Mari Kane

Mari Kane is a Blogger and WordPress Consultant living in Vancouver, BC. When she's not designing WordPress blogsites and helping people with their own, she blogs on her other site, Tasting Room Confidential.com, and web masters for the BC Travel Writers at BCATW.org. Please follow her on Twitter @blogsitestudio and Like her on Facebook.

Posts are to Pages as Apples are to Oranges

by

One of the biggest sources of confusion to new WordPress bloggers is the difference between Posts and Pages. They look similar on the front end, their Editor page looks the same on the back end, they both start with a “P” – what’s the difference?

In six words, Pages are static, Posts are social.

Pages

Pages are like old-time HTML sites used to be. They sit there and they tell you stuff. The most prevalent Pages are About, Contact, and Home. Pages only change when they are updated and they stay that way until the next time. They have no dates, no categories, and no tags. Pages are, in a way, self categorizing.

Read more

WordPress is Like a Chest of Drawers: Learn Where Everything Goes

by

wordpress like a chest of drawers, tastingroomconfidential.comWordPress is like a chest of drawers: you just have to learn where everything goes.

This is one of the first things I tell bloggers in my WordPress Workshop. I say, you will save countless hours and gray hairs by memorizing all the nooks and crannies of the WordPress Dashboard from the get go. WordPress may be user friendly, but it is also a labyrinth, so brain map it.

Think of the Dashboard Navigation as a giant chests of drawers, with more drawers nested inside of each drawer. Users simply have to remember which drawer to open to find the page where the data belongs, to put everything in its proper field.

Read more

A Friend Indeed is a Theme Developer You Need

by

theme developer, blogsitestudio.comWhen you’re new to blogging and you see all these free WordPress themes available, you wonder: who are these geeks giving away their themes to people like me? Are they trolls hunched over computers in their parents basements until the day they finally get their big chance to work in a real software company? No.

Theme developers often are the software company and giving away free WordPress theme is not their main occupation. They give away free themes with the intent of possibly selling you a premium theme or plugin once you are ready for it. Theme developers are professionals, not volunteers and as such, it is worthwhile to enlist a theme developer’s help when you have a problem with their theme.

Read more