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marybaumParticipant
I like WooCommerce.
It's free, it doesn't break my themes and as someone who's just putting a toe over the line from designer to developer, it's not hard to work with. I've tried two others: a free one that was supposed to be the be-all and end-all, but totally messed with my themes, and the one that became Cart66, which is now imho prohibitively expensive.
So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantNether of those will pull the type away from the edge of its container. what you do want to do is add some padding to that container.
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantIf it doesn't, there's something wrong with your installation, because there absolutely should be - unless you for some reason don't have full Admin privileges on the back of your site. I'll look back here in the morning - passing out now.
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
February 11, 2013 at 5:33 pm in reply to: How to make dropdowns in vertical nav slide out to the right instead? #19722marybaumParticipantThanks! That did the trick. Also, thanks for reminding me about !important - to wrangle my .nav wrap dimensions into shape.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantFor what it's worth, I have a client that I ported from Elegant Estate to Genesis AgentPress. I had done extensive work changing Elegant Estate's colors and typography to match her branding and had no problem at all making AgentPress look the way her site had looked in Elegant Estate, with one exception: neither of us really saw the need to keep the slider in the exact L-shape as EE. And it turned out she didn't much care for the stitching on major UI elements, so we made them bulbous.
Now, that means that with Genesis, you do have to bring more of your own design chops to the table and do more of your own CSS mods, but the code is so well organized its easy to do that.
Course, if you'd like help with striking design, there are those of us who'd be happy to help. I may have only been writing CSS for six years, but I've been a degreed designer since before WordPress and its founder, Matt Mullenweg, were born. π
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantI've never been sure what the big whoop about Firebug is. I greatly prefer the command Inspect Element in either Chrome or Firefox (key command cmd-opt-I or ctrl-alt-I in either browser), which will target the exact element you're looking to change - just select that element with the Controle key if you're old-school like me on the Mac and don't like to right-click, or right-click if you're a young whippersnapper who uses two buttons. (I turn the second button OFF. On the Magic Mouse, once right-click is enabled, I find I can't left-click anymore! So, old-school, one-button-only is how I roll.)
In your case, the nav elements are on line #192 of style.css, and I see that your hover style already has the black background and white type you want.
It may be that you actually want to look at some other rules in that vicinity on your style sheet - I presume you know that when you find the precise element you want to target, you want background: #000; and color: #fff; - but just in case, that's what you paste in.
Hope that helps!
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantI'd like to see more contrast in the header between the background and the type. I like the grey stone effect - though it would work better on a bolder typeface - and I'm a sucker for blue-sky treatments. Love them! In fact, my tagline could be Turning The Web Blue And Green . . . But I think you need to pick one or the other and commit. Given that this is a construction business, that would probably mean the stone.
And, as I said, the stone texture treatment would work better on a heavier weight of the typeface.
Other than that, good start!
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantThat worked! I kept running the search and seeing the phrase come up in Jetpack, and saying to myself, "But I"m not USING Jetpack comments!" Well, I've now edited the text, and the word notify is no longer smelling up at least that one site.
Hah!
Thanks again.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantI do, and that's the only place I could find the text, but I could have sworn I had Jetpack comments disabled because of what it did to my CSS. So I need to go back in and further disable the Jetpack comments - or edit the copy in Jetpack - Well, since I can find it there, I can edit it there. Thank you for Β helping me not feel crazy.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantInstead of using whatever banner rotator that is, you might want to switch to the Genesis Responsive Slider, and set it up on the Slider Settings page in the Admin. That should help a lot. You'll need to do things a little differently if you're not used to how Genesis themes work - a minor adjustment will be all you need, and then you'll find you're good to go.
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantUpdate as many plugins as you can before something breaks, then update WP. Then update Genesis - then move your hosting. But you need to start the updating process yesterday - every minute you wait is a minute you risk getting hacked.
In fact, you might even consider building a new installation from scratch on your new host and just porting your content over from an exported xml file - don't even send the old WP, Genesis and plugins over there.
BTW, if you don't already, you might want to consider building a local install on your own machine, just to do your CSS and php mods before uploading them - that's how I build theme variations. My content rarely sees those local installs, although if I were smart, I'd write more html locally and then just paste it into the browsers - because I hate writing in the browser.
But then, you'd always have a reasonably up-to-date theme install locally you could just FTP anywhere, then import content as an .xml and you'd be set to go.
At any rate, by starting over, you won't have to worry about making your old plugins work, or possibly taking along any code from the old site that's already compromised - WP 2.7 is older than any version I've worked with, and I startled learning WP in summer 2010.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantYou're welcome!
One more thing: I'd add some vertical space between the video posts when you make that column wider, and add some vertical padding to the top of your headlines in general. There's a formula I started using fairly recently - about three years ago - in print and online - that goes like this:
Body copy (p) = x
Line height = xl (can be any number - generally somewhere between x+2 and 1.5x, depending mostly on the x-height of the typeface) (number is constant and always based on body copy, even when we apply it to headline spacing)
First paragraph after a head of subhead never indents.
Second paragraph and following, if indented: first-line indent = line height, or xl. If not indented, space after all paragraphs = Β xl/2.
Headlines:
h1 = somewhere between 2x and 3x, depending on page size.
Line height/h1 - h3 = type size * 0.9 at most.
h2, h3, h4 = previous size * some integer value between .6 and .8 of the previous value, that makes sense and looks appropriate.
h4 linespacing = 1.0* type size.
h5, h6: As headline type gets smaller, it tends to get bolder. These small values may become all-uppercase and have some letterspacing values, and wider linespacing, perhaps as much as 1.3 to 1.5 of the type size.
Space before h1-h3: xl/2.
Space after h1-h3: 0.
Space before h4-h6: 0.
Space after h4-h6: xl/2.
Hope this makes some sense.
Mary Baum
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantI agree - everything is as big as possible in the column space, so everything's fighting for attention.
I would take the two widgets in the right column and put them in the footer, then make the content area two columns, with the video column wider than the post column.
Then, use excerpts in the post column, which will strip out the styles from the posts, use more subtle styling for the home page - smaller type sizes for the headlines and subheads. Your text is actually a little weak for the big and bold heads you have now, but when you lighten up the heads, it will be in better balance. You might want to close up the line height a tiny bit to keep the paragraphs hanging together.
I would also add some space between the columns - maybe more to the right margin of the left-hand column.
There are some good articles about typographic scale. If you're interested in pursuing the subject, Google the term. You don't have to follow the type sizes every default style sheet recommends for basic headlines - I've been blowing those away forever (including in print, where I started 30 years ago) but they do follow a mathematical formula known as the golden mean - roughly a proportion of 1.6ish.
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantLine 155.
body {
background: #e9e9e9;
}If you like your colors the clearest they can get - and want to be able to remember them - spec them in pairs: my absolute favorite, for instance, is #0099ff. Which we can shorten to #09f - much easier to remember.
If you like your tones more muted, jumble up the numbers and letters: #2E9AE0
My favorite color tool is http://kuler.adobe.com - which plugs in to all the Adobe creative Suite apps, so my palettes come with me to all my projects.
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantI always uncheck that crop-thumbnail box - I'll decide where to crop my images, thank you very much, I tell the screen as I'm doing that.
I have also discovered that as long as my original image is bigger than the area I'm using it in, I can make the imported image resize on the fly if I remove the width and height from the info in the gobbledygook that shows up in <img src="imagefile.png" title="imagetitle" alt="photo: cute baby" Β width="300px" height="200px" ohgeez="whatelsecouldpossiblygoinhere" "and="why" /> . Okay - those last two things are a joke - but if you get rid of width="300px" and height="200px" when you've inserted an image into a post, it will size down with the space that post sits in if the browser window gets smaller or the layout changes for some other reason.
Don't know if I would do that for a featured image that needs to be a thumbnail, but it could be worth experimenting with.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantYou're absolutely right. I suppose it wouldn't kill me to open some of these pages to make sure I'm referring to the right thing when I'm shooting my mouth off and sounding as if I know something. π
Recent posts and recent pages are deprecated.
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantThat IS the easy way. π
I started learning it more than five years ago, when I was but a girl of 47.
I'm also a big fan of http://css-tricks.com.
That said, the changes you most want to make are in the Headlines section, which starts at Line 896 in the Magazine style.css file.
The first block of code shows you the main typeface for all the headlines; change from Play to the one you want in that block. (See below.)
h1,
h2,
h3,
h4,
h5,
h6 {
font-family: 'Play', arial, serif;
margin: 0 0 5px;
}You probably know you have some other work to do before you stick in any old font there, depending on whether you're using a font you're planning to upload yourself to the server or one that's coming from a service like Typekit, fonts.com or Google Fonts. And you want to keep the references to Arial and serif, in case someone can't see your webfont (ewwww ... )
So follow the directions from your service, or else upload your fonts and follow the directions from the place where you bought them, or from fontsquirrel. Don't use any of those free-font-download places like dafont. Those fonts are often stolen.
(What I usually do is make a folder called 'type', dump all my font files in there, along with the css files that came with the fonts [each of which I've renamed to the name of the typeface: typeface.css], and then, FOR EACH TYPE FAMILY, add this to the top of style.css:
@import url(type/typeface.css);Below that basic headline block, you'll see that style.css sets up some special cases where the headlines occur at specific sizes. There's where you can change headline sizes to whatever you want.
Now, you probably also want to change the body text throughout.
You do that with the body tag, which is higher up in the file. I should have addressed that first, but I only thought of it now.
You mess with it in two places: line 97, in the Defaults, and on line 152, in its own section, where the file declares its background. I have an ongoing debate with certain members of the male of the species, ages 40 and up, including my own husband, who claim not to be able to read any body text smaller or lighter than 20px Arial Bold.
My answer: Neither can I, without my reading glasses - in fact, I can't read the numbers on a tennis ball, or see the lines on my hand!
But I'm not willing to sacrifice decent typography on the altar of don't-wanna-wear-glasses, and nor should you be. So feel free to spec the type that's right for your site. <grin>And if you get any trouble from your dear brother-in-law on this issue (you couldn't possibly be 40 yet) just tell him to put his glasses on. They're really NOT coated in nerve gas, as he may have persuaded you. </grin>
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantYou do that in the Widgets area of your dashboard.
Down the side of that area, you'll see all your widget-ready areas. The bulk of the page has all your available widgets.
if you open each widget area, you'll see what widgets are already installed in it. You can swap them in and out just by dragging. Right now, it sounds as if your Home-Top area has the slider widget in it - which one I can't tell without access to the back end of your site.
So just drag that slider widget outta there and replace it with the Latest Posts widget - and DO read through the options carefully. I'm forever forgetting to check the Include Featured Image box after carefully choosing all the options for it - and then scratching my head when the durned featured images don't show up on the page with the posts. (ADHD much?) So save your fingernails, and be sure you've checked what you want to check and unchecked what you don't want checked.
It's one of my favorite things about Genesis - and WP in general - you can change the look of a page completely just by changing widgets in and out.
MB
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantAre you at all familiar with CSS?
You would make those changes in the style.css file.
What I actually do is keep a clean copy of the magazine theme - then copy the entire child theme to another folder named something like MagazineProjectName. (Or, MagazinePN for short.)
Then, I make all my changes for that site in the new folder. If something blows up, I can always start over with a clean copy of whatever file I made the mistake in.
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
marybaumParticipantIs there a reason you wouldn't handle this by uninstalling the DCG plugin and installing theΒ GenesisΒ Responsive Slider plugin?
Also, I use another plugin called Reveal IDs that adds an ID column to every left-hand item menu in my dashboard - posts, plugins, categories, tags, whatever. That would give you the ID of the plugin, at least.
Mary Baum
Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. π
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