tutorial

September 25 2015

WordPress: posts and pages

Jen WordPress tutorials basics, images, pages, posts, tutorial, wordpress

Note: If you haven’t done your basic site configuration yet, check out this post to begin with that.

Posts are the typical content you see on blogs (hence the term blog post–see, this isn’t that hard). They’re organized by date, author, categories, and tags, and they often allow comments and social links. Posts will be associated with a particular page. Usually people think of this as their blog page, and it will be titled something really obvious like Blog. You can only have one posts page on a site.

Pages are typically for permanent information, such as About pages, or Contact pages. Pages can be organized in parent/child relationships; for example, you could have an About page with several child pages, one for each of the contributors for a site.

Pages don’t show up in the blogstream (that is, the posts), you must add them to a menu. Child pages will show up in a dropdown menu (submenu) from the parent page’s menu link.

September 25 2015

WordPress: configuring your site

Jen WordPress tutorials basics, configuration, tutorial, wordpress

Note: This was written for WordPress 4; other versions may have some differences.

So you’ve got a WordPress site, and now you need to figure out what to do with it. Before you go leaping straight for adding posts, take a few minutes to set your basic site configurations.

September 2 2015

Using GREP styles in InDesign

Jen InDesign tutorials grep, indesign, styles, tutorial

GREP is a command line text search utility originally written for Unix, and the acronym means globally search a regular expression and print. Essentially, GREP in InDesign allows you to use code to find and edit or style text through the Find/Change dialog box or Paragraph Styles. GREP is complex and can be intimidating, but it’s not terribly difficult to learn the basics, and InDesign offers tools to make using GREP easy. Because of the depth of the subject, I’m only going to address GREP styles in this article.

September 2 2015

InDesign styles: the basics

Jen InDesign tutorials indesign, styles, tutorial

Styles are predetermined formats for text and objects. Using styles is the fast and efficient way to manage formatting. This article gives an overview of how they work.

September 2 2015

Creating a newspaper headline graphic

Jen Photoshop tutorials graphics, photoshop, tutorial

A simple, beginner-level Photoshop tutorial to create a “ripped from the headlines” graphic with a transparent background at print-quality resolution.

Open a new document in Photoshop, approximately 6 inches wide and 2 inches tall, at 300 dpi, grayscale. Be sure to set the background to transparent. If you save it as a .psd file you can easily re-edit the text, and the transparency will be preserved when placed into InDesign.