Is anyone familiar with customizing Word Press? I have know clue how to change Fonts or even to control the spacing much less change the formatting of text boxes or insert stuff outside the main text boxes.
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Artie,
I am--I've got a blog running at blog.david-kennedy.com--familiar with the pain that is first setting up your Wordpress blog.
There are a lot of free "themes" for Wordpress. Themes are layouts. However, even once you find a theme that you like, you'll wind up changing it. Once upon a time, the theme for mine started as someone's work. About the only thing I've kept is the size of the column on the right........and that's about to change come May when I upload my new Web site.
Artie-
I started out with the free wordpress blog (hosted by wordpress). It is really limited in your customization. I ended up recently moving the wordpress hosted blog into my main website. With this, I also purchased a template from Graph Paper Press (I got the Modularity & Modfolio templates). They are very customizable through easy to use menus built into your wordpress dashboard. Very nice. For your consideration: http://sixtyonenorth.com/wp/
I also installed free gallery software (simple viewer type) and other gallery software from wordpress. All of it is very easy to use and install. I like the template I purchased so much that I am probably going to transition my original website (sixytonenorth.com) completely into the template. I HATE editing html (never got very good at it), and the wordpress community is constantly evolving and developing new products - many of which are free. It's a great resource. Please let me know if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help.
dt
Artie,
One of the things I'm noticing on your blog is that the images are showing up strangely skewed--re-sized disproportionately to their native size.
I measured your content width and it seems that your legs of text are max 450px wide. You can make this wider, but that's a discussion for another time because it involves CSS. For now, let's just assume you want things to look right for the template you're using at the moment.
Here's a little step-by-step of how to post images so they show up correctly.
1. Your images are too wide for your content area.
The easiest thing to do is to export out of Photoshop images that are sized no wider than 450px. However, it is sometimes more convenient to be able to make Wordpress do the work. If you don't want to worry about this, skip to step 2.
First, you need to go into Settings / Media. Sometimes you have to click on "Settings" to make its drop-down list of options, including "media," load--it's at the bottom of the Wordpress dashboard on the left-hand side):
From here, you can decide what thumbnails, medium sized images, and large-sized images look like. In your case, you want to make sure that "large" is considered to be a maximum of 450px wide, and you could enter a height of 700px or so.
2. Start a new post and inset an image by clicking on the "media" button. (The first one listed to the right of "Upload/Insert.")
3. Choose the file you want to upload. Either click on "Select Files" or use the "browser upload" function. Makes no difference.
4. You wait for the file to upload, and then Wordpress usually "thinks" for a second, before expanding that window with more options, and a thumbnail of the photo you just uploaded. That expanded window looks something like this:
Note that in this example, I am telling Wordpress to use my maximum display size because the file I uploaded is 800x614. I am also telling it to center the image.
Typing in the Caption area is helpful as it gives the image ALT tags as well as a caption on the bottom of the image (where you could put your camera / exposure data), but typing in "description" doesn't show up in the final product.
Then, click "insert post" and continue with your blog entry. I usually hit enter/return after inserting a photo so that my next line of text or next photo insertion starts on a new line.