How To: Changing Your WordPress Admin Color

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I know a lot of people that have upgraded to WordPress 2.5 have all flocked to the Fluency Admin plugin, but many people probably didn’t know that you can also change the color of your dashboard to a more “classic” WordPress look from within your dashboard. This was added for people that are slow to accept change.

All you need to do is go into your “Users” tab and select “Your Profile.” Once that is done, you should see the following:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can select the “Classic” radio button to change to a darker and more familiar blue color. This change is only saved for the individual user, so other users logged in will need to log in and make the change as well if they want the classic look.

Hopefully future versions will contain more options, but for now, it is at least nice to have a choice!

Increase Traffic by Choosing the Right Images for your Post

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I’ve always loved Hack Wordpress for the practical advice they offer, a recent example of which would be changing Wordpress Permalinks to be more SEO-friendly. Thus, I guess you can say I was inspired to talk about my own experiences with SEO. I’ll explicitly say this right now - I’m no qualified SEO expert, and the stuff I’m about to offer you isn’t going to work 100% of the time. I pulled off many of my traffic spikes by choosing the right images for my posts. With almost every post, I try to include relevant images. Some are screenshots that I’ve created myself, but most are images I take from other places on the web. I have personally discovered that the images that bring in the most traffic are usually already found on the first page of Google Images and are perfectly timed. Read more

A WordPress 2.5 Widget Guide

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If you don’t have a lot of coding knowledge, you probably find that you use widgets a lot for your sidebar content. I know many bloggers have come to rely on widgets and now WordPress 2.5 has changed some things.

If you would like to learn how to use widgets in WordPress 2.5+, I recommend you check out the WordPress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide over at WordPress Max. He does a good job of getting you used to the new look and feel of the new WordPress widgets system.

Learning the New WordPress Write Screen

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In addition to getting used to the new look and feel of the WordPress dashboard in WordPress 2.5, the second major adjustment you’ll probably have to make is getting used to the WordPress write panel (for those that write their posts within the dashboard).

I’ve probably written over 100 posts since upgrading to WordPress 2.5 across my blogs and I can honestly say I’m still not used to it. I usually adapt very quickly to change, but I’ve already noticed that I often forget to assign the category to my posts because the category panel is out of sight. I end up having to edit the post after being published to correct these types of things. I also do not like the way recommended tags now work in this addition, and I want to be able to save and continue editing.

Other than that, this edition is a huge improvement over the old write panel and makes software like Windows Live Writer less attractive. How do you like the new WordPress write panel?

Also, if you haven’t made the switch yet, you may want to check out this post written by a guest blogger over at Michael Martine’s blog named Knowing Your Way Around the WordPress Write Panel. This post was designed to introduce you to everything the new WordPress write panel has to offer, and compares it to where everything was in WordPress 2.3.3 and earlier.

Web Hosts That Support Installing WordPress Via Fantastico

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If you aren’t very technology-savvy, or just prefer to easily setup/upgrade your WordPress installations, there are a number of web hosting services that now support one-click installation of WordPress via Fantastico.

I’ve yet to find a good list, so I figured that it was time someone put one together to help these people know which web hosts they can choose from. Here are a list of web hosts that I have managed to confirm support WordPress installation via Fantastico:

• Hostgator
• DreamHost
• BlueHost
• Lunarpages
• A Small Orange
• PowWeb
• StartLogic
• SiteGround
• SurpassHosting
• Ace Net
• MySiteSpace
• HostMonster
• Site5
• Total Choice Hosting
• LinkSky
• AnHosting

Does your web host support Fantastico? If they aren’t on the above list, let me know in the comments below!