Barbara Hofmeister’s just released a new book, "To Be or Not to Be. The Choice is YOURS!".

Barbara’s family fled East Germany in search of freedom to succeed. Then Barbara found out there was more… and chose to grab more success, and share it.

Pick up GIFTS from 47 authors who have joined Barbara to give [...]

I made a new promotional video today for our free eBook and video course, that will come online within a week.  If you enjoy, please comment!

I love the free image editing software Paint.Net.  It’s a serious competitor for Photoshop CS4 ($799!) in the do-it-yourself market.  Another (reputedly) more powerful, but harder to use free software is Gimp.  But Paint.Net does the job for me.  Here is a typical application: making a banner for a website.  Below is a step-by-step guide.

But [...]

This is useful not just for capturing screen elements, but also for measuring the pixel-width of items on websites.

Note: you don’t need to use screen-capture to capture images on websites.  Just right-click > Copy. You can also get the image dimension through right-click > Properties.

This is so easy it will knock your socks off.  It took me 10 minutes, but that was because I wasn’t clear on mySQL security – it should take 3 minutes, so this article could save you 7 minutes.  I did it because I was doing a lot of development with short testing cycles and [...]

Image and text alignment are a very frequent source of frustration for website owners.  Unfortunately, mixing text and images in HTML isn’t quite so simple as in Microsoft Word.

A common problem is horizontal alignment of images and / or positioning new paragraphs after a left- or right-floating image.  See for example:

Sometimes you want to spice-up your WordPress pages (especially sales-letter pages) to replace the standard list-bullet dot or square with a custom images, for example compare:

Feature #1
Feature #2
Etc…

To:

Feature #1
Feature #2
Etc…

There is a superior visual editor for WordPress that you can install and configure to your site in 2 minutes.  It’s called TinyMCE Advanced.  It offers a rich expansion over the default editor, particularly:

Imports all CSS classes from the main theme stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list.
Support for making and editing tables (with [...]

Windows Live Writer is a marvelous tool for putting rich content (images and video) into a blog post and pasting / cropping / resizing images mixed-in with text.  It only suffers from one limitation that I can see: when  pasting an image from the clipboard it always generates a .png image which tends to be [...]

Here is a screenshot of the default WordPress installation with the Atahualpa theme:

This is an important decision for several reasons:

Your site’s appearance (“look and feel”) is determined by your theme.  A good theme will make the difference between a professional-looking site and one that isn’t.
You should choose your theme fairly soon after you begin your site, since it does have an impact on how you create your [...]

I found significant problems with the bbPress documentation on integrating bbPress into a WordPress site, which had me puzzling for well over an hour.  Here is what I did in the end: