Knowing A Little Code Goes A long Way

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I'm sure by now many of you have run in to problems in your pages and posts. "Why is that picture right there!", "Why is there a huge gap between a certain paragraph!"

This can be one of the most anoying parts of trying to build your site. When your working with WordPress, each keystroke is being turned in to code in your text editor.

Even just hiting the enter/return key is placing code, so that the internet knows what you text is supposed to look like. Being able to understand what that code means can save you a world of aggrevation.

When I first started working with WordPress this drove me so crazy! I would sometimes spend days trying to figure out what was going on, when all I wanted to do was work on my business.

I started learning coding a couple years ago, in just a few weeks I was already understanding the coding in WordPress and issues that used to take hours or days were resolved in seconds.

While coding is not for everyone, I highly recommend learning enough to know what you are looking at.

Here is one of my favorite free sites to learn different coding languages.

http://www.codecademy.com/

They cover just about anything you would wanna learn in a very simple step by step fashion. WordPress uses a combination of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. I recommend getting your feet wet with all these languages, they are all similar in certain ways and once you know a little about one language the others start making more sense.

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Recent Comments

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Thanks for sharing this. I will check it out. ~ Jude

Hello poorhouse. I am just starting out with WA. Been here almost a month now. Extremely new to coding and WordPress. When I go to an affiliate site to get their code and paste it into my post or page, after updating I click on the link and it takes me to my website. When I look at the code it has input my website at the beginning. Any suggestions on what is going on? Thank you....

when you copy and paste your code, then go to your edit on the page your placing it, look at the txt tab not visual and it will help you work out where to place it, once you have done it update it then look in preview and see how it looks

Hello KatieMac. Are you saying paste it in the text view not visual?

Always paste code in the text view, not the visual view, yes. ~ Jude

Yes that can be a bit hard, I look at in my visual the last few words and try to find it in my text code. if you just paste your code at the beginning, it will be always where you don't want it to be.

Codecademy is a great site. I learned some javascript with it and it was so easy. It's all internet based and you get to see what your code does right there with real projects. There is also lots of help if you have problems. I highly recommend learning code from this site. Think I'll go back right now and pick up something else.

Will it tell me how to change some of the font on my theme? My website has scary looking Halloween font that I want to change to anything else. http://scrapbookingforanyone.com will show you what I mean.

Wow that is some crazy text! The HTML and CSS tutorial will show you how to change text. But it will not show you how to access those files in WordPress. To do it right you will want to create a child theme, the tutorials do not cover that either.

I have not been using the WA hosting and I am not familiar with how to access those files. I opened a test site through WA and installed the theme you are using to figure out how to get rid of that text. I have not figured out how to access the files yet. When I do, I will create a youtube video showing you how to create a child theme and change your text.

As a temporary fix you can go to Appearance/Editor. Make sure you are on your stylesheet (style.css). Go down the list of code and delete the 'Creepster' text. Make sure that you delete the comma that comes after 'Creepster' too! It will default to the next text in the code 'cursive'.

I highly recommend taking the html/CSS tutorial before you do this, so that you have a solid understanding of what you are doing. Normally, you should never edit code from the editor in WordPress, it is terrible practice! I have already tried it on the test site and it worked and is safe.

This is only a temporary fix, the next time an update comes out for that theme, the 'Creepster' text will be set in your code again.





If you have any questions, or don't feel comfortable messing with the code, message me.

Thank you SOOOO much for your reply. I'm thinking that they probably don't change that theme very often so I might be fine with the temporary fix. Thanks again. Not sure why they did that. I suppose it looks like paint running and artistic to the creator.

This link will take you to a tutorial which will make it easier to understand how to change HTML and CSS on your website. Just for your information, you can edit your site by going to Appearance - Editor from your WP dashboard but if you don't know what you are doing, you can really mess up your site. Here is the link to the tutorial - http://rapidwpsites.com/tutorials/adding-the-underline-back-to-hyperlinks/

Thanks poorhouse!!

Thanks for this info. I am slowly learning what is relevant in a link code. It was trial and error, but I hardly ever get a broken link any more.

No problem. The more you do it, the more it becomes second nature.

I'm trying to learn code too. It really does help make WP become a little more of what each of us wants within our theme. I will check out code academy. Thank you for telling me about it ;)

It's a little daunting at first but for those of us that want our sites to look exactly the way we want, it's a must. It opens a lot of doors for building sites for other people as well. You can make a damn good living as a freelancer if you know what you are doing.

Thank you for the information! So far, have not had to use it! However; there will come a day. . . .

Your welcome. You are so lucky to not have had to deal with coding frustrations yet.

Great info! Thanks for sharing.

No problem, thanks for reading!

not a coder by nature, I managed to do some simple CSS in an image slider and I was SO chuffed- and it took seconds- as you say.
Small successes mean that we can then tackle bigger tasks knowing that our time spent will be very worthwhile.
Thanks for this!

Andy

I was not into coding at all when I first started, I just wanted answers to my questions. Now that I have been doing it for a while, I love it! It's so cool to be able to have things exactly the way you want.

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