Mickey Mellen
Chase Livingston is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) working on the very popular Jetpack plugin. Jetpack is a powerful plugin with many awesome features. During our recent Meetup, Chase shared a walkthrough of the plugin and how to use it if you’ve never used it before, and how to take it to the next level if you’re already loving it and using it on all of your sites. Below is the Periscope recording from our live stream: (Sorry for the vertical filming… at this time, Periscope does not support the “wide shot”) Below are Chase’s slides if you would like to follow along with the video presentation. Jetpack offers support for Markdown. You can download our Markdown cheatsheet here and be an expert in no time! Leave us a comment and let us know what your favorite Jetpack feature is. If you have any questions, please leave a comment […]
Read MoreDuring our All Things WordPress Meetup, Diana Nichols demonstrated how using a pre-processor for CSS can go along way toward reducing your development time and ensuring consistency throughout your site. If you missed the Meetup, you can watch Periscope recording from our recent WordPress Meetup. Diana shows you how you can start using these helpful tools quickly and easily, and throws in some advanced CSS tips as well: (Sorry for the vertical filming… at this time, Periscope does not support the “wide shot”) Here is a link to the slides if you’d like to follow along with the recording. (slides will open in a new window) If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or feel free to post in any of our online WordPress groups. Upcoming events July 9, 6:30 July: How to Find Help With WordPress July 16, 11:00 am: Supercharging Your WordPress Site with Jetpack Other resources
Read MoreWe’ve said for years that “submitting” your site to search engines was a waste of time. It’s typically not harmful, but it’s of no value. Companies that offer “search engine registration” for websites are either misleading or shady, but in either case they’re completely ineffective. Now Google has come out to explicitly state that those kinds of submissions indeed are scams. A few days ago, Google’s John Mueller said the following: Ignore scams like “Domain name search engine registration,” which nobody needs — your site shows up in search just fine without it. Of course, that doesn’t stop companies from offering that service, likely to add to the list of SEO services that they provide in an effort to appear more comprehensive. That said, there are some things that you can submit to Google which may help. The most important is your “XML sitemap”, which tells Google about every page […]
Read MoreContent and blogging are an important part of your website. In our Meetup, we covered: How to find topics to write about How and why to manage categories and tags How to use the WordPress editor, including SEO settings How to promote posts on your site (widgets, etc) How to promote posts off your site, including social media and email marketing Watch the video: (Sorry for the vertical filming… at this time, Periscope does not support the “wide shot”) View the slides: Content and blogging from start to finish from Mickey Mellen Tools mentioned: Finding topics to write about: Google Keyword Planner http://keywordtool.io/ Hubspot blog topic generator Backlink tools: Open Site Explorer Google Webmaster Tools JetPack: WordPress plugin. WordPress.com Stats module lets you know how many visits your site gets, and what posts and pages are most popular. Bitly.com URL shortener: shorten your links with Bitly and you can go back […]
Read MoreDiana Nichols and Aaron Reimann walked through several approaches to creating a development workflow, creating a new site, and deploying it to a live server. Topics covered both Windows and Mac local hosts, as well as staging environments offered by some hosting companies. If you missed the Meetup, you can watch the recording here: (Sorry for the vertical filming… at this time, Periscope does not support the “wide shot”) Here is a link to the slides if you’d like to follow along with the recording. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or feel free to post in any of our online WordPress groups. Upcoming events June 11, 6:30 pm: Find Your WordPress Happiness June 18, 11:30 am: Content and blogging from start to finish Other resources
Read MoreDid you miss the Meetup today on installing WordPress from scratch? Our test live broadcast for Periscope was a success! If you missed the Meetup, you can watch the recording here: Tools / Themes / Plugins mentioned: Filezilla: free FTP solution Genesis Theme: WordPress parent theme Genesis simple edits: a plugin that allows changes to commonly modified areas within the Genesis framework. Genesis simple hooks: This plugin creates a new Genesis settings page that allows you to insert code (HTML, Shortcodes, and PHP), and attach it to any of the 50+ action hooks throughout the Genesis Theme Framework, from StudioPress. Genesis simple sidebars: This plugin allows you to assign widget areas to sidebar locations within the Genesis Framework on a per post, per page, or per tag/category archive basis. GM block bots: This plugin blocks semalt.com, buttons-for-website.com and others with a 403 Forbidden message so that they no longer show up in your Google Analytics […]
Read MoreI have an addiction to new technology. When the Apple Watch was announced, I set my alarm clock for 3 am so that I could order one immediately. I spend my life online, and I do virtually all my shopping and consume all my news through the internet. My favorite websites have been the ones that I can use readily on my laptop, my iPad, my phone and now even my watch. These websites are easy to navigate and provide interesting content. I have become so spoiled that I will only stay on a website where my online experience is simple and straightforward. Why does my online life matter? Because I’m not alone – according to Stanford researchers 75% of visitors admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on their website’s design. Nielsen Norman Group shared that viewers typically leave a website within 10 to 20 seconds. You […]
Read MoreDid you miss the Meet-Up today on Developer Tools? Our test live broadcast for Periscope was a success! If you missed the Meet-Up, you can watch the recording here: Aaron Reimann and Diana Nichols share a full roundup of the tools with links here: http://wpwhatnot.com/sessions/2015-05-developer-tools/ If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or feel free to post in any of our online WordPress groups. Upcoming events May 14: Community Support for Your WordPress Website May 21: Starting your WordPress site: installing from scratch, plugins, and next steps Other resources
Read MoreWordPress version 4.2 has just been released and you can download it here. While there are no major security fixes in this release, it solves a huge list of small bugs and has a few great features. New “Press This” The “Press This” browser widget has been part of WordPress for a long time, but hasn’t been updated in years. It’s been completely revamped is now mobile friendly. Head over to the [tools] section of your control panel to check it out. Theme switching in the Customizer WordPress has gradually been adding more features to the “customizer” and now you can browse and switch themes directly in there. Streamlined plugin installs The process for installing and updating plugins has been greatly improved, allowing you to update a plugin without having to leave the plugin screen. Lots of emoji If you needed more emoji in your WordPress, you should be pleased. […]
Read MoreI like to tell people that “Google doesn’t search the internet” because technically it doesn’t. Instead, Google makes a copy of as much of the internet as possible on their massive servers and searches that instead. Whatever it finds there will be presented to you as the results, and Google hopes/assumes that when you click through the results the current version of the page is similar to what they had on their server. Indexing Google does this through a process calling indexing. It sends out spiders to crawl through websites and copy all of the info onto their servers. In theory, the more pages you can get into Google’s index, the more chances that one of your pages will be presented in a search result and you’ll get another visitor. The thoughts in this post will relate mostly to indexing, which is only half the battle. Once in their index, […]
Read More(admin note: we’ve recently switched back to Asana, which you can read about here) A few years ago we made a major switch from Nozbe to Asana for our internal task management. Asana was awesome, and I encourage you to check it out, but it couldn’t handle our needs as we continued to expand. Instead, we moved over to Teamwork.com a few months ago and couldn’t be happier. Why not Basecamp? In exploring our options, we kept coming up on Basecamp. It’s a solid product, for sure, but the deal-breaker was a lack of recurring tasks. Asana handles recurring tasks very well, as does Teamwork. While people have developed some scripts to help work around that shortcoming in Basecamp, that felt too clunky for something so important. Start Dates One of our issues was a lack of “start dates” in Asana. Having “due dates” is certainly needed, but a lack […]
Read MoreToday we hosted our monthly Meetup, discussing the ways that we make sure that the sites we create “really work”. Building a site that functions properly is one thing, but building a site that actually meets the goals of a business is another thing entirely. The discussion focused on the questions that need to be asked before our full website development process begins. Slides can be found below. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or feel free to post in any of our online WordPress groups. Upcoming events March 27 – 29: WordCamp Atlanta April 2: Building a Theme from Scratch April 9: A Deep Dive into Site Maps and Wireframes April 9: Went to WordCamp. Got the Tee Shirt. Overflowing with Questions!! Other resources
Read MoreLast week Apple unveiled their new MacBook Air and Google unveiled the new Chromebook Pixel, and they have one new interesting trait in common – a USB Type-C (“USB-C” for short) port. This is awesome and here is why. Phones are good, laptops are bad Over the past few years, most cell phones (with the exception of Apple products) have used a worldwide standard connection for charging called MicroUSB. It’s nice to have most of our phones using the same plug, but many tablets use a different connector, and almost every laptop is different. That’s all (hopefully) about to change with USB-C. Not only do we have the devices mentioned above, but Google has promised USB-C coming soon to new Android devices, and it’s expected that virtually every manufacturer will begin to follow suit. USB-C? USB-C seems likely to replace all of those plugs, and many more. Not only does […]
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