So you’ve been tasked with leading the re-design of a website, but you have no idea how to find a good web designer. Finding someone that is truly good can be an exhausting task, but it’s a vital step in determining the success of a web design project. Making a final vendor decision can be…
As far as blogging platforms go, WordPress is by far one of the best and most flexible – and when used properly can be used as a casual “blog” or even a more corporate website and product sales site. However, before we get onto that – you’ll need to know the basics, because all beginners…
I’m constantly trying to improve my WordPress development environment. It’s a conundrum I’ve been battling with since I began developing websites with WordPress. How do you reliably make local updates to a website, publish those updates online to a staging website for client review, and then publish them live to production when they are approved?
Today is the big day, I’ve begun upgrading various installs to WordPress 3.5. Many of them have been experiencing issues with JavaScript related errors in the admin. WordPress 3.5 has a new performance loading feature that will concatenate all JavaScript resources into a single request (which is awesome). Unfortunately this new method currently caused conflicts…
All code samples have been moved to a GitHub Gist. WordPress automatically generates archives for each blog author, listing all posts created by that author. But what happens when you have a system with custom post types that you want to attribute to appear on an author archive? This requires a small bit of programming,…
All code samples have been moved to a GitHub Gist. If you’re working with custom taxonomies in WordPress, it’s nice to provide site owners the option to display term descriptions in their theme. Optional term descriptions can easily be displayed on a taxonomy archive page using the term_description() function: I generally use this bit of…
In WordPress you can conveniently display, run or show something when certain conditions are met using conditional tags. I frequently find myself using the two most ambiguous tag’s: is_home() and is_front_page(). Don’t be fooled, though these two tags might be seamingly similar, they are two very different beasts. Let’s take a look at how they…
During the process of working today I came across a CSS issue with vertical-align and two inline-block elements next to each other. Setting vertical-align to baseline for both didn’t solve the issue, but after a little digging I discovered that middle did solve the issue: .menu-utility-container { display:inline-block; vertical-align:middle; } .search-form { display:inline-block; vertical-align:middle; }…
If you manage a WordPress blog with multiple authors, you’ve probably experienced issues with slow loading images. Many writer’s don’t understand the importance of image compression and optimization on the web, and it’s completely understandable.
Let’s take a look at some of the best SAAS website designs on the web, and analyze what they’re doing to drive sales and high conversion rates. Zendesk Zendesk is a SAAS support ticket management tool that is revolutionizing the customer support processes of over 20,000 companies.
Testing is a very important part of the web design and development process. If you’re a Mac based web developer then you know how difficult Internet Explorer Mac OS X testing can be. Luckily, there’s a free, easy way to do it thanks to Oracle VirtualBox. Follow these steps to incorporate Internet Explorer Mac OS…
A mailto link is great fallback for situations where a contact form isn’t practical. Depending on the how you are using a mailto link, it’s can be a nice experience to add a default subject and body to the email client when a user clicks the link. Luckily, this is easier to do than you…
I’ve been building a curated resources section for kevinleary.net to provide web designers with the best resources from around the web. I’d like to provide visitors with an RSS feed for curated posts, which has been setup as a custom post type: curated. Luckily, this is easy to do in WordPress.
I use MAMP Pro for my Mac OS localhost WordPress development environment. Lately, I’ve been working with a few WordPress multisite subdomain installs, and I’ve been frustrated without the inability to setup a local Wildcard DNS using the Hosts > General > Aliases option. Luckily, I found a work-around to enable Wildcard DNS on my…
I’m in the process of finalizing a content curation WordPress plugin, and this little tidbit just saved me some time. WordPress has automatic video embedding functionality provided by oEmbed for the_content(), but not the the_excerpt() or get_the_meta(). In order to display a YouTube video from a Google Reader RSS feed, I needed to add this…