I’ve had this question before from a couple of clients, so I thought I’d take it up in a blog post.

So let’s roll up our sleeves…

If all you’re seeing is white space where your login window should be, you first need to establish what exactly went wrong. Chances are that you’ve recently added a new plugin or that you’ve altered some of the code in one of your php files. You’ll need to access your php files either through cpanel or with an FTP client so that you can correct the code that is creating the problem.

But what code in which file? Where does the source of this horror lie?

If all you get in the wp-admin url is a blank window, try going directly to your login url. In other words, instead of going to www.domain.com/wp-admin, go to www.domain.com/wp-login.php. At this point, WP will throw up a warning message for you, which should then give you some idea of what went wrong and where.

As an example, let’s take the “headers already sent” warning. This warning typically looks something like this:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/domain/public_html/wp-settings.php:340) in /home/domain/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line737

So what would this mean?

WordPress is telling you that your wp-settings.php file is the source of your problem and that you will need to correct the code in that file (and have a look at line 340 in particular) to make your problem go away. The fix is usually as simple as removing one unwanted line of space at the beginning or the end of the php code, or removing some other code garbage of this sort.

To make the correction, you would open up the wp-settings.php file either in cpanel or in a plain text editor and start by ensuring that the very first characters in that file are <?php and that very last characters in the code are ?>

There should be no extra space before or after these characters. If you do see some blank space or any other code here, delete delete delete, save the file and try the wp-admin url again. The backend of your WP application should be up and running.

If this fix doesn’t work, you will need to spend a bit more time studying the php code and troubleshooting the problem. For this, your best resource is the FAQ Troubleshooting section of WordPress.org.

Good luck!

I’ll admin that a good 80% of the simple colour correction/optimization work that I do, I typically do in Lightroom or Fireworks. Both of those applications like the quick and dirty approach to photo editing, and when I am short on time, which is often the case, quick and dirty works well for me.

Today I retrieved a promising photo from a free stock photo site and quickly realized that Fireworks and Lightroom were not going to get the job done. Although the image was underexposed, I knew that increasing the overall exposure would simply blow out much of the colour information. I needed the kind of nitty-gritty fine tuning and control that the two more lightweight applications didn’t have.

Enter Photoshop. I applied several different masking layers and adjusted hue, levels, curves and exposure only on those parts of the image that needed the adjustment. I then exported the image back into Fireworks, which is without question my application of choice for the preparation of web-optimized images. Fireworks is also far more adept than Photoshop at placing optimized typeface on web-ready photos, and in my world that counts for a lot. To address possible legibility issues, I used the burn tool in Fireworks to darken the area behind the text, and finally exported the optimized image as an 85% compressed jpeg. Bingo.

Most of the photographs that I work on only need minor adjustments so I sometimes forget how much more difficult my job would be without Photoshop. So this is my Ode to the Wonders of That Application.

It was an unpleasant discovery and the organization needed an instant fix. What could be done in a day or two without putting the whole site on maintenance mode?

As anyone running a site on WordPress has already discovered, content management systems like WordPress don’t really allow the developer to do a whole lot of covert backend work. Any saved changes that you make on the back end will immediately show on the user end. A Dreamweaver-based site is a lot more forgiving in this way, as it allows the designer to make all the changes on his or her own computer and upload them as one file that overwrites the original.

But if the revisions that you need to make to your WordPress site can all be accomplished with the development of a new style sheet, then you’re in luck. As long as the underlying functionality and layout of your site can remain unaltered, you have the freedom to transform your WordPress site without ever putting it on maintenance mode.

The application that you will need to do this work is CSS Edit from Mac Rabbit. CSS Edit lets you import an existing style sheet to your computer and edit it without ever touching the live code. You can play with colour values, you can change background graphics, and you can tweak the general layout without having to permanently commit to any of the changes that you’re trying out. I use CSS Edit along with Chrome’s Developer Tools, which I find help me isolate an element in the code with more precision than CSS Edit’s x-ray function. CSS Edit’s preview function overwrites the style sheet on the live site but leaves the original file unaltered. You can save your new style sheet to your computer and work on it at your leisure, then upload it to the server to replace the old style sheet once you’re happy with all the changes.

If you do need to revise the PHP code, then maintenance mode may be a necessarily evil. But if you just need to change the CSS, you can easily prepare and preview a new style sheet in CSS Edit and upload your masterpiece only once it’s ready.

Hardware

My hardware is a 27″ iMac. It has all the power I need and I have never had a problem with it. Ever. I used to build my PCs but one day realized that the Mac had everything I needed. My software no longer performs illegal operations, which is always a reassuring development.

Bookware

I have found no other book as infinitely useful as Strunk & White’s succinct The Elements of Style. I used to recommend it to all my students as the one textbook that (if they had any feeling for language at all) they would want to keep on their shelf and nostalgically re-read. It is no tome and as such shouldn’t be expected to address gaps in basic grammar, but it is a brilliant brief on the steps that every good writer needs to follow to rise above the fold. The section on the passive voice is especially insightful. It is a book that every writer should read, or to put it in other words: every writer should read this book.

Software

Adobe InDesign is my application of choice for developing marketing collateral such as brochures, flyers, fact sheets, or newsletters. Although the learning curve is a bit steep, the time that you invest in mastering this application will be time well spent.

For photo processing, I use a number of different applications depending on the nature of the project. Adobe Lightroom is my application of choice if all I need are a few tweaks to an already decent-looking photograph. It has a great workflow and does everything that I need it to do.

Adobe Photoshop is the application I turn to if I am attempting to fix a badly damaged photograph or am wanting to edit a photo that requires more than a few tweaks to fix. It often has far more power than I could possibly need but can do everything that Lightroom does and then some.

If I am designing logos, I use Adobe Illustrator. It’s a great vector-based application and if you are doing any freehand design work, there really is no competition of which to speak.

Fireworks CS5 I tend to use most often during the web design process. I can’t say enough good things about how intuitive this application is to the web designer’s needs. It handles Illustrator vectors very well but exports in both image and HTML format. It’s also a great tool for prototyping, and as such is irreplaceable.

CSS Edit does precisely what its name suggests it can do and it does it very well. If all I want to do is to test or correct a few colour values or some spacing or general design issues, I fire up my Chrome browser and use the Developer Tools; if I need to redesign a live site but want to leave the original design untouched without losing my proposed changes, I rely on CSS Edit.

I used to rely heavily on Firebug in Firefox for quick CSS changes but have recently become disgruntled with Firefox. Although I’ve kept the number of installed plug-ins to a bare minimum, the browser slows down my system and has a tendency to hang. Chrome, on the other hand, is amazingly swift and doesn’t seem to tax my system at all. I use its developer tools for minor CSS work, and have Firebug lite installed when I need to inspect a site’s elements more closely.

Let me begin with my conclusion: if you want to save money and end up with a high-quality product, I advise you to outsource the development of your marketing collateral and to not insist on using MS Word as the design platform.

While I absolutely understood all the reasons why MS Word was this organization’s design and publishing platform of choice, I worried about the outcome. MS Word is an absolutely fabulous home desktop publishing application and I relied on it almost exclusively during the production of my dissertation, but a professional design tool it is not. While it exceeds nearly all my expectations in general word processing, MS Word fails most miserably when one is foolish enough to demand it to become something it is not.

You want to design a poster for your lost dog? MS Word is your guy. Without a doubt. But if you want a more sophisticated template for your marketing material, MS Word is the clumsy application that mishandles transparencies and pixelates graphics while Adobe InDesign is its infinitely wiser cousin (three times removed) who can do everything that you demand of him and more.

In MS Word, the transparencies are not always transparent, the graphics are not always clear, and the fields that one must lock in during the development process are unnecessarily restrictive. In order to ensure brand consistency, I’d locked in font type, font size, sponsor logos, and a number of other crucial fields. The template was then sent out to a number of unfortunate individuals who had no IT or design skill; the result in most cases was singularly underwhelming.

To say that one cannot produce compelling marketing collateral in MS Word would be misleading. It is most certainly possible. What is not reasonable, however, is to expect a home desktop application to produce professional templates that accomodate and anticipate every formatting and design need.

The titles will almost always be longer than the spacing allows; the graphics that you’ll want to use will need to be resized; and the content won’t always fit into the generous word count that you’ve reserved for it. I guarantee it.

Which brings us to InDesign. What a beautiful application. It is accommodating, flexible, and gives the designer plenty of room to breathe. There are none of the tedious restrictions here that haunt the MS Word template production process. As long as you remember to embed your graphics and fonts, all will be well. The obvious difference between MS Word and InDesign is that the latter was built to anticipate all your professional publishing needs while the former clearly was not. The template design option in MS Word strikes me as almost an incidental function that the programers threw in generously at the last minute but never quite got working right.

So if you want to save both time and money and you want to ensure that your marketing collateral is elegant and professional, don’t force MS Word to do the work of InDesign. If you don’t have the InDesign application, hire a freelance consultant who can produce the materials for you. The design of the initial template may take a few hours but any subsequent materials that your freelancer will produce for you with this template should be quick to prepare and relatively inexpensive. And if you’re already looking for a freelance consultant, see if you can find one who can also produce or edit your copy. Because nothing will distract a client or customer from the elegant design of your marketing materials faster than a string of spelling errors or poor grammar.

Let me begin by saying that unless you have extensive coding knowledge, you will quickly discover that every template has some built-in limitations. Although the general look and feel of a site can be tweaked with some CSS adjustments, the underlying architecture and functionality is firmly determined by the author’s original PHP coding. PHP coding can also be changed or extended, of course, but that requires some serious coding chops that most users of WordPress don’t have. What you should be most interested in during the template selection process, therefore, is not the colour scheme, the preloaded images, or the background graphics, but the template’s underlying functionality. What can it do?

Now your own ideal template functionality may be different from that of your neighbour. If, for instance, you are a photographer or an artist who wants to build a portfolio site, you will want to look for templates with solid support for the jQuery JavaScript library. Although every WordPress site can be extended with the use of plugins to support jQuery, your life will be much easier if you select an appropriate template right off the bat instead of struggling to transform your template into a ferocious creature that it was never originally designed to be. As a rule of thumb, the fewer plugins you have to install to make your site do what you want it to do, the better. Plugins are a fantastic way to extend template functionality and most WordPress plugins come with formidable support, but you will always need to be updating them and you will have to worry about possible compatibility issues every time you update your WordPress application.

Free WordPress templates typically need more plugins to do what you need them to do, so even if you plan to have a professional customize the template for you, it’s better to have that person do the work on a premium template. Although your website developer will know how to extend the functionality of a free WordPress template, you will likely be paying him or her more for the time s/he spends on that work.

But even premium templates aren’t all made equal. Some have fabulous built-in functionality, others are flashy and eye-catching but can’t pull their weight when you need them to work for you. If you’re having a template customized by a professional web developer, consult with that person about the basic functionality of the template that he or she will be customizing for you. Find the template online and spend some time clicking around it. Does it do everything you will need it to do or is it just pretty? Whatever you do, don’t let images in the template preview be the determining factor in the selection process. Imagine that they’re not there – do you still like the site’s general layout?

The selection of a solid WordPress template is crucial to the success of your site, so undertake that responsibility with careful reflection and some good counsel.