Most people getting started with WordPress have some difficulty understanding the difference between the categories and tags taxonomies. You know the feeling, you’ve written a great post, now which category box to tick? Do I need to tag this? If you’re working with a completely empty blog then you can try to work out all your categories and/or…
What are WordPress plugins?
WordPress plugins are used to add to or expand on the functionality of your WordPress powered website. Commonly installed WordPress plugins cover such topics as contact forms, comment spam, and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). What else can WordPress plugins do? Mostly if you have an idea for something you’d like your WordPress website to do then the…
Why should I keep WordPress updated?
WordPress is an open source system, which means that the source code that powers it is freely available for anyone to download and use. This also means that anyone looking to hack into a WordPress website also has the opportunity to dissect the code and exploit any vulnerability they find. WordPress is used to power…
Improving WordPress search results pages
If you have a growing website then no matter how careful you are with organising your websites’ content there comes a time when adding search functionality becomes necessary. We were recently asked to add a search box to a clients WordPress powered website and set about making some improvements to enhance the users experience. Everyone…
What is a featured image in WordPress?
So what is the featured image in WordPress? and what does it do? Well it really depends on the theme that’s currently being used. We like to use featured images to represent posts/articles on the archive pages, so visiting a category or taxonomy will bring up a list of posts and display their featured images…
WordPress drop down menus for tablets
Keeping the navigation of your website as simple as possible is always a good idea, however sometimes you just have to use multi level navigation, and commonly a drop down menu is used. Recently we had to use a drop down menu for a clients responsive WordPress website – but quickly discovered the problem when…
Content management systems, open source v bespoke
We’re agnostic when it comes to choosing between open source and bespoke content management systems; both have their strengths and weaknesses. Over the past couple of years we’ve favoured the open source CMS (Content Management System) route, and have persuaded a number of customers’ using ageing bespoke system to make the switch to use an…
Making custom post types and custom taxonomies in WordPress
By default WordPress comes with a few post types already defined. But the two most obvious ones being pages and posts. The biggest difference between these two post types is down to how they are displayed by WordPress. WordPress Pages. Pages are generally used for content that’s fairly static; contact forms, about us, are the…
Why is my website a certain width?
At least once during a website build I usually get asked the question ‘Why is my website a certain width?”. It’s a fair question, and to be honest there are a few reasons why I usually like to set a maximum width to web pages. Screen sizes. Desktops, laptops, ipads, tablets, netbooks, phones, each available…