Articles

If you want to build a successful website, user experience is fundamental. As well as great content, you need eye-catching web design and a site that works properly — including quick load times. However, there is one aspect of web design that flies in the face of this conventional user-experience-driven approach: pop ups. Despite a near-unanimous agreement that pop ups are detrimental to user experience, many popular sites continue to use them. Why? Well, the answer is obvious: Money. Pop ups are a proven way to increase a website’s subscriber rates, and therefore its bottom line. For some, everything else is […]

When you first install WordPress, you’ll find that you already have two plugins installed: Akismet and Hello Dolly. Hello Dolly — a fun and rather lyrical plugin developed by WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg — displays random lyrics from the song ‘Hello Dolly’ in the upper, righthand corner of your dashboard (see image below). And that’s all it does. For you budding plugin developers, however, this is a good plugin to study in regards to proper form and WordPress quality code. In this article we’re not going to focus on Hello Dolly, but rather we are going to discuss the ins-and-outs of Akismet. […]