BuddyPress, the suite of  WordPress plugins and themes designed to work with WPMU, the multi-user version of WordPress, is now available in a version for regular WordPress sites.

BuddyPress adds features like a user profile, ability to add friends, instant messaging, groups, activity streams and more to your site. It allows your members to interact and connect.

You can get all the specifics on how to add BuddyPress to a single user WordPress install on the MPMU.org site:

http://wpmu.org/buddypress-now-supports-wordpress-single-user-no-wpmu-required/

If you’re having problems or would simply like to learn how to use WordPress better, I can help.

My telephone training is available in one or two hour blocks. And you can decide the things you want to learn.

Here’s just an example of the types of things I can help you with:

General Website Issues

• Registering a domain name
• Setting up hosting for your website (including recommended web hosts)

WordPress

• Installing WordPress on your domain
• Importing content from another blog
• Configuring WordPress correctly and effectively, including
  • Specifying who can comment on your site
  • Managing comments on your site
  • Configuring your permalinks for maximum visitor and SEO purposes
• Getting started with WordPress: writing posts & pages; setting up categories correctly
• Adding users to your WordPress site
• Using widgets on your site
• Plugins: what they are, where to get them, and how to install and configure them
• How to update and backup WordPress

This is just a sample of the things you can get help with. We can cover all the questions you have and get you off on the right foot.

Contact me today to arrange your personalized training session.

soldiersthecomic chose WPbyDesign to customize the Studiopress Corporate theme for their digital comic website.

Rob at soldiersthecomic.com knew he wanted to use the Studiopress Corporate theme for his digital comic. He contacted WPbyDesign to help him tweak it out to provide the look and functionality he was after.

The simple look of the Corporate theme makes the richly colorful panels of the comic stand out. It’s a clean, non-cluttered look that shines through.

We added several pages templates with their own corresponding sidebars to the theme. This allows Rob at soldiersthecomic.com to customize the sidebar content based on the page content.

WPbyDesign also customized the two sister corporate sites, underwatersamurai.com and uwspublishing.com. Each of these sites was built on the Corporate theme as well.

thegreenfamilia.co.uk is included in the Studiopress showcase.

Woo hoo!

TheGreenFamilia.co.uk is now featured in the Studiopress showcase of sites:

http://www.studiopress.com/showcase/lifestyle/the-green-familia.htm

I’m happy that the extensive tweaking we did on this site, in combination with the beautiful graphics created by Sharon at comarni.com, is worthy of this honor.

Thanks to Brian at Studiopress 

It’s called a Wibiya toolbar and it sits at the bottom of your browser bar on sites where it has been installed.

On the toolbar are links to recent posts, random posts, Twitter, your Facebook community, if you have one, and other dubiously-useful links.

In general, I don’t like things popping up on my screen suddenly when I visit a website and I have to say I find the Wibiya toolbar more annoying than helpful.

If you want to present a professional website, I suggest you don’t consider installing this toolbar. The functionality and links that it adds can be better incorporated into your WordPress site in more attractive and useful ways. For instance, if you want to direct visitors to your RSS feed, the universally recognizable square RSS icon can be inserted into your header or sidebar or dozens of other areas. If you want to invite visitors to join your group on Facebook, an attractive Facebook icon and short invitation text will get their attention without the risk of annoying them.

It’s easy to get carried away adding features and “doo dads” to your site, especially a WordPress site. After all, there are nearly 7,000 WordPress plugins available now to add all sorts of features to your site.

Before you implement any add on or feature on your site, make sure you are clear that it adds value and is useful to your visitors.

It’s a clean theme with shades of dark gray, light gray, and blue. The look is different from many of the Studiopress themes because the header and footer areas stretch the full width of the screen.

The Executive theme from Studiopress

View the demo of the Executive theme

One feature in the Studiopress Executive theme is an SEO Options area inside the editor. Now when you create a post or page, you can enter a custom title, keywords, and description for that post or page. This will create the title tag, and the keyword and description meta tags based on what you enter in these areas. In the past, you would have to have an SEO plugin, like All in One SEO, to be able to specify and customize these values.

Executive is an attractive theme, but not unlike most Studiopress themes, its look is dependent on images, so changing the look of it will require either editing the images or dropping them altogether and relying simply on a color code.

The navigation on the Executive theme is set to display only pages so it’s a perfect theme for businesses who don’t want to have lots of blog posts, and hence categories, on their site. This gives the feel of a more traditional website without the features of a WordPress-based bloggish site. (Is bloggish a word?)

So take a peek at the Executive theme. It may just be what you’re looking for.

The Green Familia got a new look with an extensively customized Studiopress Lifestyle theme

For the past few months, I have had the pleasure of working on The Green Familia. Besides the fact that I simply love the purple and green color scheme, this project was an opportunity to add some really useful and fun features to a Studiopress site.

Brenda Cuby, the Owner of The Green Familia, wanted a new vibrant look for her blog. She worked closely with Sharon at Es-preso to get just the right look. Then it was time for me to step in and start doing some tweaking for functionality and features.

Tabbed widgets in the sidebar highlight lots of content in a compact area. The top tabbed area pulls a teaser of the latest featured post, as well as the most recent and the most read posts. Another tabbed area allows for links to favorite resources.

Another tweak was adding image links to the individual posts. These images invite visitors to share their favorite eco tip (via the contact form) or enter one of the current competitions.

A 125X125 ad section was added to the sidebar to monetize the blog. Besides graphical ads, this area can also display Google Adsense ads. A big plus is that these ads can be scheduled to start and stop on specific days.

Reader ratings, a poll feature, an animated tag clouds, video reviews, a newsletter sign up area, and links to Twitter and Facebook are just some of the additional features we added to the site.

One important part of this redesign was the organizing the navigation. Rearranging and recategorizing tightened up the navigation on the site and made things easier to find. Navigation is a critically important part of every site and taking time to work through the categories was time well spent.

I am so happy to have been a part of this project! You can browse through the site for yourself at thegreenfamilia.co.uk

The folks at WordPress recently emphasized this in a blog post: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/

WordPress included an automatic upgrade feature inside the WordPress admin. Just go to Tools — Upgrade to make sure your WordPress version is up to date.

You’ll also see a message at the top of your WordPress admin panel asking you to upgrade when new versions are released.

I’m really excited about this because the Lifestyle and Church themes are my two favorite to work with.

You can read about the new and improved features added to these new versions on the StudioPress site:

Church 4.0 theme:  http://www.studiopress.com/releases/church-40-theme-released.htm

Lifestyle 4.0  theme:  http://www.studiopress.com/releases/lifestyle-40-theme-released.htm