These tips will help beginners to create highly functional and accessible Web pages. Some of the tips focus on writing valid HTML syntax while others focus on designing pages for ” ease-of-use. ”

General Tips

• Write your pages for multiple types of Web browsers – - to provide trouble-free access to the widest possible audience. The World Wide Web is a multi-platform, non-browser specific medium. It should not matter whether people browse your Web pages using Netscape, Explorer, Opera, Lynx, WebTV, NetPhonic ‘ s Web-On-Call, Mobile Telephones, or Personal Data Assistants (PDAs, or palmtops, the little computers card). Each browser ought to render your informational Web pages without problems. If a Web page is designed properly, blind individuals, or anyone using text-to-voice or Braille displays, can easily listen to and review your work.
  • What You See Is Not What Others Get On The Web
  • Bobby
• Run Web pages through a validator to test their compliance with common HTML (HyperText Markup Language) specifications. Modify pages until they validate, because compliant pages have a better chance of being rendered by various Web browsers, as the writer intends. However, if you intend something that is impractical with HTML, it will be no less impractical for being syntactically valid. Work with the strengths of HTML rather than trying to batter it into a WYSIWYG page design system. (WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get.)
• Spell check and proof-read your documents.
  • Free Website Spell checker
• Establish a routine for locating and fixing broken internal and external Web site links.
• Include contact information and a copyright notice.
  • Sign It!

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TreeMagic Cypress is a new lightweight browser plugin for WordPress. Install, configure, then double click any word, or select a group of words on the page. On mouse-up a small popup appears adjacent to the selected text that gives you instant access to define, expand and explore related resources. It does not replace or interfere with existing hyperlinks, but adds an instant and powerful reference compliment to all your texts, regardless of formatting and styles.
The plugin can be configured to any external Internet website, as well as connecting to your own data, or network. TreeMagic Cypress is available as a free download from the downloads section of this site

The popup has a list of links that is configurable from the plugin administration section. The idea is that when you double click or select a group of words on a page, the popup is invoked adjacent to the word(s) allowing you to rapidly select a web site from the list. Typical examples of this are search engines, Wikipedia, Refdesk and similar knowledge-base sites. After selecting a site, the word(s) you have selected become part of a search string that returns results in a smaller separate popup window. You can of course keep your query results ‘on site’ such as searching your own content, help files or related resources. Because the query URLs are completely configurable in administration, you have total control over the searches, including opening the results page in a resized new window or using the existing target.

TreeMagic Cypress is not new technology and utilizes a small javascript and css to provide the fastest possible way to show extended meaning, content and relationship for text on a page. Once installed every text word on your site, that is not a hyperlink is potentially active. It does not interfere with any other mouse click functions and is totally unintrusive in use. Installation is simple, via a standard WordPress plugin. There are no database changes and the plugin adds negligible overhead to your HTML.

The broad concept is to provide the visitor greater freedom to take diversions from interesting cues in the text, but not taking them from your site in the process. Too many turns in the road and too many temptations to explore, can take your focus away from the content on a page. Most of us have come to realize that it is all too easy to be a ‘browser butterfly’ taking detours from hyperlinks and searches that often leave you marooned and lost in hyperspace. TreeMagic Cypress addresses the need to explore and supplement page content from other resources, but keeps your visitors safely focused on your website.

Searches can be configured for anything from a dictionary definition, translations, image searches to a full blown encyclopedia expositions. Following further links within the results ‘new window’ allows readers to explore in a separate browser page, while keeping your website in view when they want to return. Because we use a new window to display content, all your usual browser tools are available such as page saves and bookmarking your excursions for future returns.

As a web master, you have a simple administration interface that gives options for adding and deleting your website search strings, also the results window target and size. We have included a few samples to get you started, but the choice is up to you to provide the most suitable supplementary content for your website. There are numerous types of applications available for this tool and because you can manage your own reference links, you can offer a variety of offsite or internal content. All you need to do is track down your reference site and discover the correct query string.

Some typical examples of sites are as follows:

Google search
–Images
–News
–Maps
Wikipedia search
Currency converter
whois /IP lookup
answers.com
dictionary.com
Clusty.com
Translation
–en-fr
–en-ge
–en-it
Currency conversions
–£-$
–$-£
Navigation
–Home
–Contact us
–Help!
–Site map
–Site search

Do you need TreeMagic Cypress?

One of the main considerations with WordPress is choosing carefully which plugins to use. Too many and your website can suffer with decreased performance. Because of the tiny script footprint, this plugin will not add any significant processing burden to the database or page loads. It’s simple to use and will add some great features to your web page texts with the minimum of setup. The features and benefits are only limited by your imagination.

Download here …

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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Writing and manging content in Worpress using Mimbo theme

- Required: WordPress 2.3 – Mimbo theme installed, active and configured. – Image manager plugin installed and configured. – Basic image resizer software such as PhotoFiltre

The Mimbo theme makes extensive use of front page images. It does this by utilizing the powerful wordpress ‘custom fields’ feature to add exclusive images to excepts displayed in the front page of the site. There is no auto-resize feature in this process and in order for the page to look presentable, these images need to be correctly prepared and optimized to load quickly and fit into the layout dimensions of the template. Image preparation can be done locally using an ordinary and free image/photo manipulation software such as the gimp or http://photofiltre.free.fr/ In addition, WordPress has an excellent browser based image manager http://www.soderlind.no/archives/2006/01/03/imagemanager-20/ that provides all the cropping, resizing, compression and formatting required. We will make extensive use of this tool, as it simplifies the whole process.

NOTE If you are going to use pictures generated from original high quality digital photos or artwork, you do need to add an extra step in the process. High quality images usually provide excellent resolution and dimensions. This is essential for print and artwork display, but is quite unsuitable for website use. A web page has to display images by transferring digital information to your browser. Put simply, the more digital information the image has, the longer it will take to render that image in the browser. Original digital images are often many megabytes in size, which is way too big and would take several seconds to load on a page. Likewise their dimensions are often far to large for the web page template. Many people make the mistake of resizing their images into a smaller dimension, without optimizing the digital data. This means, the images are still too large and render slowly on the page.

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WordPress for Wiki prototype

According to Wikipedia:

A wiki is software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are often also referred to as wikis; for example, Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.^[1] Wikis are being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets and for Knowledge Management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.^[2]

Why wordpress as a wiki?
Put simply, WordPress is probably the finest Internet publication system available. It efficiently broadcasts posts to search engines and social networking services and provides excellent visibility, both in design, code structure and connectivity. To combine these well established features and the collaboration qualities of a wiki like setup produces a good combination of high visibility and group authoring requirements.

The following plugins have been chosen to emulate a wiki-like feature set. Most wiki features have been accomplished with these carefully selected plugins. We will evaluate this setup and refine/adjust as required. Most of these plugins have been selected to provide ‘connectivity’ between subjects, topics, keywords and meta information.

0. Awsom News Announcement: Allows you to post news announcements in the area above your posts on the index page (or anywhere else you want). By Harknell.
1. Audit Trail: Keep a log of exactly what is happening behind the scenes of your WordPress blog. By John Godley
2. Autolink tags for content: This plugin automatically checks out your posts to add tag links for the tag text in the posts. By Kelvin Xu.
3. Image Caption Easy: Transforms the alt text of an image into a caption which can be controlled through css. By Mark W. B. Ashcroft
4. SH-Autolink: In posts and comments, it transforms predefined words automatically into hyperlinks. By Stevie.
5. Snippet Highlight: embedd code between <pre> </pre> tags. apply code language as css class: php, css, js etc. By Roland Rust.
6. Subscribe2: Notifies an email list when new entries are posted. By Matthew Robinson.
7. TreeMagic-Cypress: Way of making Internet and Intranet information easily accessible. By Ambient Webs LLC
8. Upload+: Secure, cleaner and customized file names for uploaded files. By Pixline
9. User Permissions: Per-post user permissions By John Godley.
10 WP-DownloadManager: Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
11 WP-Footnotes: Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.
12 WYSI-Wordpress: This plugin adds a more advanced WYSIWYG editor to the WordPress post editing screen. It includes advanced image handling, including on-the-fly thumbnail resizing and compression. It also includes Martin Chlupác’s excellent Iimage Manager v 1.4.1. By MudBomb.com.
13 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches, limited by a certain relatedness threshold. Like the tried and true Related Posts plugins—just better! By mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine).

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