File Not Found: How To Create A Custom Error 404 Page

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Why Should I Care About Error 404 Pages?

“Error 404” occurs when a visitor tries to access a page that no longer exists. Despite best efforts to redirect and specify links to web pages on your site, your visitors can still encounter the dreaded error message. This means that your 404 page can either enhance or compromise a visitor’s experience on your domain, depending on how it is designed. Taking the time to design a user-friendly error page can make the difference between increasing and decreasing your website traffic.

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How To Add “Read More” Links On WordPress

Categories Thinking Out Loud

Displaying your WordPress posts as excerpts rather than full text on your home and archive pages is valuable for improving load time, navigation, and web traffic. By using excerpts, you significantly decrease the home and archive pages load times, which allows users to quickly scroll through and select desired posts. As a result, this creates a more enjoyable experience for visitors, and entices readers to continue reading and stay on your site. Some WordPress themes offer excerpt functions that allow you to activate “read more” links from settings < reading < summary. However, these excerpts are auto-generated to display a default length of 55 words, which means that your preview sentences will be cut off with [...]. I have been looking for a way to display my post summaries on my home and archive pages with more flexibility to accommodate the structure of each post. Then, I came across an article by wpbeginner that explains how this can be done using one of the two built-in methods offered by WordPress.

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Why You Should Blog With Markdown

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When creating blog content on WordPess, the constant process of stopping in order to highlight and edit your text, through the visual and text editors, can be a lengthy process. Markdown is a markup language that offers a quick and easy alternative to styling your WordPress posts, pages, and comments with plaintext formatting syntax. This means that you can add formats such as headers, lists, emphasis, blockquotes, links and images to a plain text using special characters such as brackets and asterisks. This offers bloggers a faster way to format their text without learning any complicated codes or shortcuts. If you would like to use code in your blog however, WordPress does support a variety of code languages. WordPress uses Markdown Extra, which supports features not available in standard Markdown, such as inline HTML, code blocks, and syntax highlighting. The changes and additions made by Markdown Extra also allows users to create definition lists, footnotes, and tables. These features can be particularly useful for bloggers who want an easy and efficient way to display or reference information. For instructions on how to render these features on WordPress, please review this quick Markdown reference and this Markdown syntax guide.

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How To Overlay Text Onto An Image In WordPress

Categories Thinking Out Loud

There are different ways of achieving this, but if you are looking to overlay text onto an image in your WordPress site one option is using an HTML code with inline CSS styles. To get started, copy the code listed here and paste it into your WordPress text editing window under the “text” tab. This will not work if you paste the code under the “visual” tab.

<div style="background-image:url(http://SAMPLE-
IMAGE.jpg);background-repeat:no-repeat;"><h1 style="text-align: 
left; color: white; line-height: 28px; padding: 200px 20px 4px 
40px; font-size: 48px;">SAMPLE HEADER</h1><p style="text-align: 
left; color: darkgrey; padding: 15px 20px 400px 40px; font- 
size: 20px;">SAMPLE TEXT</p></div> 
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Where Are The Themes?

Categories Thinking Out Loud

After creating an account on Reclaim Hosting, and installing WordPress to my domain, I could not find instructions on how to access the themes and editing features for my domain. In order to build my site, I needed to access my WordPress dashboard, yet I could not find any instructions on Reclaim Hosting as to how I could do this. Finally, I came across an article from InMotion hosting called How to Log in to your WordPress Dashboard. As I had hoped, accessing the dashboard is quite simple. InMotion provides directions on how to access your dashboard by creating a direct path in the URL, depending on how you installed WordPress. The instructions are below.

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