A friend of mine who has been using Blogger for a few years gave Wordpress a try last week. He set up a free blog on Wordpress.com and after a few days of playing with it, decided he prefers Blogger because the posting interface is much more user-friendly than Wordpress.

My friend is extremely computer-savvy, but he’s not an html/css geek like I am. He doesn’t have the time or the patience to mess with the guts of his blog when all he wants to do is produce content. So in the interest of helping new Wordpress users create content that matches their vision, I’ve got five tips to make your posting experience easier.

1. Create your content locally.
I think most Wordpress users will agree that the default WYSIWYG editor is at best sub par. I have actually gone to great lengths to turn mine off completely to write my code from scratch. But that isn’t an option for most everyday bloggers. After playing around with a few plugins that claim to increase the default editor’s functionality, I’m unimpressed with that option. So I started doing some research about desktop applications that are basically blog-centric, fully functional WYSIWYG Web editors. There was a great article over at ProBlogger last year about the advantages of using a desktop blogging client with links to some of the more popular ones.

Unfortunately, I don’t have one to recommend, but in my research, I’ve come across tons of bloggers who vouch for them.

2. Make a plan for using images.
Since Wordpress doesn’t have a native feature to manipulate images, it can be frustrating to upload an image multiple times to get it the proper size. If you know what size your image should be before you start editing it, then this will stop being a problem. For example, my larger graphics within posts are most often 250px wide, and my smaller graphics are 115px wide. But those are just the two examples that One Thing New needs. At the very least, I would suggest determining a set width for horizontal and vertical pictures. Not only will that eliminate the need for uploading your images multiple times, but it will help your blog’s design by giving your images a uniform feel.

3. Learn a little CSS.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s a type of code that tells your Web browser how to display the content on your site. And one thing that Wordpress gets right is giving you the ability to edit this code very easily. I’ll give you a couple of very useful snippets of code that can help your posts do what you want them to.

Go to Presentation > Theme Editor, and your stylesheet should be the default file that pops up. Scroll to the very bottom and add this:

.image_left { float: left; }
.image_right { float: right; }

Click to update the file. What you have done is add two “classes” that can be used to position images within your post and have the post text wrap around them. To make these work properly, you’ll have to place them properly. For example, if you want the image to be at the top right of your first paragraph like the Weekend Web Developer image is in this post you would write in the Wordpress post box:

<p><img src="yourimagename.jpg" class="image_right" />Your post text here...

This is probably a little more code monkey stuff than you were prepared for. But once you’ve created those classes, they can be used in as many posts as you want.

4. Check out Wordpress plugins.
I mentioned that I wasn’t impressed with the plugins I tried to beef up the Wordpress editor, but my search wasn’t extremely thorough. And it was by no means exhaustive. There is a vast network of developers creating free plugins to enhance the functionality of Wordpress. And with a little searching, you should be able to find some that make your life easier.

The first place to start looking is the Wordpress plugin page. There are also lists of plugins at WPPlugins.org and wp-plugins.org. Once you’ve downloaded your plugins, it’s super easy to activate them. Just upload the plugin file to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ folder. Then go to the Plugins tab from your Wordpress dashboard, and there should be a list of plugins with the option to activate or deactivate them. Simple.

5. Pick a new theme.
One of the best things about Wordpress is its ability to be customized (something that seems to be a bit more difficult at Blogspot). If you don’t like the default behavior of your blog, the problem might be in your theme’s stylesheet. Check out Wordpress Theme Viewer for a massive amount of themes that have all kinds of default functionality. Chances are there will be a theme out there with the exact set of features you want.

I hope this article has given you some helpful tips about improving your experience with Wordpress. Familiarity and ease of use are strong factors when considering what blogging platform to use, and I understand sticking with what you know. But I encourage all you burgeoning bloggers to give Wordpress a try.

As you know if you’ve been reading One Thing New, yesterday was my birthday, and while I intended to take the weekend off, I wanted to post this quick suggestion for the Wordpress team. With the next release, lets have an easy option for disabling the auto-formatting within posts.

I realize there is a plugin that can disable the wpautop filter for posts, and I have it installed on all of my Wordpress sites. But some unwanted paragraph tags still get through from time to time. I haven’t poked around Wordpress’s guts very much, and I’m not sure how difficult it would be to disable this feature myself. But based on some searches I’ve done in the WP support forums, I know I’m not alone in wanting it done.

Now, before the open source police come to berate me for criticizing a free application, I can assure you that is not what I’m doing. I’m merely suggesting this feature be included in a future release of the platform. I love Wordpress and have started using it on all of my sites. But as a developer who likes to code everything by hand, I would like to see this feature added so that I can have total control over my content.

As readers of onethingnew.com know, I’m busy working on relaunching roblindsey.com, my personal Web site. And to say I’ve been having a hard time of it is an understatement. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece outlining some beginner Web design strategies. The intention of that post was to help designers who are working on outside projects overcome some common stumbling blocks. Tonight, I’m going to write an addendum to that post outlining the problems I’ve been having with my personal project and some things I’ve learned to combat them.

1. PROBLEM: Inability to decide on a design.
I’ve been designing and laying out pages for quite a while now, and I rarely suffer from designers block. In my case, the opposite is true. In thinking about relaunching my site, I made mock ups of five or six designs that would have been totally workable. Each had different color schemes, navigation formats, and layouts. I liked them all, and my problem was picking one.

SOLUTION: Pick the best, save the rest.
It got to the point that I just had to make a decision. Thinking about the project instead of working on it was driving me nuts. So, I picked my favorite. I don’t know if it was the best one, but I liked it the best. I decided if I didn’t like it, I could always change it in a few months to one of my other designs.

And if I decide not to use any of my other designs, I’ve got five, fully fleshed out mock ups ready to go for outside projects.

2. PROBLEM: Lack of motivation.
As a professional Web developer, I find it hard to muster motivation to work on my personal projects because I’m not getting paid by anyone for them. That might seem petty, but it’s true.

SOLUTION: Change your whole attitude.
I had to remind myself that my personal Web site is an online representation of me. If it is designed with the same attention to detail and quality that I put into my freelance jobs, it will speak volumes about my work ethic. It’s true that no one is paying me directly for working on my personal site, but if roblindsey.com looks great, it will help get me more work. Shouldn’t that be motivation enough?

3. PROBLEM: Finishing the job’s menial tasks.
This is the phase I’m in now. The design is chosen and finished, and all that’s left is the grunt work: formatting text and editing images (a LOT of images!), then checking and fixing my stylesheet for cross-browser compliance. I can design fairly quickly, and my first two problems were resolved in a couple of days. Knocking out the grunt work is going to take several days in itself. And it’s not as fun.

SOLUTION: JUST DO IT!
“All that’s left is the grunt work.” That’s all that’s left! I need to get that idea in my head, and just tear through it in a couple of afternoons. Just get started, and you’re already half-way done. That’s the mindset I need to have.

I’m not sure if anyone else has these problems, but I thought I would share with my readers what it’s like for me to work on my personal Web site. I hope you’ll check out the site when I relaunch sometime this week (believe me, you’ll know when it’s up). I think it looks really nice, and I would love some feedback when it’s done.

You’ve had the same Web page since 1996, and it has always served you well. There’s a link for folks to send you an email and a little animated gif of a bunny rabbit at the bottom. Everything works fine. So why should you change it? I’m glad you asked.

1. Get with the times.
For most people, “Web 2.0” doesn’t mean anything. It’s just one of those tech-geek buzzwords like “P2P” or “Open Source” that make the average Web user glaze over. But just because the term itself is meaningless, doesn’t mean that you can’t take some of the common Web 2.0 concepts and apply them to your site. By doing a couple of simple things, you can update your Web presence to let your visitors know that you are keeping up with the times.

For example, instead of having a link to your email address, try adding a contact form so visitors can send messages to you directly from your site. Instead of that animated gif, add a little Flash animation to your header or create some onmouseover effects for your navigation buttons. Simple touches like these will let your users know that you aren’t stuck in the ’90s.

2. Rename, rebrand, relaunch.
This is what I’m working on over at my personal Web site. It used to be exclusively about my music, but I’m changing it to reflect my complete Web presence, including portfolio, blogs, and my music.

If you want to change the direction of your Web site, don’t just change a few paragraphs on the front page or the header graphic. Make the changes complete from top to bottom. If you want your site to say something different than before, you need to distance yourself from your old message as much as possible.

3. Optimize for search engines and your users.
Chances are, if your Web site is more than two years old, you should probably rewrite everything. One of the tenets of the Web 2.0 movement is that style should be separate from markup. So, when you view source and see tables within tables and a bunch of tags, time for a redesign.