Have you been on a date/night out with friends/any social gathering lately? Let me make a bold prediction: At some point, the conversation you were having ceased because the other party was staring onto their cellphone to check Emails, Facebook or “quickly look something up on the web.” If it wasn’t the other person, it was probably you. So am I psychic? No. It’s merely the times we are living in. Cellphones and other mobile devices have become an integral part of our lives. I mean, have you seen the line for the new iPhones? Whether this development is good […]
10 Skills All WordPress Developers Should Have
23% of the internet? That can’t be right. That’s gotta be millions of websites. How come I have never heard of it then? She must be lying. Nothing can be that important and slip me by completely. This WordPress thingy must be more like a hobby. That can’t be a real job. For those who have no idea what WordPress is, being a WordPress developer must sound like a made-up job. Web designer, yes. They can sort of understand that. After all, websites have to come from somewhere, right? But WordPress developer, on the other hand, most people have never […]
Marketing Advice for Developers: How to Get Paid for Your Plugins and Themes
“Really?! Eight downloads? I have been sleep deprived for three months for that? I missed my daughter’s middle-school play for eight freakin’ downloads? Eight!?” Creating a product can be a disappointment. You pour your heart and soul into something for months, cut all the time from working with clients that you can, neglect your day job to the point that you are not sure if they won’t fire you, and isolate yourself to the point that your family starts referring to you as “the other person living here.” Until finally, it’s done. The thing you have been working on is […]
24 Awesome IFTTT Recipes for Automating Your WordPress Tasks
Running a website can be lots of work. Although WordPress provides an excellent and easy-to-use way of doing so, there are so many steps involved with maintaining a complete online presence these days that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at times. That’s because it is not the website alone that we have to work on. Although many of us wish we could just concentrate on the core of our business, such as producing excellent content, this is no longer enough. There are so many additional things going on in the periphery, most of them having to do with content promotion. […]
How to Set Up a WordPress Blog in 10 Minutes or Less
As a serious user of WordPress, one of the things you will do most often is run through its installation process. Whether it’s on your own site, a local development environment, or the live site of a client, the 5-minute WordPress install will be part of your daily life—like eating and breathing. Usually setting up a website with WordPress consists of the following steps: Download and unpack the latest version of WordPress Create a MySQL database and user with all necessary privileges Upload WordPress files via FTP Run the installation Done You can even skip part of the installation by […]
Best Practices for WordPress Theme Development
WordPress is slightly addictive. I always thought of it as a gateway drug into the world of web development. Maybe you started off just needing a simple website. You figured out how to install WordPress on your server, chose a theme that suited most of your needs, set up some widgets, maybe installed some plugins, and that was it for the beginning. Then came the day you really wanted something on your page but couldn’t find a plugin for it, and it wasn’t part of the theme options either. Or maybe someone told you about Firebug and showed you how to […]
The Best Web Analytics Tools for WordPress
“What gets measured, gets managed.” -Peter Drucker Imagine you wanted to visit a new restaurant on the opposite side of town. Although it’s in an area of the city you haven’t visited before, you understand its location from the map. Getting there should be completely doable with some trial and error, and maybe asking for the way once of twice. No biggie. Now imagine when you leave the house, somebody blindfolded you, spun you around a few times and then wished you good luck before sending you off to find said restaurant. You’re left groping blindly through the streets trying to […]
The Ultimate Guide to Updating Your WordPress Site
WordPress is constantly evolving. With the help of trusty developers and the constant feedback from the community, the platform is frequently updated. Besides new features, updates address security vulnerabilities, and generally improve the overall WordPress experience. Keeping your site updated with the newest version will give you the latest and greatest that WordPress has to offer. However, staying up to date can be tedious. Unforeseen hiccups, compatibility issues with plugins, and other unfortunate consequences are not unheard of. More than a few users have had their site break, experienced downtime, or lost data due to problems with the update process. Of […]
23 Must-Have Apps for Running a Website from Your Mobile Device
There’s no denying it: mobile devices are on the rise. Not only are more and more people using their devices to access websites, but phones and tablets are quickly becoming important tools for our careers. With the evolution of devices, we (as people) are becoming more mobile ourselves. Many internet entrepreneurs actually start out with the specific goal of being able to work from anywhere. In fact, this trend is increasingly more common for people across all careers. People simply do not want to be tethered to an office. The reason many of us opt for smart phones and tablets is because we don’t […]
How to Introduce Social Proof to Your Site
In 1968 two social psychologists made an experiment. They put various numbers of people, starting with one person and gradually working their way up to 30, on a street corner and had them look up at an empty sky for sixty seconds. The result of the experiment was that the bigger the crowd of skygazers, the more likely it was for passersby to stop and look up as well to find out what all the commotion was about. Placing a group of thirty upward-looking men on the corner caused more than 80% of pedestrians to stop and tilt their heads. […]
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