WordPress Style Guide
Betterbridge.blog is hosted by Automattic. This is the same company that owns WordPress. The characteristics of our site are listed below:
Theme: Publications. Automattic says their Publications theme “is perfect for sites about fashion, food, travel, or design.” That seems close enough to bridge for us to try the theme. We are very happy with this theme. We have tried other themes that were not satisfactory for bridge blogs.
Title: If our lesson is a chapter from a book, then our title is exactly the chapter title. If our lesson is about online practice at Best eBridge, then our title is “Online Practice with [topic].”
Category: All of our categories are chapter titles from the books that we teach.
Image: All of our images are the exteriors of our teaching sites. The image on the post shows the location where the post is taught.
Tags: We don’t use many tags. These would probably be helpful for SEO, but we don’t use many.
Word: All of our documents are in Word. Once we have a title for our blog, we open the word document, click Ctrl a for “all” and then Ctrl c for “copy.” We paste the document into our post.
Link: Each post may be downloaded. Once we have inserted the Word document into the new post, we close the Word document. Then we highlight the name of the document in our post, go to Media to upload, select the Word file, select “Open,” and click on “insert into post.”
Comments: At the bottom of each post, we add an extra line, then click on “add contact form” and “add this form to my post.”
Extra Spaces: Some posts develop undesirable extra spaces. Before we save the post, we delete all extra lines that WordPress has inserted into our post.
Publish: We click on “publish” to publish all the steps above.
Location: We add the current location.
Excerpt: Posts can be difficult to tell their source. So in the excerpt box, we add identification as to the author, book, and chapter. Then we pick a great sentence from the blog and paste it into the excerpt.
Titles: All section titles are Heading3 or Heading4. The main title is Heading3, centered. All subtitles are Heading4. If it is a major category of subtitle, we center it. If it is less than a major category, we align it left. If it is a subsection of a subsection, we begin the subsection’s title with a dash, which is Alt 151 (appears as “—”), and continue in italics.
Indents: We indent some paragraphs 10, 25, or 40 pixels, depending on what looks good. Generally, ordered lists do well with 10 pixels and unordered lists with 25 pixels.
Ordered lists: The exact WordPress code for an ordered list is —ol style=”padding-left: 10px;list-style:upper-alpha;”—. This makes the list begin with a capital letter (ie, an upper-alpha). We might replace “upper-alpha” with lower-alpha, decimal, decimal-leading-zero, lower-greek, upper-greek, lower-latin, upper-latin, lower-roman, upper-roman, or other leading characters. If we didn’t want to begin at 1, then we would add start=”x” where x would be the starting value. If start=”2″ then the first character would be something like 2, b, B. Obviously, we replace the front and rear dashes with carrot symbols (eg, < and >), but if we did that here this paragraph would not be recognized by WordPress as text.
Unordered lists: The exact WordPress code for an unordered list is —ul “padding-left: 25px;list-style:disc;”—. This makes the list begin with a black dot. We might replace “disc” with circle, square, or other shapes. Obviously, we replace the front and rear dashes with carrot symbols (eg, < and >).
We Teach Bridge! 