So there’s this guy who runs a business. Let’s call him Joe. Joe runs a contest on 99Designs and has shiny PSDs for his soon-to-be-built WordPress site. But he needs a developer and somehow he lands on your portfolio and he likes what he sees. He browses through your website and notices a resource called “How I helped ABC turn …
4 Quality Survey Tools for Creating Fun and Effective WordPress Polls
Figuring out what website visitors really want can be tough. After all, it’s not like you can just grab their attention and ask them for their thoughts, right? Well, actually, you can. Surveys are a tool you can use to stop beating around the bush and just ask for the information you need. While there are many strategies you can …
How I Built a Kick-Ass WordPress Theme With Upfront Builder (And Why I’m Freaking Out)
I am a photographer, a videographer, a designer, a writer, a marketer. I am not a developer… and I’m freaking out because I just finished building a WordPress theme from scratch – without writing a single line of code – with Upfront Builder. Most people I know have no clue what it is that I actually do. They know it has …
How to Customize the WordPress Multisite Activation Email with a Plugin
One of Multisite’s useful features is the way it lets you change the experience users get when they first register a site on your network. You can edit their welcome email and change the default content that’s created for their site. You do this by configuring your network settings in Settings > Network Settings. But there are two emails that are …
How to Code Your Own Custom WordPress Widget
Have you ever wanted to create a custom widget for your WordPress website? While WordPress does include a built-in text widget, which you can use to display HTML along with embedded CSS and JavaScript, if you want to do anything more than that the text widget just won’t cut it. What if you want to grab a bit of content …
Pricing Your Services: A How-To Guide for WordPress Developers
Pricing is tricky, to say the least. And no doubt you’ve had a similar conversation to this one I had recently with a massively popular (and profitable) blog I wanted to write for: Client: “I’m sorry to break this to you — but you’re nowhere near the $XX rate.” Me: “Thanks very much for your feedback. Much appreciated 🙂 Cheers” …
Will You Still Need a Child Theme With WordPress 4.7?
WordPress 4.7 is slated to arrive in early December 2016. While a lot of new features will roll out with the latest version of WordPress — the new Twenty Seventeen default theme, thumbnail previews for PDF uploads, and more — it’s the custom CSS editor added to the WordPress Customizer that caught my eye. The question this new feature raises …
The WordPress Loop Explained
The WordPress loop is big. It’s huge. It’s critical. Without it, your WordPress site won’t work. By this, I don’t mean that it’s large. In fact, it should be as lean, tight and quick as possible. But it’s a major part of what makes WordPress, well, WordPress. Without it you can’t query the database and display your content, whether that’s …
This is How WPMU DEV Makes Life Easier for WordPress Developers
Let’s face it. WordPress development is not for the faint of heart. Wages aren’t as strong as they are for other types of developers, competition is fierce, and you’re expected to work miracles in minutes — after all, it’s just a simple WordPress website, right? One way to address this conundrum is to simplify your development process by pre-making routine …
Why Premium WordPress Themes are a Blessing and Not a Curse for Developers
Before premium WordPress themes were a thing, we used to code everything from scratch. When I first started my career in web development and web design, every piece of HTML, every line of CSS, every piece of JavaScript, was all done by hand. Yeah, we had some tools to help us out, but they just automated a few things here …