WordPress (WP) is currently on version 3.2. My website is using version 2.8.6. It’s time for an upgrade. I figure, now is a good time to do some spring cleaning to the website while I’m at it.

I have a plan, and I think it’s a legit plan because I’m using Darren Rowse’s book as a reference. Not because I want to increase my blog’s traffic or become a famous blogger, but because I don’t want my blog to suck. So I enlisted some help from a Pro Blogger – indirectly, of course. I don’t actually know Darren Rowse.

I’ll share my website redesign plan here and work toward that goal. I’ll share things that I learn along the way, because sharing is what I like to do.

The Goal

Currently my blog is a mixture of blog posts about being an administrative assistant, pictures from my Facebook profile, and a calendar with my family’s birthdays on it. I want to move this website to a more public version of “Me, blogging.” If you search my name this website comes up first, so it should be an appropriate public introduction to who I am.

The Plan

1. Upgrade to WP 3.2 – I’ll need to back up my posts from this site prior to the upgrade. WordPress makes this simple for me with their Export tool.
2. Update Theme – There are literally thousands of WP themes to choose from. I am in love with my current theme, Notepad Chaos by Evan Eckard. I stumbled upon it a few years ago and I have yet to find a theme that I like better than this one. Fortunately, Evan offers this theme (and others) for free and also includes the layered Photoshop files. Evan rocks! Once I upgrade to WP 3.2, I’ll upgrade my theme to version 2.
3. New Pages – New pages will be: About page, Portfolio of my design projects, Bio page including my professional experience, and of course the Home page will be my blog posts.

Let’s Go!

I ran into this issue yesterday. I created an image which originally came from Adobe Illustrator and ended up in Adobe Photoshop. I saved the image as a JPG and uploaded it to a WordPress blog. When I sent the blog’s link to everyone I work with, I got a quick call from one of them stating the image didn’t appear for them.

Let the troubleshooting begin.

I quickly determined that the issue was with Internet Explorer, as the image showed up in Firefox and Chrome. So I did a Google search to see what documentation is out there.

Several places suggested it may be a permalink issue. I tried it just to make sure, but that was not the answer in this case.

Upon further searching I found the issue on the Microsoft Support page. These are all great suggestions, but still didn’t fix my problem.

So, back to the drawing board – the Photoshop drawing board. I thought maybe I should rename the file or try a different file format, that maybe WordPress was getting confused because I had uploaded several versions of the file to get it just right.

As I was re-saving the JPG image, I realized the error of my ways. The file was in CMYK color mode. D’oh! I changed it to RGB color mode, re-saved, re-uploaded and voila! Instant fix!

It’s like magic.

What tipped me off? When you do a “save as” in CMYK color mode you have far fewer file format options to choose from than RGB color mode. I noticed my list was much shorter and then checked how the mode was set. Hopefully this will be helpful if you ever encounter this issue.