This is the third part of Project WP, and the last one where we play pretty. After this, we’ll get into customizing a basic theme with PHP, HTML and CSS, and creating a blog identity with logo, icons & header. Expect Part 4 here next week, but for now:

Give us the Pretty one more time! 10+ Recommended WordPress Plugins to make your blog prettier

In our last post, we listed the 8 dead essential WordPress Plugins for you. Take a look at these non-essential, but still highly recommended plugins today. Note: all plugins have been tested by us for use in WordPress 2.5+. Read on…

In the first part of Project WP, we installed WordPress and set it up for our convenience to improve visibility and attract more visitors. Today, we’re going to look at 8 absolutely essential plugins that significantly contribute to our efforts of creating a successful WordPress blog.

Part 2: Eight dead essential WordPress Plugins

WordPress is a fantastic platform for bloggers. If you’ve been thinking about getting into blogging, but you don’t know what awaits you, rest assured, for we are here to help. In the course of this series, we’ll take it step by step and explain how to create your own blog - with your very own custom theme. This involves the design part as well as the part working with PHP and CSS. Read on…

Project WordPress is a series of in-depth tutorials on creating a custom blog - step by step, and from scratch. Read about how to tweak WordPress to your liking, about useful and must-be plugins, working with PHP and CSS, and using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator professionally to create beautiful results: your very own, brand new WordPress Theme.

Part 1: WordPress Install, Setup, and Basic Optimization

In this first step of creating a whole new blog, we’ll take a look at wonderful WordPress and how we can set it up do do what we want. The standard install of WordPress is rather rudimentary, thus requires us to do a couple of adjustments, which, in our opinion, are crucial to creating a professional WordPress blog. Read on…

On a quick note: the last weeks have been quite busy for us. We’re working on several projects right now and things did get a bit stressful. That’s why we didn’t have the chance to post what we wanted to during the last two weeks.

But we have good news for you: we’re going to make up for it - big time!

One of the jobs we’ve been working on lately is the creation of a brand new WordPress blog from scratch. It included setting up WordPress, choosing, installing and customizing the best plugins, picking a basic theme, and remaking it completely including graphics, PHP and CSS. So basically, we created a new WordPress theme.

Here’s an appetizer:

What we’re going to do now is post the complete process of creating a WordPress blog here on Vibr8bros.com. This includes all of the above. The main pillars of this tutorial series will be:

• WordPress - installation, setup and plugins of choice;
• Blog Identity - creating the logo and identity of a blog;
• Blog Layout & Style - building the CSS and PHP on the basis of a basic theme to create a whole new WordPress theme of choice;
• Blog Graphics - creating the header and all graphics for the blog from scratch using Photoshop and Illustrator.

We will take it step by step and go through the complete process with you. We will talk about tweaking WordPress to your liking, useful and must-be plugins, working with PHP and CSS, and using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator professionally to create beautiful results. In the end, you’ll be able to apply the techniques we discuss to your own projects.

So, in the prospect of this great series coming up here on Vibr8bros.com - do you think you can excuse our recent blogging holiday?

Stay tuned…

In this tutorial, you learn how to enhance the link appearance on your WordPress blog. Using simple CSS, this post covers what you need to know in order to pretty up your blog in 4 simple steps.

Have you noticed the little “8″ gracing every link on our site? We styled our links this way in order to distinguish them from the other content. It’s also a branding issue - our mark appears with every link on the page ;)

We did this using simple CSS. You also need to have the image (or icon) to use this feature. You can easily apply this “enhancement” to your own blog, too.

As we’re running a WordPress powered blog, we will show you how we added this feature to Vibr8bros.com.
This is how we did it: Read on…