Setup Tutorials for Encounters

This video in this series provides an overview of how to choose your blog post to be content based with a read more tag or an excerpt. You get two options here, but you also get another feature that lets you decide how many words you want for your post excerpts. Covered in this video: Introduction to the blog content post method. Introduction to the blog excerpt post method Choose how many words your excerpt will have. Video  

This video in this series provides an overview of how to create pricing tables for your Encounters theme. You can have as many tables as you want but this video will create 4 price tables like the live demo site shows: Price Tables Demo Covered in this video: Introduction to the pricing tables and how they look. Using a code snippet for faster price table creation. Changing the default table content. Video  

This video in this series provides an overview of how to create a front page just like I did for the Encounters demo website. In particular, we will focus on the main content area with the Call to Action and the four boxes with images and content. Demo Front Page What we will do here is create the demo site front page with 4 image content boxes, but you can go with 2 or even 3 if you wish. How you change this is by changing the class=”span3″ to span6 for 2 boxes, or span4 for 3 boxes. This is a 12 column layout theme so we want everything side-by-side to total 12 columns. This is why for four columns you will see in the code, 4 containers each with a class of span3 which adds up like this: span3 + span3 + span3 + span3 = 12 Covered in…    read more 

This video in this series provides an overview of how to setup the Widgetkit slideshow that you see on the live demo front page. This is a free plugin that you can download and install with custom styling that I provided in the theme download package you got with Encounters. Widgetkit Slideshow Covered in this video: Introduction to the Widgetkit plugin. Installing Widgetkit. Setting up the included template skin for your slider. Create slides Using the Widgetkit widget to display our slideshow. Video    

This video in this series provides an overview of how to setup the LayerSlider like you see on the Optional LayerSlider page of the Encounters demo website. Please note that this slider plugin is not part of this theme, but it is an option you may want to consider because of it’s capabilities and responsive features, but having the different layers slide in and around is a nice showcase feature to have! Also, please note that this is a commercial plugin which means it’s a paid to download plugin, but well worth it. UPDATE: March 16, 2014 I’ve been checking out an alternative slider which you may want to look at if you are in the market for a commercial slider. I’ve been looking at the Revolution Slider instead of the LayerSlider, as it appears to be easier to use. Again, using these sliders are optional and not required. Revolution Slider…    read more 

This video in this series provides an overview of how to use the child theme to modify your Encounters theme style, but it can also give you a basis of how to override styles. For this tutorial, we will look at removing the lines from the showcase header background, but also the top header and footer areas. You can do this for all locations that contains the background lines, or you can remove them from any of the above. Covered in this video: Introduction to the child theme. Using your browser to find what style is being used on a particular area of your page. How to modify the existing style using the child theme. Video    

This video in this series provides an overview of how to assign widgets to select widget positions throughout your website. By default WordPress will publish your widget to “every” page that has the widget position you are using. The problem with this is that you do not get the flexibility of showing a widget (or widgets) on specific pages only. We will need a plugin called Dynamic Widgets because WordPress does not offer this capability.  UPDATE: You may want to first check out a plugin called Display Widgets first as some users have said it’s easier to use. To see what available widget positions you have available for this theme, you can check out the live demo website here:  Widget Positions Covered in this video: Introduction to the available widget positions of Encounters. Installation of the Dynamic Widgets plugin. Creating and assigning widgets to select positions. Using the Dynamic Widget settings…    read more 

This video provides an overview of how to exclude select categories from showing up as posts in our main blog home page. In this tutorial, we will focus on the portfolio categories, but this can be done for any category. This will of course be up to the individual to decide if they want to separate categories, but basically this tutorial is to prevent portfolio posts (or others) from being seen in the blog.  Covered in this video: Introduction to categories. Installation of the Simply Exclude plugin. Excluding select categories from being seen in the blog Previewing our blog. Video    

This video in provides an overview of how to setup a “Portfolio” just like the Encounters theme demo website. We don’t need any plugins at this time, but this is what we will be making:  Portfolio Covered in this video: Introduction to the Portfolio. Introduction to the Portfolio theme settings Creating a Portfolio category. Create some Portfolio posts. Adding your portfolio to the main menu. Previewing our portfolio. Video