Towards the end of 2015 I shifted my working method and started using the Parent and Child functionality of WordPress themes to power all my new clients websites. Previously to this I used a Starter Theme that got customised to each individual clients needs. What is a Starter Theme? A starter theme is basically a bit of…
Review: WooCommerce Membership by RightPress
What follows is a real world case study in how I used the WooCommerce membership plugin by RightPress. Background. One of my clients originally approached me with a membership website running on WordPress and the Magic Members plugin. Unfortunately the plugin had been badly configured and users were becoming despondent with the website and membership…
Dynamic Excerpt Lengths in WordPress
Excerpts are used in loads of places in WordPress themes, and adjusting the lengths of them is very easy using the functions already built into WordPress. However there’s one styling aspect that troubles me when using excerpts across multiple columns. The Problem. When the post titles used in your excerpts are all a common length…
What’s the difference between WordPress Categories and Tags?
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…
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…