Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

  • Books
    • Content Strategy for WordPress (2015)
    • WordPress for Web Developers (2013)
    • Beginning WordPress 3 (2010)
  • Blog
    • Fascism Watch (2016-17)
    • Content Modeling for WordPress series
    • WordPress Hidden Gems series
  • Work
    • Portfolio
    • Services
    • WordPress Plugins
    • WordPress Themes
    • Presentations and Interviews
    • on GitHub →
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All my secrets laid bare

May 19, 2003 Stephanie Leary

Get your mind outta the gutter. This is business. Free stuff for web designers, to be specific.

Free hosting

Freedom2Operate

Free hosting with yourname.f2o.org domain, for-pay a la carte extras like Oracle db, newsgroups, extra disk space, and extra bandwidth. Full domain hosting at $7/month.

Free streaming server

Darwin Streaming Server

An open-source version of the Quicktime server.

Free design tools

Denim

Free site prototyping tool that takes your scrawls and squiggles and turns them into a real, if funny-looking, linked site. Probably works better with a Wacom tablet than a mouse, but you can make do. The menu is kind of weird.

Free photo management

Gallery

PhotoPal

Free PHP-based photo gallery software with auto-thumbnails. Gallery has a fairly fixed page layout, whereas PhotoPal is completely CSS-based and therefore customizable.

Free & really cheap photos

iStockPhoto

Stock photos for 50 cents each. Get one free for signing up, a free one each week for logging in, and free when you buy $25 worth of credit (or more) at a time. Note that you can’t just buy one photo; you pay for download credits at $10 for 20, $25 for 55 (5 free), and so on.

Free training

web design books at the library

People around A&M, head to the TK 5105.88x section in Evans (third floor, hang a right off the elevators). Tons of books on ASP, PHP, content management systems, Apache administration, accessibility, Unix administration, etc. Many of these are less than a year old. Staff can check them out for four months at a time.

CSS-discuss

Forget taking CSS classes. Go here, peruse the archives, and get friendly with the wiki. Everything you need to know is here. Beginners should check out its little cousin, CSS-foundations.

Free CSS classes at WestCiv

If you weren’t paying attention, take a class for free.

webdesign-L

The archiving system sucks, but this is still a great listserve. Join.

Dive Into Mark

Dive Into Accessibility

Keep up with Mark. Every few weeks he’ll reward you by throwing out some incredibly valuable post on things like protecting your server from evil crawlers or fixing your RSS feed. People who need to know how to design for the disabled (and doesn’t everyone?) should head straight for Dive Into Accessibility. When you finish that, move on to Building Accessible Websites.

Free & cheap paperwork

Web Redesign downloads

The book is invaluable, but if you’re just a cheapskate, grab the downloads from each chapter. There’s an interview for your clients, a sample of a content inventory (another one available at Adaptive Path) and other useful stuff.

Forms at the P@ttySite

All the forms you’ll need to be a small business of your own, $25. Her initial consultation interview (which used to be free from her site) is nowhere near as good as the one that’s still available for free from web-redesign.com. Just so you know.

Web Design

Latest WordPress Book

Content Strategy for WordPress

A short book for content strategists and managers on implementing a complete content strategy in WordPress: evaluation, analysis, content modeling, editing and workflows, and long-term planning and maintenance.

Read the sample chapter

Kindle Nook iBooks Kobo Smashwords

WordPress for Web Developers

WordPress for Web Developers (9781430258667)

This is a book for professional web designers and developers who already know HTML and CSS, and want to learn to build sites with WordPress. The book begins with a detailed tour of the administration screens and settings, then digs into server-side topics like performance and security. The second half of the book is devoted to development: learning to build WordPress themes and plugins.

This is the second, much-revised and updated edition of Beginning WordPress 3, with a more accurate title. Everything’s been updated for WordPress 3.6.

WordPress for Web Developers is out now. See what's inside...

The best WordPress features you’ve never noticed

  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Screen Options
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Bulk Edit
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Private Status
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Dashboard Feed Readers
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Options.php

Content Modeling for WordPress series

  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 1: analyze content
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 2: functional and organizational requirements
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 3: a sample content model

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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