When I began working with API’s a few year ago I was incredibly excited. The amount of data I had at my fingertips was overwhelming. I had the ability to create a full scale application with someone else’s data, and it was was mind boggling. Today I find myself using API’s in almost every project…
Browser cache can speed up a website tremendously, but it can also cause web development headaches in the process. Have you ever uploaded a modified image, stylesheet or JavaScript file only to find that an out of date version is loading for the majority of your users? This can quickly snowball into a usability nightmare. Fortunately there…
There are a more than a few ways to setup WordPress pagination, or “paged” links, in a WordPress theme. One popular method involves using the WP-PageNavi plugin. This plugin is great for someone non-technical who wants to add pagination onto their current WordPress site, however it’s not an ideal option for a theme developer. Jacob Gold…
LESS for CSS is incredible! I’ve been using it on literally everything I do since the beginning of the year. Dmitry Fadeyev has created a great library of re-useable LESS classes called elements, and I been using it extensively in my work. Elements.less contains a set of re-useable classes and mixins that help you cut down…
With Google now considering site speed as a ranking factor, it’s important to keep your site running at it’s fastest. There are many ways to improve the performance of a WordPress website. Using a content delivery network is one of the best bang for your buck methods. But how much faster can a CDN really…
When you start to use WordPress as a CMS you begin to realize that one WYSIWYG area isn’t going to cut it. At that point you may start to explore the option of custom fields. They’re great, and they work well for handling small changes. But what happens when you need to have multiple WYSIWYG…
Microsoft Word works great for creating stationary and printed documents. However, if publish content on the web there are a few formatting issues you should be aware of. When you copy and paste your Microsoft Word content into a content management system like WordPress it’s proprietary HTML code is preserved, producing very messy HTML that…
Avoid becoming a social vegetable A close friend constantly jokes about my new remote role, claiming that it won’t be long before I’m a social vegetable. It’s true, it is tough to cut out the human interaction you get from a traditonal office environment. With a little creativity you’ll soon realize that working at home…
LESS will make your CSS coding incredibly easy to maintain and iterate on in the future. If you’re still building websites without it, you’re an idiot. What is LESS? LESS is a language that enhances CSS to make it more modular by following D.R.Y. development practices. With it you can use functions, variables, operations, nested…
I hit a little snag today while trying to connect to MAMP using the OS X Terminal. I must admit I’m very new to the command line, so this may be obvious to many but it wasn’t to me. Failed Connection ssh [email protected] This was throwing an error telling me that port 22 wasn’t available.…
**This has been released as the Visual Editor Biography Plugin in the WordPress Plugin repository.** WordPress has a basic profile setup that allows you to store settings about authors. In your journey as a WordPress theme developer you may find that it’s quite handy to have a rich text biography field included in your user…
It’s a common design pattern for search engines to display the total number of search results found. Surprisingly most WordPress themes don’t do this, and it’s incredibly easy. There are a few methods out there, but I’ve found that this is the most efficient and effective way.
Loading resources from a CDN is a great way to improve website performance. Google provides free CDN hosting for many common JavaScript library, includes the popular jQuery framework. If you’d like to load a Google CDN hosted copy of jQuery in your WordPress theme, drop the following PHP class into your functions.php file. /** *…
With WordPress being honored as a Hall of Fame CMS for 2010 by Packt Publishing, it’s worth mentioning some well designed websites powered by it. If you disagree with my opinions, or have any suggestions by all means fire away your comments below, I’d love to hear them! Varmland of Scandinavia
So you’ve just received approval to launch your website redesign project. What’s next? I’ve built this list of items to help make your next WordPress redesign launch a smooth one! Content Consistent typography and design throughout the site Proper spelling and grammar Search the site for test or filler content Consistent capitalization and writing style/tense…