One of the things that happened last year was that I had a number of interesting conversations with a client seeking a quote who had been navigating the process of choosing a developer for their simple business website. I was one of three people up for the job. The client had come to me asking for a WordPress site as they'd used WP before and were a little familiar with how it works. But they were uncertain because the competitors touting for this work had rubbished WordPress as a viable … [Read more...]
A Path to Becoming a Professional WordPress Front End Developer
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
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
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
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...]
A New Genesis Social Icon Menu
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...]
More Mac Web Development Tools in my toolkit – Remote Tools
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...]
Mac Web Development Tools in my toolkit – Local Tools
In the process of updating this site's theme, (if you're reading via RSS, head over for a squizz... it's looking all brand spanking new over here!!) I have been tidying up my blog archives and came across a post I never finished; one that included a list of all the Mac web development tools in my toolkit. It was pretty out of date, so I thought I'd revisit it and write up a list of my current tools. I'm also interested in yours... what's in your toolbox? I'd love to know where we intersect … [Read more...]
Interview with a Princess
So, a few weeks ago I had the great opportunity to chat to Josh Kinal and the gang at The Nudge Melbourne about the relationship between designers and developers. If you're interested in such things, and perhaps curious what an Australian Kiwi accent sounds like... well, you can check it out here... http://thenudge.com.au/episode5/ Before the interview I had put together a few thoughts by way of a wishlist from devs for designers on slideshare too... wade in with comments if you've … [Read more...]
WordPress Template Hierarchy
If you've spent any time at all working with WordPress themes you'll have no doubt found yourself navigating the dark corridors of the WordPress Template Hierarchy. It took some time for me to get my head around which file to create when I'm making custom templates and the WordPress Codex has been invaluable in terms of figuring out what to put where. The Codex's diagram and my handy dandy little template code snippet that prints out which template I'm looking (below) at have been my 'go to' … [Read more...]