Week ending July 28, 2013: On codex.wordpress.org, I found a great article on CSS Troubleshooting. Aside from backup, backup, backup your data reminders, the article gives several ways to isolating your CSS problems: You can either box your sections, by adding a border color to each of your sections, so when you refresh your page, you will be able to see which sections in the CSS code corresponds with the section on your page you’re having problems with. Or you can highlight the sections, to allow the problem to jump right out at you, by adding color to the text in each section, or by adding a background color to the text in each section.
If you are very comfortable with coding, you could try the “slash and burn” technique, which is listed as “The Last Resort”. It requires that you copy your source code into a text file, save as junk.html, and left open throughout the entire process. You would copy the graphics to the same test folder, and the CSS file to the same test folder. Then in the junk.html file, change the style sheet reference to <link rel=”style sheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css”> After saving junk.html text file (and remembering to leave it open throughout the entire process), you move to where you believe the trouble begins, move to the section above it and highlight the entire section from the opening and closing tags, and CUT the section. Save the file, then refresh the page in your browser. You should see the section missing from your page. Check to see if it fixed the problem or if it went away. If yes, then you know this section is your problem. If the problem is still there, then go to the junk.html text file, and PASTE the deleted section back into the file, and move on to the section above it, or below it, and repeat the steps from CUT to PASTE.
I find this information extremely useful particularly because of the way CSS file is written in WordPress. The coding isn’t neat or pretty. I was also made aware, by this article, that the html coding is handled in the .PHP files, The HTML code and references that hold the structure of the WordPress page are generally found in the index.php file in the Theme folder. For help modifying those files, I’ve read the following articles: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes and http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates. The more I read, the more confident I am that I can create a site my client and I will be happy with.
Christina Ruiz 