Blog Tech Guy

It’s been at least, oh I don’t know, maybe three people who have asked me how this can be done.

First, I find it best to resize the image to the size you want it before uploading then it’s easier to work with.

Then to add a caption I usually like to add a CSS class and wrap a div around the photo to style it. If that sounds like gibberish then you could just try something like the following code in the HTML part tab of the visual editor:

After each photo. This makes the text 90% of the standard size, in italics and grey/gray.

If you wanted to do this the CSS way, you would add something like this to your themes style.css

Then in a post would write this:

The text would then be styled as before. Notice the “hard return” before the caption text i.e. it starts on a new line, otherwise the caption text would start next to the photo and not below it. It is possible to automatically wrap text at a certain width, but let’s not confuse matters.

You could of course also set a background colour, float the image right or left and many other things.

Hope that hasn’t confused you too much!

After working on so many people’s blogs it has become apparent that whilst there are many, many things that can be improved (including on my own) there are a few basics:

1. Don’t monetize too early. Do you see any adverts on my blog? No. Why? Because I don’t have enough traffic to make much money anyway, I don’t want people to be put off by a lot of adverts, it looks more professional and it looks neater. Which leads me onto…

2. Reduce clutter. I’m guilty of this myself, but reducing the number of images (and adverts) and animation on a homepage can make a site look more attractive, and professional.

3. Give someone somewhere to subscribe to your RSS feed via email. Again, I don’t do this on this site (I just offer the RSS at the moment), but I will when I get around to it. Feedburner currently only offers a daily email (though once the Google integration is finished they promise to offer more options), Feedblitz can be configured to be hourly, daily, weekly or monthly for free (ad-supported), and Aweber can also manage this along with other nice email management features for a fee.

4. Write more content. I receive emails all the time asking me “How can I make more money?” and I look at their site that is full of adverts and has a post once every 8 or 9 days. If you blog is aimed at making money by simply being a blog (unlike one like this which is alongside a business), then you need to get more traffic in order to make more money. It’s called the “magazine model” - you make more money the more people who visit you site. In order to get this traffic you need to post quality articles, often. For more information, check out Yaro Starak’s free Blog Profits Blueprint eBook.

There are obviously countless more examples that can be done to improve a website. If you’d like a professional review of your blog or website, please contact me and we can have a chat.

Quite a few people have asked for help recently on changing the default setup of Wordpress that says “no comments” under a post (or above a post on this site).

Well, it’s easy! If you open index.php (and single.php if you have one) in your particular theme (wp-content/themes/your_theme), there will be a line similar to this:

There may be some differences depending on what your theme likes to do with the wording. There are three “states” the comments can be in:

1. No Comments. Here this is displayed with the words Comments (0)
2. One comment. Here this is displayed with the words Comments (1)
3. More than one comment. Here it is Comments (%) where the % will be the number of comments over 1.

You can change these sections to whatever you like, just remember to make a copy of the file you are changing first as a backup. For example:

Simple hey?

All I’ve done is change:

1. Comments (0) to → We love comments, want to make one?
2. Comments (1) to → 1 comment left. Want to make another?
3. Comments (%) to → % Comments left. Want to make another?

Any questions please give me shout.