Blogging Tips

How to find (and successfully work with!) a professional photographer for your blog

Whether you write a blog or simply read them, you’ve probably noticed most of your favorites have one thing in common: beautiful visuals. It should come as no surprise that gorgeous, professional-looking photographs feel practically requisite for today’s blogger.

Today I wanted to chat a little bit about the practice of bloggers working with professional photographers, how to find one in your area, and what you can expect to pay to shoot content for your blog. We’ll also go over four ways to get gorgeous, low-cost (or free!) photos for your blog.

Here’s the lowdown:
Keep reading “How to find (and successfully work with!) a professional photographer for your blog”

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From Lisa's Desk

Everything You Need to Know About Plugins

One of our favorite features of WordPress is that you can find a plugin to do pretty much anything you need for your site. In fact, we consider several (free!) plugins to be essentials additions to any blog! But, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility.

We know how it goes: you have a new feature in mind, and you find several in the WordPress plugin repository that just might fit the bill. But you won’t know for sure unless you try it out! So you install a few plugins, play around, get everything to look and work how you want, and move on with your life. Then, one day something breaks — and you have no idea what or why.

Spoiler alert: it probably has to do with your plugins. We’ve seen it time and time again — when something isn’t working as it should, 9 times out of 10, it’s a plugin issue. But that doesn’t mean all plugins are bad! It just means you need to be smart about how you use them. Today we’re teaching you everything you need to know about using plugins on your blog.  Keep reading “Everything You Need to Know About Plugins”

Development

How to style our Shop the Post plugin with CSS

While all of our plugins are built to display beautifully in any of our themes, we know many of our customers use themes from other shops — and have put a lot of hard work into getting that theme to look just right. By the time you discover us, your theme is sitting pretty, and while you still long for that extra bit of functionality our plugins provide, it’s a bummer they don’t match your current theme perfectly. Sound familiar?

Today, we’re showing you how to style our popular Shop the Post plugin to blend seamlessly with your site. Consider this post a great jumping off point for adding styles to our other plugins, too! This tutorial will be helpful if you’ve added the plugin on to a theme you bought elsewhere, OR if you’ve customized an <em>press theme with your own brand fonts and colors, and need the plugin to match.

Whether or not you use <em>press plugins, this tutorial is worth a read for any blogger, as this process applies to many other WordPress plugins! And if you’re not sure how to use CSS to style your site, be sure to check out our post on CSS basics before reading this one.

Keep reading “How to style our Shop the Post plugin with CSS”