For Your Readers:

You will learn lots from these little slides, but your readers, whether pro- or anti- Twitter will appreciate this.  This is a slideshow, 140 slides, with one tweet on each one – that is 140 characters – easy peasy.  They are the best wisdom and guidelines for twittering.  It will answer the “Why-on-earth-do-you-do-that?” types, and be eye-opening for the newbie tweeter.  http://zubeta.com/twitter-M.html

For Design Inspiration:

It seems that every time I go site-surfing to find a graphic, I stumble upon more great designing websites and online magazines.  My reader is chock full of them.  And to be honest, I still only go to my fave’s: webdesigndepot, freelanceswitch, and smashing magazine.  Those are the ones I can’t live without.  HERE is the list of websites on the Smashing Magazine‘s “Network” launched last Nov.  http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-smashing-network/, most of these are already in my reader, and some are just brilliant.  Now they are all compiled on the front page of smashing – no more hopping around for the good stuff!!

For Your Business

There are hundreds of you signed up to receive updates via email or reader.  And since I only get a few questions per week through the contact form here and even fewer comments, I simply need to ask - Who are you?  What would you like to know about WordPress?

See the newsletter this month for my survey – and as a thank you for participating, I’ve purchased this exclusively for you-  ”Press Releases & Template” – it is full of everything you need to know to fully realize the marketing value in press releases.  I learned a lot while reading this and intend to use it on this site.  Click here to go directly to the survey.

For YOU:

Recently uploaded to the Members Center:

• Twitter Icons (unique, high quality)
• Handy Icons  (social networking hand drawn in color – very nice)
• Glossy E-Commerce Icons (for your stores)
• Feed Icons for Designers (a huge assortment of RSS standard icons)
• What to Do When a Reporter Calls (pdf)
• How to Build Your First Media List (pdf)

For everyone:

• Photoshop Keyboard Cheat Sheet
• HTML Cheat Sheet
• CSS Cheat Sheet
• HTML Character Entities Cheat Sheet

(I love your avatar – too cute!)

Your questions answered:

1. By grey boxes around everything – I assume you mean the images?   To remove these, go to Appearance>>Edit, and find the Style.css- should be listed at the bottom of the right-hand side.
- scan through that file until you find:

a img {border: 3px solid grey; .....}

- change the border width to zero like so:

a img {border: 0px solid grey; ....}

Note – there may be more than one instance of “img” so you may need to use your notepad and search & replace feature to find each instance.\

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2. Your question says that you have a picture, but you’d like it to function like a button, correct?

First, find the button code. Look here first: Posts>>Edit>> and inside the specific post – click on the “HTML” editor.  If it isn’t in a particular post, but in your sidebar, go to Appearance>> Widgets and find the text widget with the image in it.

Scroll down in the html until you see a line of gibberish (code) that begins with "<img alt="" and ends with “ />” (also known as an “end” tag.)

In order to make that image do something (just like a button) you need to put a link around it. For an example, lets say you want that button to go to your about page.   A normal link will look like:

<a href="http://myblog/about" title="About Me"> About </a>

You will want to replace the “About” text with your image, so that the image is now surrounded by a link – thus clickable.  So the end result will look like:

<a href="http://myblog/about" title="About Me"> <img src="http://flickr/myaccount/myimage.jpg" title="me" alt="" /></a>

You will need to replace my links (in blue) with your specific links.   By the time you’re done you’ll be an html coder!

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3. You’d like people to click on a link and email you.

Yes, this can be done with a mailto: function in an “a” tag, HOWEVER, bots and spiders crawl the internet all the time, and I strongly recommend against using the mailto tag as it will be scanned and become the target of innumerable spam. Instead, I recommend the use of a contact plugin – I use Contact – Form 7.

If you are SURE you want to use the mailto function, it works like this:

<a href="mailto:cathy@myemail.com">Email Link</a>
(replace the blue text with your email address!)

Let me know if you have problems with any of these answers!

To leave me more questions – and get FREE answers – simply leave a comment on THIS POST.

http://twitterbuttons.com

This is the only instructions you’ll need to install twitter in your sidebar:  go to twitterbuttons.com. They provide oodles of graphics to choose from, and even your individual customized CODE to copy and paste into your text widget.  Just enter your twitter name into the top of the landing page, and then the code in each button will be customized for you!  How cool is that? 

If you need a little more guidance for entering the code into your sidebar, go to these instructions.

Happy Blogging & Tweeting!

Cathy