More site development – the side bar

And I worked from home today, spending quite a bit of time on it.

This must have been the most frustrating aspects of creating a WordPress site, but I cracked it finally. The good news is once I create it as a template part, that’s it, it all automatically updates when it refers to that template part…. That was the easy bit!

The hard bit? I did some settings changes and I wanted a load of images to represent stops on a route map, so I created a load of images (the LinkedIn, Facebook logo and donate button come from their respective owners and added to the site that way, reduced to fit the side bar).

Previous for a few days, I created a navigation bar with just links to pages, seen in the below screenshot, it may disappear by the time you look at the page.

(Lost the image)

But… that’s where the fun changes, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the images to accept a link, until I looked at the top bar where I made a UI change in the settings… oh…!
Now it works. Next task, to get it to change colour when you hover, it will look slightly weird but I’ll try and keep the affect down, the plan is to go orange.

It took me YEARS to work out how WordPress works and now I am learning it in less than 7 days. As for the links to the LinkedIn and Facebook profile, I have customised it in that I used a HTML modification and good job I remembered good old <a href=””> </a> tags! <img src=””> is another one, <p></p>, <list><li></list>, I think I got the basic ones covered.
The most ironic part is, how WordPress is driven, its basically a giant database with some PHP coding to pull and push data, so a simple query of “SELECT aboutme FROM pages” in the background. I think I got the syntax right for SQL, someone comment if I am right or wrong.

But anyway, all the links and HTML files are actually stored in a database and then spat out and shown on your display. The images aren’t, they are just linked to an area on the site.

If you are wondering “can I do this in another database like Access?” In theory, you could, but it won’t be web capable and in fact, most computers couldn’t access your site. However, if you wrote a VB program, you could output the data to a VB file and have it display locally.


(Oh as for the file I used, here is the raw unedited file I used to create the bar with. Its mostly all standardised and I turned on the layers and and when required).


EDIT: Oh the buttons, if you want the PSD files, you can down them by clicking this text.