Software have very kindly agreed to donate one Code Collector Pro licence to one reader of Inspired By Wordpress. Of course, I’m not going to make it plain sailing to get your hands on this licence for Code Collector Pro, that would be just too easy.

In order to enter the competition you need to leave a comment below with your entry. You must include a link to one of your online designs. Ideally it should be a wordpress theme in it’s self, but once this has been done I will hand-pick from the selection in a weeks time the best ones. I will be looking for a modern design that is easy to use and is fit for the purpose of the website. It doesn’t need to be simple, but I would suggest that you don’t link to an overly complicated design either.

Just started out? Not got a theme live? No problem. Just link to a graphic of what your design will look like.

Now, in a weeks time (thats Thursday 19th 2009) I will sit down at lunch time (12:30 GMT) with a group of friends who are a mixture of designers and non-designers to judge the contest. And just to make it clear, I have banned them all from entering.

Good luck with the contest everyone!

Joren has broken the trends with his site, making something that is exciting and unique.  His design skills don’t stop here, he has come up with a new solution for his contact form, bringing down a JavaScript contact form that allows users to quickly contact him without ever leaving the page they are on.

On top of this I love the way Joren’s site has what feels like conventional main navigation, yet every link interacts with you in a different way. For example when clicking the “Portfolio” link it simply takes you to the homepage. Then, the “Services” link appears like it would simply take you to yet another page yet in reality it will simply scroll you down to the “Services” information on the page. After this the “Blog” link acts as expect and then comes the rather elaborate “Contact Me” link. This is a really fancy aspect of the website that I adore.

The contact me link will darken the page and pull down a JavaScript powered box from the corner which looks very effective on a design such as this one. Joren has included instructions on how he did this on his Blog.

I think that Joren should be highly influential to all designers. He is both highly creative and knowledgeable. I think that is is someone that we could all learn a thing or two from.

Something a little different this time. Rather than looking at one particular website I have decided to look at a selection of websites by a particular person. The person I have chosen for this event owns several popular blogs including Blog.SpoonGraphics and Line 25. These website’s are the work of Chris Spooner (@chrisspooner).

I guess the most logical place to begin would be with his personal Blog, ChrisSpooner.com. If I’m honest, this this is my favourite of all his site. I love the way the entire site changes around the weather.

So, as you can see above in the screenshot I took it was a cloudy day. Now, it’s not like I used the Safari Developer tools or anything to take a look at what other weather condition Chris had catered for in his CSS and changed the body class to get some rain…

…or even some snow.

Now, when I saw this effect for the first time I was instantly interested in how Chris managed to do this. After a little digging, it turn out that a different Chris was responsible for this one.

Moving on, we have other sites by Chris. Although these ones can’t predict the weather for me I still think they are worth a mention. The next site is Chris’s business site, SpoonGraphics.

I would like to say now, I am not a fan of the brown – yuk! But what I do like on this site is the scrolling portfolio. Normally with these I just think, whatever – every site has one these days. But Chris has done something a little different here. I like the way every slide is different. On most site every slide would have a standard template and every slide would be near-enough the same so, what’s different here? Every slide is unique.

The SpoonGraphics Blog is also a nice addition to the site. Although they are both very similar in style and fit in next to each other nicely, the Blog is still unique. It feels like it is separate form the rest of the site, but at the same time it still feel part of it. I like the graphic at the top of the blog, it adds a much more personal feeling to the blog, and makes it look kinda cool. Still don’t like the brown though.

His final site that I will look at today is Line25. There is one thing about this site that I notice every time I visit it, straightaway. This is the way the titles for each post are overlaid over an image for each post. This just jumps out at me as it creates a contrast between the title and the image.

I hope everyone has enjoyed this post. It would be interesting to see other people comment below with their thoughts of these sites.

You can now also see my latest additions to the website in the navigation, both of which should be online within the next few days. The first is a new ScreenCasts section. In case you have not guessed from that information I plan to start producing my own ScreenCasts over the upcoming weeks.

The second of the new additions is the Inspiration section. This will also be online in the next few days hopefully, and will provide what I hope it to become an extensive resources for inspiration for designers of all types. This page will link in with my Flickr account where I will store and manage the inspiration.

Although the previous design was not my own, I would like to include a few before and after screenshots below, just for the record.

Before

After

I hope you all like the new design, any comments would be greatly appreciated with some thoughts on the new design. If you feel that it is missing anything please let me know so I can add these features in the future.

I came across this site earlier and had to share it.  I think we can all learn a lot from it.  If you want to show-off your skills as a wordpress designer (or any designer by that matter) this site should be an inspiration to you.  I love the way everything takes place so smoothly on the site, using JavaScript to send things (in a good way) whizzing across the screen.

In fact, Rather than my normal method of just writing about what I love about this site, I thought I will show you instead. Sorry about the picture quality, I will try and remedy this shortly.

Black also happens so be something else.  It is a colour that I have never successfully designed with.  Every attempt, ever, has failed.  So for these reasons I do think that this is a very inspiring website, and best of all it’s run on Wordpress.

Yesterday the latest version of Wordpress (2.8.5) was released, but whats new?  Anything?  On the visual level, nothing.  But behind the scenes the guys behind have made a few changes.  Rather than trying to explain all of these I figured it would be best if I took it straight from the Wordpress Blog.

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Wordpress recommend everybody to upgrade to this version of wordpress as soon as possible due to the new security fixes.

They are also including a note for everybody who who thinks that they have been hit by the recent exploit.  They are recommending that everybody in this situation uses the Wordpress Exploit Scanner immediately.

If you think your site may have been hit by one of the recent exploits and you would like to make sure that you have cleared out all traces of the exploit then we would recommend that you take a look at the WordPress Exploit Scanner.  This is a plugin which searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

I do hope that nobody reading this has suffered from the exploit, but if you have do follow their advice as they do know what they are talking about.  Follow their advice and keep wordpress up-to-date and you should be fine.

So, for Blog Action Day 2009 I decided to look at what us web designers and bloggers can do to help save the environment.

As a web design and blogger I spend the majority of my time on my laptop.  I use to to design websites from stage one, as well as to write blog updates and tweet.  As a result I am consuming a lot of energy just to do this.  So, I guess what I am looking at is how we can do out bit by using less resources to do what we do best.  I have spent the majority of the day compiling a list of things we can do to save energy.

1. Don’t leave your computer on. This may sound like a obvious way of saving energy, but you would be amazed at how many people leave their computer on all of the time.  Even if you cannot shut-down your computer put into hibernation or standby when it is not in use, as well as turning of the screen when it is not in use, although this may seem like a small thing it will go a long way.
2. Unplug your phone. When your phone is plugged in it is using energy, and a lot more than most people relies.  By unplugging your phone it will help to use less energy meaning that you are saving a little more of the planet.
3. Turn off your phone. Before you complain that you need your phone on, I do not mean in the day.  Once you have stopped working and begin to relax for the evening or you go to bed for the night you are not going to use it again until the morning, so even if it is on charge turn it off.  By turning off your phone you will not only make your phones battery last longer, but you saving another little bit of the planet.
4. Don’t leave your speakers on. We all do it.  Speakers can use a huge amount of energy powering fairly juicy amplifiers, so even when you are not using them you will be surprised at how much energy they use.  When you are not using them, turn them off.  That wasn’t so hard – was it?
5. Switch that light off! Even if you are only leaving the room for five minutes your light is using energy.  On your way out turn your light off, it not difficult to take a second to turn it back on on the way in, is it?
6. Turn off your desktop. Use Your Laptop.  What use is this?  Simple, your laptop, even paired with an external monitor uses way less energy than your desktop computer.
7. Switch off your second monitor. I know that I am contradicting what I just said above, but do you really need that extra monitor?  Turn it off, you know you’ll feel better for it.
8. Avoid your printer. Why?  We’re in the digital world now, do your really need to waste energy while you kill that tree?
9. Don’t draw that.  Photoshop it. Why waste a tree while your computer sits there killing the environment?  Instead of wasting paper why not just do it on photoshop with your shiny new graphics tablet?
10. Take Your Canvas Bags, Take You Canvas Bags, Take Your Canvas…..

Finally, to conclude this article on climate change, I would like to share a few energy-based statistics with you.  The following image is curtsey of  GOOD.

Please, please tweet, re-tweet, Facebook and email this post everywhere.  Please share it with the world to help make a difference today.

I have had many people ask me why I use Wordpress so much.  Many people say that using one content management system all of the time is surly a disadvantage, less flexible than using different content management systems for different uses, using each one for what it is best for.  According to these people I have a closed mind, I am not willing to try something new.

I wouldn’t say this is true at all.  We all favour a CMS, whether it is Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla.  It really doesn’t matter, the real question is can your CMS do what it needs to do.  If wordpress can, which in most situations it can, I will use wordpress.  Why?  Because it is so flexible.  With custom fields, custom page templates, the sheer number of plugins, and the Wordpress MU variation of Wordpress, I truly think it has got to be one of the most flexible content management systems out their.

On top of this, how many content management system have a sister project, running for another purpose that can integrate fully with Wordpress itself?  How many other content management systems have a forum, made by the same company that is also free, and easy to integrate so that it shares the same user database, and uses the same user settings?

It doesn’t matter weather you want to use it’s blogging function or not.  In fact, why not use it as a news feed, or a staff communication area instead?  Wordpress has infinite uses.  You can even use it as a user directory.

Wordpress, is a unique project and makes a simple yet powerful content management system.  How long will it take for other to realise this?  We don’t have a closed mind.  They do.

There are pro’s and con’s to each approach. For example, if you have the complete post on the homepage then people may get put-off by the amount of content. On the other hand if you display a read more link then pople may not bother with the extra click, the extra time, to load another page on the website.

I have seen many websites where they show an entire post on the homepage, but I think the majority will tend to show only a small portion of a post with a read more link. Why? It means people can see multiple headlines easily, without haveing to scroll down too much.

Also, by adding a readmore link their is the oppertunity to show multiple posts above “The Fold”. So, what is the fold? The fold is the point at which a webpage disappears out of the bottom of a browser window and the user has got to scroll in order to see more content. Scrolling, is something though that many people will be reluctent to do andso the content above the fold has to be good to make them want to scroll down.

So, what should be done? In my view it depends, if you want you audience to read your latest post with minimum effort, then you should display the entire post on the homepage, but if you do this, you really – really should not put more than one post on the homepage. If you want people to read, or at least see as many of your posts as possible I would go down the “Read More” link road.

But it more complex for me going down the “Read More” link road. In my view if you do plan to go down this road you should be careful with when you use a read more link. For example if you have a very short post then you should not use a read-more link. But if you have a long post you should place it so that their is just enough content showing to make the user want to read on.

What are your thoughts on the topic? Does anyone disagree? Please comment below.

How often do you see a website with a proper header at the top of a website these days?  And without a set of links just below it or next to it?  Not often.  I think it is a good example of out-of-the-ordidery design due to the way the head of the page is incorporated into the sidebar, freeing more space for the content and for the content that matters to the user.

What do you think?

CSS–Tricks is a very inspirational website, not just in it’s writing but in it’s design as well.  I think the way Chris Coyier has achieved something that is very rarely seen in the most modern of designs, but I feel that it creates a real impact.  It may be something small, almost silly or insignificant to most people, but he has succeeded at something which I have failed at in past attempts.  He has created a sidebar that is wide enough to hold plenty of information without being too long.  But at the same time his content column is not too narrow and the overall design not to wide.

As I said it mat sound silly, be he really is a figure to look to in modern design.  And with that, I present CSS-Tricks as it was at the time of writing.

• Created our profile page templates
• Added custom fields
• Installed the correct plug-ins for the basic settings
• Hidden un-used fields.

If you have missed any of the days, or wan to recapp, you should read the following posts:

• Part One: Creating the Profile pages
• Part Two: Adding Custom Fields
• Part Three: Listing the users, and optimisation

So, we know where we left off, but what are we going to cover?  Today we will try to streamline and optimise the whole process, creating a minimal maintenance set-up.  In order to do this we will:

• Change the URL of the profiles
• List all of the users on one page
• Hide the Dashboard
• Have an auto-mated email send to new members
• Generate profiles for people who have not posted
• Get more control over what users can do
• Track what users do

Change the URL of user profiles

Changing the URL of the author profiles is a very easy job, one which will take us only a few seconds.  Simply download and install the Customer Author Permalink plug-in from the Wordpress repository.  Once you have done this go to Settings –> Author Permalink and change the Permalink to whatever you like.  If you were to change the permalink to member as I have the admin profile would then be located at [yoururl]/member/admin.

The Custom Author Permalink Settings Page

List Authors on a Page

It does seem a little pointless having gone to all of this work if we are not going list all of the member on one page and then link to their profiles.  Don’t forget that only users that have posted a post on the Blog and made a page will appear, but don’t worry we will solve this problem later on.  The first thing we need to do is create the file, in order to do this make a copy of page.php from your theme folder and add the following right at the top of the file.

/*
Template Name: List of Authors
*/
?>

This simply declares the file as being a custom page template called “List of Authors”, giving us the ability to create a page using this template that will list all of our authors. For the next stage I have added two separate code snippets below. Simply add the second snippet just before the first, the first should already exist in your new file as a line of code.






Now save this file as authorslist.php in your theme folder. You can now login to your Wordpress control panel and add a new page, using this newly created page template. In order to do so navigate to the new-page panel and then select the template as shown below from inside the “Attributes” box.

Selecting our new authors template

Role Manager

Role Manager is another good plug-in to play around with if you are going to allow members of the public to create an account with your website.  This plug-in will allow you to customise what the users can do.  It allows to to take away and add user levels, each with it’s own unique abilities to do various things.  On top of this it will also allow you to customise the settings for individual users.

Show Authors Without Posts

In order to show all users, you will need to install the “Show Authors Without Posts” plug-in. This plug-in is not intend for quite the job that we are going to use it for, so once you have installed it you will need to change the default role for new member to author, and then use the Role Manager plug-in (detail below) in order to change what an author can do.

Audit Trail

Audit Trial is a very useful plug-in for some people, it will track exactly what every logged in user does and when they do it allowing the administrator to trace every move of the logged in users.

Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.

To summarize:

• Log of user actions inside your blog – useful for finding out who did what in a multi-user system
• Post/page revisions and restorations – every change to a post or page is recorded and can be instantly restored to a previous version
• Differences are shown graphically
• Extensible, allowing other plugins the ability to add and display items in the Audit Trail
• Ability to track registered user page visits
• Fully localized

Conclusion

Now, you should have a fully functioning Wordpress powered user directory.  This is all good, but you are now building you own online community, and so there are a few things you should consider.  For example, how are you going to back-up your database?  You lose that and you have lost your entire community.  You should should also monitor the activity of other all users.  You need to know which pages are the most popular, so you need a statistics plug-in like the one I reviewed the other day.

Further, what about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).  How are you going to publicise you directory?  How are you going to develop it?  These are all important thing to consider.

If you need any help or support with anything in here please feel free to comment below and I will do my best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

This tutorial will be over multiple parts (that’s right, it’s our first series). The different parts are detail below.

• Part One: Creating the Profile pages
• Part Two: Adding Custom Fields
• Part Three: Listing the users, and optimisation

So, what additional fields will we be adding?  I think that their is quite a lot missing so, we will add those listed below:

• Twitter
• Linked In
• Website Name (we’ll turn this into a link)
• A Profile Picture
• Posts they have written on the website

On top of this we will also make any field that the user has not filled out hide themselves by default, this will make the profile page feel much more customized than it may otherwise feel.

Creating the custom fields

Now I have already talked you through doing this once already, but I will walk you through doing it with all of the above.

Now, you can navigate to Settings –> Register Plus in Wordpress in order to access the control panel for the plug-in.  You should now work through this page and customise the settings as you wish, the settings will change what the user can/has to do on the Wordpress sign-up page.

When you get to the “Add User Defined Fields” section you will need to be careful, the first input field should be the same as the name of the field all in lowercase, and the second should be the name of the field.  The name of the field can be whatever you like, but should be linked to what you expect the user to do with it, for example I added a custom field named “Twitter” where I wanted people to input there twitter user-names.  In the next box (the drop-down one) you can choose what type of field you want it to be.

So, now we will do one together.  We will start with Twitter, if you don’t already have a Twitter account I would suggest that you start by going over to Twitter and getting one for free.

To start navigate to the Register Plus page under Settings in your Wordpress control panel.  Now, scroll down to the User Defined Fields section, here you will see a sub-section labelled Custom Field, in the first box type “twitter” all in lower-case, and in the second box type “Twitter Username”.  After this make sure “Text Field” is selected in the drop-down box and then tick the “Add Registration Field” and “Add Profile Field” boxes.  Finally scroll box to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes”.  That’s it, you have created you first custom field.  The custom fields should now look something like this.

What your "Twitter" custom field should look like

Now try to repeat this process for the other fields, using the credentials shown in the picture below.  For now we will skips the recent posts and profile picture sections as they are done differently.  In order to add more fields you need to click the little green plus icon by the field that you have already created.

What your custom fields should look like

Adding your custom fields to the template

Now, like yesterday this isn’t as bad as people think it is going to be.  Open author.php again in your text editor and get ready to begin editing it.  We’ll start by adding the users twitter user-name, and linking it to the users twitter profile underneath the email address.  To do this add the following code, you should know where by now.

You’ll notice now that it is exactly the same what we were adding before, except we replace the code between the quotes with the variable we declared in the first box back in the control panels for the Register Plus plug-in. So, how do we turn this into a link? Well, we link to twitter.com/ and then the twitter user-name, just I have below.

OK, twitter done, lets make the name of the user’s website into a link.

And then add a new bullet-point for there linked-in profile.

Showing Author Posts

This bit, will be really quite easy. Go to your server and open archive.php, and then copy everything between:

and

Now, paste it between the same two line sin author.php, and your done.

Making Things Vanish

So, this is all good and that, but what if someone doesn’t want to fill out a field? Well, we need to make it vanish. For this section I am going to go through and edit the entire block of code in one go, and then I will explain what I did in a moment.

$curauth = $wp_query->get_queried_object();

?>

ID, ‘nickname’); ?>

ID, ‘websiteName’); ?>) == ”) {?>
• Website: ID, ‘websiteName’); ?>

ID, ‘user_email’) == ”) {?>

• Email: ID, ‘user_email’); ?>

ID, ‘twitter’) == ”) {?>

• Twitter: @ID, ‘twitter’);?>

ID, ‘linkedin’) == ”) {?>

• Linked-in: ID, ‘linkedin’); ?>
  ID, ‘aim’) == ”) {?>
• AIM: ID, ‘aim’); ?>

ID, ‘yim’) == ”) {?>

• Yahoo: ID, ‘yim’); ?>

ID, ‘jabber’) == ”) {?>

• Google Talk/Jabber: ID, ‘jabber’); ?>

ID, ‘description’) == ”) {?>

• About: ID, ‘description’); ?>

So, what did I do here? Well, it’s simple really. Before every bullet-point I added a PHP if statement, so in simple terms this is what the description one is saying:

If there is a user description, display this code, otherwise don’t.

So, what does mine look like? Well, that what the picture below is of. Take a look, your should be pretty similar at this time, but style to look like your theme.

The finished article

Conclusion

Now you should have a fully working Wordpress profile page, but how you access it? Simple, go to [yourwordpressurl]/author/[yourusername], and that should land you on your profile page. If you need any help at all with this tutorial, or Wordpress in general post a comment below and I will get back to you ASAP.

Tomorrow we will be looking at how to optimise the whole user profile, as with the default settings every user has to have made a post to get a profile page. That is just the start of what we will be looking at though, as I have a lot more lined up as well including controlling what members can do and tracking what they do.

This tutorial will be over multiple parts (thats right, it’s our first series). The different parts are detail below.

• Part One: Creating the Profile pages
• Part Two: Adding Custom Fields
• Part Three: Listing the users, and optimization

What You Will Need

I could go on all day with plug-ins that will help to optimize this process, but I am going to start with the bare minimum, and then we will build on these over the next few days as we optimize the whole directory into a much more streamlined system.  We will start by building the system off just one plug-in, and then work from there.

So, I guess you want to know what plug-in this is?  The plug-in is called Register Plus.  What does Register Plus do?  It is a plug-in that will simply enable us to customize the registration process in Wordpress.

Additionally, I would advise that you make sure that you are happy with your current Wordpress theme as we will have to edit the core files, but DON’T PANIC!  It’s not as bad as it sounds…. I promise.  Any theme will do, you should still be able to follow the steps here without any problems.

The (really) easy bit

As I say, this bit is really quite easy, so I’m not going to go into much detail here, if you need any extra help just leave a comment below and I will get back to you.  For this bit you need to install the Register Plus plug-in from the Wordpress plug-in repository and ensure you have the theme that you wish to use installed and activated.

Now, you can navigate to Settings –> Register Plus in Wordpress in order to access the control panel for the plugin.  You should now work through this page and customize the settings as you wish, the settings will change what the user can/has to do on the Wordpress sign-up page.

When you get to the “Add User Defined Fields” section you will need to be careful, the first input field should be the same as the name of the field all in lowercase, and the second should be the name of the field.  The name of the field can be whatever you like, but should be linked to what you expect the user to do with it, for example I added a custom field named “Twitter” where I wanted people to input there twitter user-names.  In the next box (the drop-down one) you can choose what type of field you want it to be.

The "Twitter" custom field that I added

Finally you should tick “Add Registration Field” if you want it to appear on the registration page when people register, “Add Profile Field” if you want it to appear on their profile page in the Wordpress back-end and Required if you want to have to fill-out the field.

If you want to add more custom fields, click the little plus at the end of the line, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit save.

Editing Author.php

This is where the fun begins.  You now need to login to your server via FTP, and then navigate to “[wordpress_root]/wp-content/themes/[your_theme]“.  Now some of you might have a file named author.php, if you do sorry but I cannot write a tutorial especially for you because they are all different.  So, for you there are two options, delete it and follow this guide or read this guide and try to work out what you can edit via trail and error.  If you need nay help, again just post a comment below.

For the rest of you duplicate the file in your theme called archive.php and rename the new copy to author.php.  Now, open it in a text editor. The first thing that we need to do is remove the mark-up that is not needed from the file, you should three lines of code that look like those below, but note that it is common to find the first two of these lines on one line.

<?php if (have_posts()) : >
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); >
<?php endwhile; else: >

The first thing that you will need to do is delete everything between line one and two and then everything between lines 2 and 3, so the three lines look like the above, do not delete anything outside of these lines as it may effect your theme.

Now you need to add the following lines of php to the file between line one and two from the above php.


<?php

?>


If I’m honest I believe that that was the hardest part. Now, we are going to put all of the user data we can into a list on the page, once finished you can go through and delete any information that you don’t want. Now, we need to create a bullet-pointed list, and then add our data. In order to do this add the following directly after the php you just added before. On top of this we will set the user nickname to the title of the page. This assumes that your page titles for you theme are level 2 headings.


<h2></h2>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>


Now we will add (yet more) php that will make a call the user database and pull out the pieces of information that we request. The first field that I will add is the page title, to do this we will edit the code that we just added.


<h2><?php echo $curauth->nickname; ?></h2>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>


So, what did that bit of markup do? Well, it makes a call to the variable ($curauth) that we declared in the first piece of php we added, which has already fetched an array of all of the user data from the database, we then simply pulled out the correct piece of information. the word “echo” simply tells the php to put the nickname into the html, allowing the browser to render the page normally. Now, in a list we will add the other variables.


<li>Website: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'user_url'); ?></li>
<li>Email:<?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'email'); ?></li>
<li>AIM: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'aim'); ?></li>
<li>Yahoo: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'yim'); ?></li>
<li>Google Talk/Jabber: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'jabber'); ?></li>
<li>About: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'description'); ?></li>


So, what should you have far? Well it should look something like the screenshot below, but of course it will appear blank where information is not filled out in their profile (we’ll fix that later).

Your profile so far

And your code so far:


<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>


Now, don’t forget that you should still have other HTML and PHP around this which will control what your theme.

Now, that wasn’t too bad… was it? Feel free to leave comments if you need any help or support.

By using a plugin to add this code, the need to modify your templates code in order to install Google Analytics is removed, saving valuable time.  On top of this, if you are a newbie this will then make your life much easier preventing you from having to search through code that may become damaged if the wrong part is removed.

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Is it easy to use?

Very much so.  Simply sign up for a Google Analytics account, or login with your Google account and add your wordpress website as a new profile, then copy the UID and paste it into the UID box on the Google Analyticator settings screen.

The Settings Screen for the Google Analyticator Wordpress plugin

What next?  Click the link to authenticate the plugin to work with Google Analytics and then change the drop-down to read “Enabled”.  Finally, scroll to the bottom and click “Save Changes”.  Job Done.

Does it work as expected?

More so, the amount of functionality this plug-in offers is truly amazing.  You can control everything from what hits it tracks right round to where it places it’s code in the theme template.  At first it is a little overwhelming looking at all of the available options, so I’m glad that all of the advanced configurations are already set, minimizing the amount of work that the user has to do.

Here’s the full list of features quoted from the Wordpress plugin directory.

• Supports standard Google Analytics tracking
• NEW! Includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches
• Includes a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• Supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Supports download link tracking
• Supports event tracking with outbound links / downloads instead of the old pageview tracking method
• Allows hiding of Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Supports any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Installs easily – unlike other plugins, the user doesn’t even have to know their Analytics UID
• Allows tracking code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Provides complete control over options; disable any feature if needed
• NEW! Supports localization – get the settings page in your language of choice

As you can see the list really is quite extensive, I really cannot see what is missing from the huge list of features available.

The plugin even includes a Dashboard widget which allows you to track your stats without ever the need to login to the Google account.

Google Google Analyticator Dashboard Widget

As you can see from the screenshot above the plugin automatically imports a lot of information from Google Analytics including a Graph, the Top Pages, Top Referrers and the Top Searches.  This Dashboard widget can be very helpful with tracking your sites progress without having to sign in to an extra online server, I personally rate this small feature very highly.

Conclusion

It’s easy to use, it’s feature-full and it works.  What more could you ask?  Weather your a wordpress pro or a wordpress beginner I would suggest that you install the Google Analyticator.  I can’t find much that doesn’t seem useful, even if it’s not useful for your current project you will soon find yourself using it in the future.

Top Marks.

Before anyone can do anything with Wordpress, they need to be able to install it.  Weather it be on a local server or on a live server it has to be installed.  In this tutorial I will explain how to install wordpress from scratch.  Before you can precede with this tutorial you will require:

1. A working web server
2. An FTP account
3. A MySQL database

Step 1: Downloading and Uploading

The first that you will need to do is visit the Wordpress website where you will need to click the download link on the homepage.  This will take you to the Wordpress download page, here you need to click the large blue link on the right-hand side of the page, this will initiate the Wordpress download. Once the download is complete you need to extract the files.

If you are installing wordpress on your localhost, you can copy the wordpress folder to the location here you wish to install wordpress on your server and then skip to step two.

The rest of you, and no-doubt the majority of you, will now need to upload Wordpress to your server.  For those of you who do not have any hosting yet you can get some free hosting over at byethost.

In order to upload your website to your servers you will require and FTP client like FileZilla.  Once you have installed an FTP client you will need to input your FTP details so that it can connect to your host.

In order to do this in FileZilla you will need to go to File –> Site Manager, then click “New Site” and fill-out the form that you are presented with, finally click “Connect” to connect to your FTP server.

The FileZilla site manager

Once you have connected to your FTP server copy the contents of the “Wordpress” folder that was in the ZIP folder onto the server, in the location where you would like to install wordpress.  In order to do this in FileZilla, navigate to the location where you would like to install wordpress and in the left pain navigate to the location where you extract the wordpress ZIP folder.  Now click-and-drag the contents of the ZIP folder on the right-panel.

Step 2: Running the Install

You will now need to navigation to the location where you installed wordpress.  For those of you who have a byethost account this will probably be username.byethost.com.

Once you navigated to this page you should be presented with a screen that looks like the one below.

The first screen that should be seen when installing wordpress

On this screen simply click “Create a Configuration File” to proceed.  The next screen will explain to you what you are going to do when installing wordpress.  Read the screen and then click “Lets Go!”.

Now, it’s time to insert your Wordpress database settings, you should be able to get these from the screen where you set-up your database with your host, if you cannot find these instructions contact your web host and they should be able to provide with assistance in finding them.

The Wordpress install screen where you configure your database settings

Now, click “Submit”.  If the screen returns and error go back and check your settings.   Otherwise, you will  proceed onto a screen that will confirm that you have successfully connected wordpress with your database.  If you get this screen click the “Run the Install” button.

On the next screen you will need to choose a name for your Wordpress website.  Enter the name into the appropriate box and then insert an email address, this will be associated with the main admin account, and if you forget your password it will be emailed to this address.

If you want your website to appear on search engines, tick the box labeled “Allow my blog to appear in search….” and then click “Install Wordpress”.

The screen that allows you to choose a name for your new Wordpress website

On the next screen you will be presented with your username (admin) and a randomly generated password, note this password carefully before clicking “Log In”.

The final screen shows you your username and password

Now for those of you who didn’t write down your password correctly, check your email.  Assuming that your host allows “php send mail” then you should shortly receive an email with your password in.

The final thing you now need to do is login, you should be presented with a screen like this the one below.

The default wordpress logon screen

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial helps somebody install wordpress successfully on there server.  If you need any help, just give me a shout by leaving a comment and I will do my best to help you.

If you have any other comments, feedback or just want to share your thoughts on wordpress or this tutorial, feel free to leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading.

Instead, today I’m going to tell you a little about Inspired By Wordpress and why I created it.  Inspired By Wordpress was created as a place to share the large collection of knowledge and experience that I have collected about Wordpress – from making themes to managing a website and finding inspiration.

Inspiration.

That is the main topic of this website, I plan to regularly post inspiration from around the web, weather it be in the form of someone else’s website or a little part of a website.

Although is may seem a little contradictory, the inspiration will not only be from Wordpress themes and related, but from any website – as surely anything can inspire a Wordpress theme or plug-in?

Anyway, I hope someone sticks around a reads information from the site.  Happy Wordpressing!