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Blog Planning Notepad for the Holidays

In case you were thinking you couldn’t improve your website when on holiday this Christmas because you wont have a computer, I have created an “A4 Blog Planning Notepad” for you to print and take away with you.

A4 Blog Planning Notepad
You can save the Blog Planning Notepad to your computer by clicking on the image right or link below, then clicking the save icon in Adobe Acrobat. Once you have read the guide, print off several pages of the notepad and keep in an ideas folder for noting all your blog and news post ideas on.

There are sections on the notepad for planning your tags, categories, permalinks, images, links and more (all explained in the guide). Once you eventually publish your posts, file a copy of the actual post with your notes in your Blog Posts folder. I’ve included margins on the template so you can hole punch your pages for safe keeping.

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Google Translates Your Website

It is now possible to display your website in almost any language simply by pasting a snippet of Google Translate code into your website or blog. Your website visitors select their language from the dropdown list in the Google Translate box and all text on the page they are looking at is translated immediately. [Read more]

Next Generation Photo Gallery Plugin

Display photos on your website in a multitude of different layouts including albums, thumbnail galleries, sidebar galleries and slideshows. The Next Generation Gallery Plugin can all be managed and customised from one easy interface inside your WordPress website.

Thumbnails open in a variety of professional looking lightbox effects with descriptions at the bottom and viewers can use the next button to view other images in the gallery. If you have choosen to have your photos appear in a slideshow, you can select the amount of time between each shot and the fade effect etc.

Download the Next Generation Gallery Plugin…

Adding Photos to Your Web Pages

Instead of adding individual photos to pages, you can upload new photos, arrange them in albums and give them titles, tags etc inside the Gallery admin.

1. Login to your WordPress website and select Gallery from the menu bar
2. Click on Add Gallery on the submenu and create a gallery (I have one called Website Portfolio where I upload screenshots of all the sites I design)
3. Click on the Upload Images button, choose images from your computer, select a gallery for them to go into and click on Upload Images button at the bottom.
4. Select Manage Gallery from the menu bar and edit the one you are working on.
5. Change titles, add descriptions and change the order in which they appear, then save.
6. Go to the web page where you want your new gallery to display.
7. Click on the gallery button and select a gallery to insert (see screenshot above)
8. You choose whether the photos display as thumbnails or slideshow or both in the gallery settings.

Adding Photos to Your Sidebar

When you upload the Next Generation Plugin to your website, you also get the Next Generation Sidebar Widget. Once activated, you will see a slideshow widget and a gallery widget appear under Design/Widgets in your website admin.

Click to add these to your sidebar, then edit to tell them which galleries to display and how many photos they should show. You can also change the size of the thumbnails to suit the width of your sidebar.

Gallery Screenshots Using Gallery Plugin
Click to see larger images in lightbox effect.