The Web Princess

WordPress & Genesis Theme Development

The Web Princess

Freedom Comes from Making the Bed

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There are some times when being in business for yourself is kind of a drag. Don't get me wrong, I love what I'm doing, I love the technical aspects of all the code tweaking and messing about with making pretty designs work as amazing, functional websites. I love the freedom that's inherent with freelance... That's the cool stuff. The business side of being in business? For me? Less fun. Less free. So, while it may seem unconnected to the business of doing business, let me start by … [Read more...]

A Path to Becoming a Professional WordPress Front End Developer

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I had the privilege of addressing the audience at WordCamp Welly 2014 this weekend where I shared my journey to becoming a professional WordPress front end developer and passed on some of the ideas I have about what skills and tools you need to go from someone who tinkers about with their site to someone who's turning out great websites with professional standards. For the record, I don’t think that this is the only way to get on that road, this is basically my story and how I’ve got to where … [Read more...]

Making your Gravity Forms Work for You – Part Two

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This is part two of a two part series... if you need to catch up with the earlier instalment... head over here to Making your Gravity Forms Work for You - Part One ... I'll wait for you to get back... OK, for those who just need a quick reminder, I've got my forms built and connected to each other so they're sharing data, and I'm ready to connect these forms up to my two external services.  My CRM (Zoho CRM) and my Project Manager (Asana). Now, if I was really committed (read, nuts) I … [Read more...]

Learning from Web Project Mistakes – a Case Study

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Late last year I was approached by a designer who needed development done of an adventure travel site. The company had been taken over by a new owner and they were keen to get the site updated, particularly as the office was about to move and they wanted to release the new site to coincide with updating everyone with the new address. This was one of those jobs that ‘needed a very short turnaround’ and on the basis of my initial investigations into how long I thought the job would take I advised … [Read more...]

Making your Gravity Forms Work for You – Part One

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I've been doing some thinking, and I've concluded, that one of the least well utilised functions on people's websites are contact forms. We probably all have them on our sites, and as useful as they are I am willing to bet that most of us aren't doing anything more than setting them up to email us some basic information. But... did you know, that they can do ever so much more than that? In this post, and the the next, I'm going to shamelessly use my contact form as an example. First off, I'll … [Read more...]

Can I get sued for using images on my blog?

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I received this in my inbox this morning, and thought it was too good a question not to share with the wider group. It touches on a couple of my interests, copyright and cat pictures, (who doesn't love cat pictures?)... This from Claudia, a client and friend who uses social media and her blog beautifully to interact with the clients of her cattery business Aylesham Cattery. I read a troubling article about a blogger that got sued for breach of copyright in the US.A photographer got in contact … [Read more...]

A New Genesis Social Icon Menu

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You may remember, I've done a bit of fiddling around  using WordPress Custom Menus to make lists of Social Icons. They worked but they were fiddly, relied on sprites which are a bit of a pain to deal with and furthermore also relied on users getting comfortable with the advanced settings of Menus and adding things like classes to the menu items.  I am also aware that a lot of people use the Genesis Simple Social icons plugin to create a genesis social icon menu. But given that I still like … [Read more...]

Let’s Talk about Naming Widget Areas and Sidebars

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So, you've installed a brand spanking new theme and are starting to plough into the prospect of fitting it out with some sweet customisations. Your theme has a bunch of content editable areas for you, because the developer knows you're smart and can find your way around their very clever structure. You have, what they call in the biz, intuition. So, you go to your Appearance » Widgets and have a scan down the right hand side of the page to decide where you want to put your content. Easy, … [Read more...]

More Mac Web Development Tools in my toolkit – Remote Tools

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I broke this post into two because I hadn't realised just how many tools I use, and really didn't want to bore you with at TL;DR entry... so hopefully you've read the last one and are now catching up with this one... Here are some more mac web development tools, and these ones focus on remote management of servers and cloud based data.Yesterday's post was all about tools I use locally on my Mac to edit, tidy, and write code  locally on my machine before I transfer content off to the server. The … [Read more...]

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