WordPress & Genesis Theme Development
One of the things that happened this 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.
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 I am, working full time as a freelancer, working exclusively doing website development on WordPress.
Part two of a the tutorial that runs through the process of making my Gravity Forms contact form collect a lot more data than just contact details, and then to share it with some of the business tools I’m using to manage client contacts and projects. In this, part two we look at how to connect the Gravity Forms data from WordPress with Zoho CRM (client relationship manager) and Asana (project management tool).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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… [Read More]
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 anything to add or you think I got it horribly wrong! All (reasonable) opinions welcome!!
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’ resources.
I came across a couple of alternatives today that I love!! Thought you’d like to check them out too…
