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Okay Themes: Back to the Basics

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Community

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November 7, 2013

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It’s Thursday yet again, and that means it’s time for #ThemeThursday! Carrying on from the last three weeks, we will look at a premium WordPress theme provider and attempt to assess its good (and bad) points. Today, the theme provider in question is Okay Themes. Run by Mike McAlister, Okay Themes came into existence as a full-fledged theme shop back in 2011 (although Mike has been selling his WordPress themes via ThemeForest since 2008-09). Most of the themes currently offered by Okay Themes are sold on ThemeForest. Theme Features Okay Themes currently offers 24 themes in total. Of these, 10 are free […]

Plugin Development: Do Less

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November 6, 2013

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In scouring the many WordPress plugins that exist on the web for my work on Tidy Repo, I’ve noticed some trends. Some plugins do very little; I’ve often said that plugins like Quick Page / Post Redirect and Simple Google Maps Shortcode “do just one thing, and do it well.” Others are more robust, offering turn-key solutions for large-scale problems. Think WooCommerce or Buddypress. It’s only very rarely that I come across a plugin that is actually somewhere in the middle of these two categories, and it got me thinking about which approach I prefer. And the more I thought […]

Typography Matters

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November 5, 2013

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One of the best ways to enhance the polish and professionalism of your website’s design is to choose great fonts. The process of choosing a font, or a combination of fonts, is often dismissed as an easy task. But the truth of the matter is—when editing a WordPress theme or trying to roll-your-own web design—deciding on typography is actually much more than a process. It’s an art, in and of itself, and there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. Designers who went to art school, and font foundries filled with people talking about things like “ascenders,” […]

Free WordPress Themes Fresh From October

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November 4, 2013

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October has come and gone, and just like any other month, it witnessed the release of many new and impressive WordPress themes…both free and premium. In general, the trend during October was clearly in favor of blogging themes, even though a good number of portfolio themes were released as well. Just in case you are looking for premium themes, check out our ongoing series, #ThemeThursday, where one new premium theme provider is reviewed per week—the previous installments include Theme Furnace, ColorLabs and DevPress. However, if you are looking for free WordPress themes, you are in the right place. There were several free WordPress themes released during […]

Segmentation as a Product Design Technique

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November 1, 2013

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Most of the time we think about market segmentation as a marketing strategy. Better Messages In one case, we use it to help us target our messaging. In this approach, we break up our target market into groups that have concerns or traits in common, and we shape our campaigns so that each segment gets a more perfect message. Let’s say we have two kinds of users—business folks building a single membership site, and developers who will build several membership sites a year. In this scenario, a WordPress membership plugin developer might use segmentation to shape their key messages so […]

DevPress: All About WordPress Development

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October 31, 2013

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It is time for the third installment of our ongoing series, #ThemeThursday. Today, we’ll be taking a look at yet another impressive but lesser known WordPress premium theme provider—DevPress. As always, this article is by no means a buying guide. Instead, I shall attempt to assess the positive and negative aspects of DevPress as a theme maker, thereby helping you make an informed decision before deciding to purchase any WordPress theme. Also, just in case you missed the previous parts in this series, feel free to check them out: so far, we have covered Theme Furnace and ColorLabs & Company. […]

Episode #27: Stop Squeaking Lisa

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October 31, 2013

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Show Notes Host The guest host of the Halloween version of the DradCast Episode #27 was Lisa Sabin-Wilson of Web Dev Studios. What were they sippin’ on? Dre was drinking water Brad was drinking Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. Lisa was drinking Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. How did the host get into WordPress? Lisa has several new editions of books coming out—the 6th edition of WordPress for Dummies, 2nd edition of WordPress Web Design for Dummies and the 2nd edition of WordPress All in One For Dummies. Lisa also recently spoke at PressNomics about her journey with WordPress. Pressing Topics of the Week WordPress 3.7 […]

Why Schema.org is Crucial to WordPress

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October 30, 2013

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Recently, there have been a number of articles discussing the new Hummingbird upgrade on Google Search. Many of you have probably already heard that because of this change, it will be more important to use Schema.org in your site’s syntax in the future. But what is Schema.org, and how does it apply to how I’m building my web pages? Schema.org was a joint effort by Google, and a number of other search engines, started a few years ago to try to get more semantic information from web pages. In essence, it teaches content owners to think like programmers by creating inherited […]

WordPress Retreats

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Community, Events

Published

October 25, 2013

5 Comments

The trend is small. But it’s growing. The concept is simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for it to bubble up in our own WordPress community. But it’s powerful. And useful. And the financial benefits won’t be immediate. But they’ll be felt for years to come. So it makes sense that we should stop and take notice. To understand it is to understand the nature of how most of us work in the community. We’re all over the map. We’re located across the globe. The person helping with support might be six states […]

Co-Creating A Better Support Experience

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Community

Published

October 24, 2013

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Too often, product support is seen as simply a way to correct users who just can’t seem to do things properly. But what if we saw support as a way to educate users, and more importantly find the the difference between a developer’s concept of what a plugin or other product can do and what users think it can do? If these two perceptions are different, then it is a clear sign that a new approach is needed for the support user experience. Redesigning a support system is an opportunity to not only better educate users about how to use […]

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