Image Options for Better Web Performance

Last Updated on Thursday, 18 April 2013 02:34 Written by David Bauernschmidt Tuesday, 23 April 2013 12:00

If you read articles on best practices you will quickly read that one of the best ways to increase performance is to limit your calls to the server as well as “shrink” the size of those files.  Implementing and keeping up with all of the options can actually take a full time job.  However as a small business web developer, I have realized that just implementing some of these can have a profound impact to your site.  We are always loading “assets” from the server to support a page.  These “assets” might include, images, javascript libraries, style sheets, video, audio, etc.  Better managing these assets not only improves performance but in some cases also lowers the band-width requirements.  We are very visual people so it has been my experience that the areas for great performance is to address the images first and then move on to the other areas. I am not saying that the other areas aren’t important but rather some of the little things you can do to images can improve a lot towards performance. My goal is talk about some of the available options as well as give you some thoughts and links that make this even easier.

Customising Your ocPortal Website’s Design

Last Updated on Sunday, 7 April 2013 12:00 Written by Steve Jarvis Wednesday, 10 April 2013 12:00

Customising your ocPortal website’s design

Depending on how knowledgeable you are in CSS and HTML will determine how detailed a customisation you will want to make. This post aims to make it easier to find your way around the files you need to.

The Theme Wizard

Managing Your phpFox Site’s Themes

Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 March 2013 07:57 Written by Stephanie Brown Thursday, 28 March 2013 12:00

This article will focus on managing your phpFox website’s themes.

As of phpFox v.3.5, phpFox now comes with 4 default themes: Default, Cosmic, Microblog, and Nebula.  Up until now we have only had 2 default themes to work with.  Each theme has its own set of styles as well, which are variations on the theme.  All but the Default come with a single style, Default comes with 4 different styles to choose from: Default, Facebookish, Altitude, and Density.  You may or may not want to have all or some of these themes enabled, and you may want to purchase or download a new theme to use on your site.  For now, we will work with the default themes.

How to Create a WordPress Theme – Part 3

Last Updated on Friday, 1 February 2013 06:54 Written by TJ Marsh Tuesday, 5 February 2013 12:00

Before reading this article, make sure to check out part 1 and part 2! Now that we’ve got our design and a copy of WordPress ready to go, it’s time to open up the “default” theme, clean things out a bit, and start making our new theme. Let’s get started:

1. First, we open up header.php. You should see something that looks very much like this:

How to Create a WordPress Theme – Part 2

Last Updated on Friday, 1 February 2013 06:53 Written by TJ Marsh Monday, 4 February 2013 12:00

Before reading this article, make sure to check out part 1! Now, while there are some out there who know all the WordPress template tags off the top of their head (I’m not quite there yet), for the rest of us it helps to have a place to start. In a best case scenario, you just pull out your already prepared WordPress theme, loaded with all the features you like to use, and simply replace the existing style sheet with your own. But for the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to work with the good old default WordPress theme (Kubrick).