This is the H1 tag

This is the H2 tag

This is the H3 tag

This is the H4 tag

This is the H5 tag

This is the H6 tag

This is bold

This is strike through
This is italics
This is a link to nowhere

This is a quote

• Un-ordered list
• Another item
• Last One

1. Ordered list
2. Another item
3. Last One

• Something that looked nice and clean – a design that featured the content of the site well.
• Something easy to update – and few systems are as easy to update as WordPress.
• Something that was pre-designed to feature the elements that church web sites need the most – events, articles, and lots of informational pages.

We’re still perfecting the theme in the background. We want to create quite a few variations and skins for the Ministry Theme. Some churches need a dark background, others a grunge feel. Every church has its own personality and we hope to create a framework that will feature the personality of any church. We will also be creating a theme options page so that you can more easily change some of the elements of the front page and sidebars of the site. Here’s a feature list…

• Church and ministry-friendly layout.
• DHTML Drop down menu, automatically generated by page structure.
• Tabbed sidebars for a concise way to communicate information.
• Custom pages for home, links, and archives.
• Featured Post on the front page with built-in thumbnail support.
• Sub-featured posts on the front page as well.
• WordPress 2.8 ready, including handling of captions and images.
• Gravatar/avatar support is built into the comments.
• Base theme is relatively image-free for fast loading.

Keep watching for further developments and let us know what you’d like to see in the comments section below.

Please know in advance that the tabbed area doesn’t work very well in IE6, but it does degrade. The tabs turn into h2 headings. The drawback is you lose the white background and it stretches the sidebar further down the page. We’re following in the path of 37 Signals in not spending hours and hours of time trying to fix every little detail for IE6. We want IE6 users to be able to read the content, but we’re not concerned with every visual effect going well. It’s time we grew beyond the old and busted browser.

You could also add an email subscription form using code generated by FeedBurner or FeedBlitz or another email and feed list manager.

You could also show recent photos as clickable thumbnails using Flickr and the Flickr plugin from Tan Tan Noodles.

You can change the default image sizes under the Settings > Miscelleneous area of the WordPress Admin area and there are plugins available to refresh all images on your site should you ever change these settings. Just remember that images are sized by WordPress as you upload them, so if you change your mind on the size later, you’ll need to change your code by re-uploading and re-inserting the image.

Just above is an image that’s aligned to the center using the “Add media” tool, and after the next paragraph are some images as thumbnails aligned to the left, but not using the “Left” alignment in the “Add Media” window, but rather with “none” selected next to alignment. Left alignment works similarly, but allows text to wrap around the image, which is fine unless the image is at the end of the article, in which case they will hang off the bottom of the article area.

One hint about WordPress (at least 2.6.*) is that the system automatically uses captions if you fill in the Caption field. We leave that blank. Then, we switch over to HTML view and add in a description of the image where the code says alt=”", between the quotation marks. This “alt” text serves at least 2 functions. One, it shows up if your image cannot be displayed, so at least people know what kind of image was supposed to be there. And second, search engines can’t admire your pictures, but they can catalog what’s in the picture using this “alt” text.