Just like a painter needs a brush, a blacksmith her hammer, and carpenter his saw, WordPressers need their own set of tools. While we have many different WordPress development tools at our disposal, most of the work happens inside a simple text editor. Whether you are a full-on plugin or theme developer or “only” an advanced user, we need code editors all the time: Configuring core files, changing styles, editing template files, you name it — a good chunk of our work is modifying lines of code. Therefore, it’s only good and proper that we use the best tool at […]

For the most part, learning WordPress is a steady process. Every day, we learn a little more, discover new plugins and tricks to get things done more efficiently, and push our capabilities in increments. However, every now and then we discover something big, something that that completely changes our workflow and opens up a world of new possibilities. A game changer. For me, one of those game changers was the discovery of Firebug. “You mean, I can directly change any element on my site in real time without any trial and error in my style sheet, reloading or anything? Woah!” However, […]

When it comes to SEO and getting traffic, the majority of people automatically think of Google. No wonder when the official word for “searching something on the Internet” contains its very name. With more than 50,000 searches per second, Google is definitely the king of search engines. So, from an SEO perspective it makes total sense to set up your site to please them. However, that doesn’t mean it is the only traffic source worth optimizing for. Believe it or not, there are alternative search engines that can also bring masses of visitors to your site. And I am talking […]

Does the following sound familiar? You want to make a change to your WordPress site. So you fire up the FTP connection, locate your desired file and download it, make the necessary changes and upload it back to the server. After that, you refresh your browser page to see the changes in effect. If that is your workflow, don’t worry. You are not alone. Everyone starts out like that. It’s only later that people professionalize with things like local development and trying out design changes via Firebug before committing changes to style.css. It’s a natural process and you shouldn’t be […]

It’s no secret that mobile traffic is a force to be reckoned with. In recent years, the number of mobile Internet users has surpassed that of desktop users. By now, more than one-third of Internet consumption happens via phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. In some cases, these numbers are even higher. In the USA, for example, mobile devices account for more than half of all digital media consumption. It is, therefore, no wonder that mobile capabilities of websites have become a ranking factor in Google as evidenced by the “mobile-friendly” tag in the SERPs. The conclusion: As a WordPress […]