sewmyheadon - Web Design Tips

Thanks to Charles and Jonathan of the WordPress Podcast for episode 42, where Matt Mullenweg answered an audio question from yours truly regarding using WordPress as a CMS.

Matt pointed out a user-maintained post on the WordPress Codex titled “WordPress CMS.”

There’s a lot of good info in this page.  I’d love to see even more documentation and community spring up around using WordPress as a CMS for non-blog websites.

Maybe even a gallery where people can show off their latest WordPress-powered sites.

Hmm . . . maybe that should be part of my contribution to the WordPress community.

Of course, there’s plenty of invaluable information throughout the Codex and I use, and recommend, it regularly.  With a little digging and forum forum posting, you can find answers to most questions.

Other links related to using WordPress as a CMS:

• WordPress Makes Sense For Many Non-Blog Websites
• Building alexking.org 2.0
• WordPress (as CMS) Hacking Tips
• Five Wordpress “CMS Enabling” Plugins
• Wordpress as CMS

Of course, a quick Google search will turn up a lot of other helpful pages.

Well, another CSS Naked Day is over and I’m happy to have participated.

It’s a wonderful exercise, seeing plain jane markup without the benefit of CSS styling. It illustrates:

1. the power of CSS, and
2. how clean, non-presentational xhtml markup and logical document structure can make a site usable even without the cheery look & feel

As part of site testing, I strip away stylesheets to see what the content looks like to search engines and other devices that don’t support CSS.

In celebration of CSS Naked Day, I’ve stripped off my CSS and am running with my semantic markup hanging out.

Somebody sew my head on please!

sewmyheadon.com will strip down and get naked on April 9th in support of CSS Naked Day.

Dustin Diaz created this ‘holiday’ to promote Web Standards by stripping away the presentational (CSS) elements on a site to show semantic markup and good structure.

If you’re running WordPress, you automate your site’s undressing using the CSS Naked Day Plugin by Aja Lapus.

I’ve got a little toning up to do beforehand - off to my workout.

Dan Cederholm’s book Bulletproof Web Design 2nd Edition is now available.

I scarfed this book like carrot cake and highly recommend it to anyone interested in Web Standards and creating flexible, usable sites using semantic markup and CSS.

Oh, and if you build websites and aren’t interested in CSS and Web Standards, kiss your sweet job goodbye. Still can’t believe y’all are out there, but I’ve seen your work.