Self-employment offers a number of attractive benefits to WordPress professionals and other intellectual workers. But self-employment can also pose a heightened risk to your mental health. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to preserve good mental health. How Self-Employment Poses a Risk to Your Mental Health Working for yourself at home (as many WordPress developers do) might seem more beneficial to your mental health than traditional employment. You can set your own hours, wear comfortable clothing, and work when it suits you. What’s not to love about all that? But that’s only part of the picture. Self-employment can […]
Everything You Need To Know About Information Architecture
Information architecture (or IA) may sound as if it’s purely academic, but it’s actually quite practical. How you present the content you’re publishing on your site, together with the paths you lay out for your users to find and consume that content, are essential to the user experience. In this article, we take a broad look at IA, and offer some practical advice to help you build a better WordPress site. What Is Information Architecture? Essentially, IA is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint before you dive in and […]
The Case For WordPress
These days, site owners have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to building a new site. From other content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal, Joomla, and Perch, to the recent growth of long form publishing platforms like Medium and eCommerce-specific options like Shopify, WordPress is facing some serious competition. Granted, we may be a wee bit biased, but in our considered opinion, WordPress is still the best choice for most small business websites, blogs, and e-commerce sites. Why? Well, WordPress boasts a number of features that make it user and owner friendly, but four advantages, in particular, make […]
Top 11 Things You Need To Start A Career As A WordPress Professional
If you’re planning to build your future career as a developer on the WordPress platform, you’re making a smart choice. WordPress powers almost 26% of the entire web, and enjoys a 50-60% market share among all CMS platforms. And those numbers aren’t likely to go south any time soon, so it’s safe to say WordPress is only going to increase in popularity from here on out. That’s a lot of potential clients and gigs for developers with the right combination of skills, traits, and tools. And that’s exactly what this article is about: the eleven tools, essential skills, and specific […]
How To Build The Perfect WordPress Client
In a recent post, we took a look at the characteristics of the ideal WordPress developer by building the DEV-BOT 5000, a robot embodying the perfect mix of skill, experience, and responsiveness. Well, turnabout’s fair play, right? In this post, we’re going to build the perfect WordPress client for our DEV-BOT 5000. Its name: the Ideal Client Engineer – Curious Responsive Engaged Active Model 5000. ICE-CREAM 5000, for short. (Because who doesn’t love ice cream?) We started out by asking some of WordPress developers what traits their ideal client would possess, and we’ve sorted out their responses below. What makes […]
How To Build the Perfect WordPress Developer
What makes a great developer? To find out, I talked to people who work with devs the most, clients. So, as long as we’re contemplating how to build the ideal dev, I thought it would be fun to frame this discussion in the world of robotics. What features would the DEV-BOT 5000 include? What would interactions with it be like? Let’s see what clients said about their very real, 100% human interactions with developers to gain a better understanding of what this bot’s feature set would look like. The Perfect Developer Should… Be Communicative The ideal WordPress developer’s communication module […]
How Social Media Can Be Used To Launch A Developer’s Career
I went into writing this article with wide eyes. “I’m going to find a handful of devs who have started (or propelled) their careers through social media.” And sure, social media has been a helpful part of many developers’ marketing strategies. But what I found wasn’t so straightforward as a list of developers with great origin stories. In fact, I found many who didn’t find social media all that useful at all. The insights provided by the devs I spoke with are even more interesting than what I originally hoped to find. A “Big Picture” Discussion About Social Media The […]
9 Things WordPress Developers Wish Clients Knew About Building Websites
We’ve all heard the client horror stories. You know, the ones that bring to mind a certain comic from The Oatmeal? Still, if you’re a client and unsure of what goes into the development process, coming to a place of understanding means viewing things from the developer’s perspective. To help out clients (and give devs some peace of mind), we’ve put together a list of nine things WordPress developers wish clients knew about the site design and development process. A look through this list ought to act as a bit of validation for devs and be highly informative for current or […]
Will Immersive Education Lead To A Generation of Developers?
So, I was reading news online the other day and I came across a story about this new toy from Fisher-Price that’s designed to give preschoolers their first introduction to coding. “Say what?” I thought as I clicked through to read it. Apparently, the Think & Learn Code-a-Pillar is a toy that’s meant to introduce 3 year olds to the concepts behind coding including problem solving and sequencing. It’s super basic, but that’s the point. Each segment of the Code-a-Pillar has a different function like turn left, turn right, flash lights, or make a sound. Depending on how you plug […]
How Being Like Jessica Jones Can Help Your Online WordPress Business
When it comes to business advice, a lot of it is pretty generic. “Don’t air your dirty laundry on social media” is one I hear all the time. Another is “always use professional language.” Now, this is typically good advice to follow but there are times when generalizations like these can actually hurt your business. When you think about it, there are tons of examples of businesses that don’t follow this advice at all. In fact, they scoff in the face of it and shout a hearty expletive, to boot. A great way to frame this idea is to think […]
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