You've decided to start your own blog - congratulations! Knowing what you want to say is the easy part, but if you're new to blogging, figuring out how to set up a blog can be a daunting task. But don't walk away from the computer! The Complete Idiot's Mini Guide to Creating Your Own Wordpress.com Blog teaches you the basics of the #1 publishing application in the world. You'll learn everything you need to know to create, customize, manage, and share your own WordPress blog, including: *Designing your blog theme *Creating and publishing posts *Using plug-ins and widgets *Adding subscribers

Essential skills for first-time programmers! This easy-to-use book explains the fundamentals of HTML and Web development. The modular approach of this series--including drills, sample projects, and mastery checks--makes it easy to learn to use this powerful programming language at your own pace.

Author Biography

# Wendy Willard is founder and owner of WILLARDESIGNS, a firm specializing in cutting edge Web-based design and development for businesses of all sizes and varieties, and in education and consulting about web-related concepts. She holds a degree in Illustration from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Wendy teaches and lectures on Web design and development throughout the U.S. and Europe.

PART I: HTML Basics

Mod. 1: Getting Started

Mod. 2: Basic Page Structure

Mod. 3: Color

Mod. 4: Working with Text

Mod. 5: Working with Links

Mod. 6: Working with Images

Mod. 7: Working with Multimedia

Mod. 8: Creating Lists

Mod. 9: Using Tables

Mod. 10: Developing Frames

Mod. 11: Employing Forms

PART II: Beyond HTML

Mod. 12: Creating Your Own Web Graphics

Mod. 13: Web Content

Mod. 14: JavaScript

Mod. 15: Making Pages Available to Others

Part III: Resources

A: HTML 4 Reference Table

B: Special Characters

C: Troubleshooting FAQ

D: CSS Reference Tables

E: File Types

F: Mastery Check Answers

Supplements

Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In this book, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.

Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories:

* JavaScript-Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.

* Network-Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.

* Browser-Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster.

This book contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas.

This title will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It will walk you through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom WordPress theme. From development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through design tips and suggestions, to setting up your theme's template structure, coding markup, testing and debugging, to taking it live it reviews the best practices. The last three chapters are dedicated to additional tips, tricks and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using third-party plugins.

Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site's design and branding.

Expert guidance on designing a great theme for one of the most popular, open-source blog systems available for the Web today!

What you will learn from this book :

* Set up a basic workflow and development environment for WordPress theme design

* Create detailed designs and code them up

* Enhance your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphics

* Debug and validate your theme using W3C's XHTML and CSS validation tools

* Customize and tweak your theme's layout

* Set up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive forms

* Download and install useful plug-ins and widgetize your theme

* Improve post and page content using jQuery and ThickBox

* Add interactivity to your themes using Flash

* Includes a reference guide to WordPress 2.0's template hierarchy, markup, styles and template tags, as well as include and loop functions

A must have guide for creating engaging and usable SharePoint 2010 branding

With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has provided a more robust environment for creating collaboration and content management sites that rival any of the popular websites on the internet. Creating a branded SharePoint site involves understanding both traditional web design techniques as well as topics that are typically reserved for developers. This book bridges that gap by not only providing expert guidance for creating beautiful public facing and internal intranet sites but it also addresses the needs of those readers that only want to understand the basics enough to apply some style to their sites.

Things like creative design, the experience visitors have navigating your user interface, ease of use these are all important branding considerations and not always intuitive. This unique book from a team of SharePoint branding experts lays it all out. The book is divided into four sections:

* Introduction to SharePoint Branding: In this part you will learn about what SharePoint branding is and how the topic has changed since SharePoint 2007.

* Branding Basics: This section is geared towards both getting started as well as being a guide for people that don t want to dive super deep into the advanced topics of SharePoint branding. You will learn about how to plan for branding projects, including creating wireframes and creative mockups as well as gathering requirements and estimation. You will learn how to work with SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint 2010 themes, and SharePoint navigation as well as gain an understanding of the low and medium effort approaches to branding can be used to make SharePoint look more like your own visual style.

* Advanced Branding: This is where you will learn about the more intricate techniques for making large changes to the SharePoint UI, such as cascading style sheets (CSS), master pages, page layouts, web parts and XSLT. You will also get an introduction to deploying SharePoint branding to production servers using solution packages (WSP).

* Other Topics: Everything else that is related to SharePoint branding is discussed here, including working with the SharePoint 2010 ribbon and client side technologies such as the client object model, jQuery, and Silverlight.

Whether you want to make SharePoint look completely different or just make minor design changes, this expert guide will provide tips, techniques, and insights to get the job done.