Pro Blog Design

The WordPress admin login page is very easy to customize. With the code below, you can add your own CSS to the login page and make it look however you like. Check out the new Pro Blog Design login to see it in action.

Best of all, your customizations are all done in your theme files, so the changes will stay when you upgrade WordPress.

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Image by elroySF

Changing the style of your links is probably the easiest change you can make in your design.

If you aren’t sure how to do it, there is a good explanation at Echo Echo. It will show you how.

It takes only seconds to try out a new look for your links. With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to style your links, to both look good and be usable at the same time.

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Your environment rubs off on you.

Want to be a better photographer? Browse Flickr.
Want to write better? Read great authors.
Want to be optimistic? Hang out with optimists.

It’s a simple principle, and it applies to design as well.

Want to have better taste in design? Surround yourself with beautiful things.

There are hundreds of sources of inspiration surrounding us every day, but for a web designer, the most obvious are simply other web sites.

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The W3C is the internet’s daddy. They created HTML, CSS, and dozens of other specifications that govern the use of the technologies that makes the internet thrive today. Valid code is code which meets their guidelines, and can be tested in a validator, such as the HTML and CSS ones.

Does valid code actually help your blog though?

The Mythical Benefits of Valid Code

• Valid code helps my search engine rankings. Good code helps your search engine rankings, i.e. code that the search engines can read. If you have used tables for presentation, causing your content to be split up in the coding, then Google will have trouble. However, if you just forget the trailing slash on your <img> tags, then they won’t be too harsh on you.

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We have talked before about the basics of making your blog printer friendly. Whilst that will ensure that your content is legible on paper, what if you want to do more? What about sorting out the rest of the troublesome parts of your design?

With some simple adjustments to your print.css, you can make your blog truly printer-friendly.

The Header Area

In a single blog post, we might have 3 different headings; the blog title, the slogan, and the post title, and even some information about the post, such as a date. On screen, we can use CSS to style these however we want, but in print, we have 4 large, separate lines of text. It takes up too much space, and is especially noticeable on shorter blog posts. Look at the following example of how a page on Pro Blog Design printed originally.

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Blogging doesn’t end at the monitor.

Many readers print out interesting posts, but not if your website prints with text off the page, adverts and other useless content. Adding a print stylesheet to your blog is an easy method of ensuring that your content remains useful on paper.

Do you blog about phone reviews? It’s perfectly plausible that your readers will print out a few of their favourites and take them down to the shop with them. Life advice? A reader could print out your words, to read later on at their leisure. Almost every niche has a reason to be printed.

Setting Up the Stylesheet

1. Create a new file in your text editor (e.g. Notepad), and save it as print.css
2. Upload this file to your theme’s directory. (The same place where your main stylesheet is)

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