No matter whether you are running a blog or another kind of website, online success is all about creating a relationship with your audience. However, how do you do that? How do you establish a bond to an anonymous mass of individuals who happen to stop by your website? Luckily, together with the means to build an online presence, technology has also provided us with a way to understand those who visit us there. I am, of course, talking about web analytics. Analytics tools take a lot of the guesswork out of running a website. Without them, we would all […]

WordPress will never be able to do everything you want it to do… and that’s a good thing. If the platform contained every functionality known to man, it would be a monster. Goodbye, five-minute install! Fortunately, there are plugins. Lots of plugins. WordPress add-ons make up for what the core lacks. It’s no wonder the extendability provided by plugins is one of the platform’s biggest strengths. It is, therefore, no secret that, while there are tens of thousands of plugins in the WordPress directory, the difference in quality can be vast. In an attempt to divide the wheat from the […]

If you look at a WordPress page with any of the available developer tools, you might get the impression that it is mainly made up of HTML and CSS with some occasional JavaScript. However, what you see there is only the end product. In the background, much of any given WordPress page is actually constructed from PHP functions and database queries. These get interpreted by the browser who then spits out the page in a viewable form. While CSS works well to make superficial changes (colors, sizes, etc.), if you want to make bigger, structural alterations, you will need to […]

I have a serious problem with the WordPress editor. In my humble opinion, it has one big flaw that I have very little understanding of and that hinders beginners from creating good content. What I’m talking about is that the so-called kitchen sink—a second line of formatting options at the top of the WordPress editor—is hidden by default. To access it, users have to click on the furthest button on the right that says Toolbar Toggle. Only then does the second row of buttons appear. Why do I care so much? Because, besides the ability to indent and underline text, […]

The WordPress editor is the central work hub for content creation. Once you have your site up and running, you’ll probably spend about 80% of your time there. If you think about it, that’s pretty impressive. One part of your website that lets you take care of 80% of your work? Sounds like a powerful tool. The WordPress editor is something we take for granted. Its look, behavior, the even its formatting options are so intuitive that even newbies will quickly become familiar with it. This familiarity, however, is somewhat artificial. Just like the rest of the platform, you can customize […]

With its root as a blogging platform, it is easy to disregard WordPress as a serious business solution. The fact that it is open source and free to use for anyone can also certainly contribute to its image as a product for hobbyists. Clients who don’t know better might doubt its scalability for larger projects, and developers may therefore think they couldn’t land big-name clients by offering WordPress services. However, what people tend to forget or be unaware of is that WordPress by now powers 25% of the Internet. Yes, that is one quarter. Yes, of the entire Internet. So, […]