Wordpress

January 9, 2013

Thoughts on Competition Among WordPress Developers

One of the observations I’ve made in the past 5 years as a WordPress developer is that there appears to be very little competition among those who directly interface with clients to provide services. Theme houses and plugins are in a very stiff and sometimes hostile battle for marketshare, in stark contrast to service providers.

This topic has been on my mind for a number of months as I’ve been consistently amazed and humbled by the openness of WordPress experts to freely help others on Twitter. We share code, jump in for a quick diagnostic, and even share pricing and work/life balance tips. At the forefront of the open model are Andrew Norcross (@norcross), Remkus de Vries (@DeFries), Brian Gardner (@bgardner), Nathan Rice (@nathanrice), Gil – Flashing Cursor (@flashingcursor), Bill Erickson (@billerickson), Jared Atchison (@jaredatch), and Carrie Dils (@cdils). More recently, Nick Croft (@Nick_theGeek), Brandon Kraft (@Kraft), and Robert Neu (@RealFATMedia) have made themselves into some of my newest besties – we’re even working on a new Genesis plugin for release soon.

WordPress community gone wrong

Just last week, one of my new friends mentioned above, Carrie Dils, wrote an article with a title that immediately made me wish I’d posted this when I put it in drafts as an idea. After reading it, we have differing angles and her situation is a real bummer for the WP community in her area. Go read it and we’ll continue the discussion: The Shocking Truth: I’m Not Your Competition.

We have a healthy WordPress community some places, most places

I also muse about it when I visit a developer site from the business card I’m handed at an event or social and I can’t help but think of the old HTML sites we used to make 8-10 years ago. It seems that there is a client for everyone, even those in the business who aren’t anywhere near current in their designs or premium themes and code (like a static site with a WP blog created in 2012 – because we all realized WordPress is a true CMS in 2007). I don’t needlessly have to link to them to shame them – we’ve all seen portfolios that make us wonder how they are feeding their families.

I think back to how I started without a portfolio and look at what crap I used to do compared to my current offerings and wonder how anyone hired me in 2009. Some peoples’ portfolios look like that today because they are just starting out as I did nearly 4 years ago. Conferences and Meetups bring on a combination of “you’re not my competition” and “wow, I’m not worthy to be called a WP dev.” I personally struggle between those two emotions – one is prideful and one isn’t valuing myself enough.

The worst thing you can do for your self-esteem is to compare yourself to others with more experience and talent.

My wife reminds me of this at least once per month when I show her a tweet, comment, or e-mail from someone I respect and admire where they give me kudos or validate something I’m doing. “That’s nice, but you know you worked hard to get to where you are and you know you deserve everything,” is her typical response to such petty notifications that “I’ve made it” because of a little validation.

Constantly improve, learn, and ask questions

We, as WordPress developers, and especially Genesis developers, are a community. I’ve never encountered a professional community so willing to help, give advice, give entire blueprints to their business, and more. Can you imagine a real estate agent telling someone all of their best hard-learned tips to a rookie who just hung out his shingle? If it happens, it’s not often.

Over the past year, I’ve tried more and more to learn the coding jobs that I had to hire @norcross to do for me. He’d do a job and I’d read the code.

I’d get another job, try his code, edit it around to suit the client’s wishes, and still hire him to fix my crap.

This happened job after job for the end of 2011 and the first 3 quarters of 2012. Then I figured out some major pieces of missing learning that prevented me from looking at code made in one instance an bending it to my will in another instance.

Be confident in your own abilities

I just outed myself as sucking at code. Not exactly – I suck at programming pure PHP and combining with jQuery and other extreme uses of CSS that I can try for 5 hours and not get the results an expert can in 20 minutes. Rather than beat myself up for a day (I’ll give it a good college try for 1-3 hours if it’s brand new or I think I should be able to make it work), I hire someone who will do a better, faster job than I can and still work on other stuff at the same time as that’s going on. I turned my 80% wasted work into only 20% wasted and eliminated 80% of my coding anxiety.

My strengths are in being utterly straightforward, no matter the cost to us (you’d be surprised how willing people are to work out a plan when you’re honest as early as possible), being admittedly too quick to respond to e-mails, and striving for complete trust in the process and and in my ability to get the job done, done right, on budget, and on time.

That’s all people want: a good product and good service. Give them anything excellent above that and just good across the board and you’ll have a client for life. More on that later…

What do you struggle with? How can I help you as I’ve been helped by so many to get me to where I am today?

Community contributions

Edward Caissie: I’m in … here’s a link: http://edwardcaissie.com/2013/01/you-are-the-competition-i-want/

January 2, 2013

The Genesis Framework Is the Only WordPress Theme You Need

StudioPress - Genesis — image credit: studiopress.com/features/

I’ve been using Genesis since its inception in February, 2010. I honestly can’t remember if I was part of the beta testing, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find an old beta copy in my WordPress archives. For the next 18 months, I alternated projects between Genesis and another theme framework, as well as another couple of really good theme houses who made themes that more or less fit what particular clients wanted. Then I stopped jumping around cold turkey.

Why I cut down to one theme

Well, going all in on Genesis is one framework, but many, many child themes. Now I switch between modifying a child theme that already looks great but needs some customization for a client or starting with a blank slate. I’ve decided to concentrate on just the Genesis framework for several reasons:

The global network of support is unparalleled. My fellow preferred developers work together to solve problems, help each other, and even help with a project when someone is too booked to take a new project.
Since it’s the biggest player on the market, everyone who makes products that integrate into themes, they account for Genesis and support any issues that come up better with sites running on Genesis. People also write plugins and snippets specifically for Genesis, knowing a lot of people will use them.
I know the site will last through many WordPress and Genesis updates without a major overhaul to any modifications.
I can reuse most of the code I create or collect from the community of Genesis devs on many sites without creating code from scratch or heavily modifying it to work in a new environment.

Studies have shown that your greatest gains in life will come from improving your strengths, not your weaknesses. So, instead of becoming good at all themes/frameworks, I’m concentrating everything into one platform with one set of rules and putting them all on one host. For the same reason I chose to only use WordPress in 2006, I have chosen to only use Genesis.

Why Genesis instead of another framework

With those good reasons to consolidate efforts into one framework, I had to choose between frameworks. I’d been using both Genesis and Thesis in 2010 for a few months, choosing Thesis for blog-centric sites and Genesis for sites with a homepage because of the child themes with great homepages already framed. It didn’t take long for me to realize that wasn’t as efficient as using one exclusively, especially when it came to later support.

Once a Thesis site had been up for a few months after I’d made my shift to Genesis, it would take me a good 5-15 minutes to get my bearings of where certain settings were, differences in hooks, and some things that were so different that I made the suggestion on more than one occasion to convert to Genesis (which most clients happily did). On my server with 55 WordPress installs and counting, only 2 of them are not Genesis sites.

I can copy/paste functions like a beast when there is an improvement I’ve learned that I want everyone to have. I know where in stylesheets to find modifications I’ve made. With well over a dozen very good Genesis-specific plugins that add tremendous power and flexibility, I have no desire to work with any other code.

I literally shudder when I read some code in other themes, even some premium themes.

What do you use?

I know I’m not alone as a StudioPress/Genesis-only developer. What I don’t know is how many of there you are – I’d love to follow you on Twitter or Google+ if I’m not already (you can also find my personal Google+, but I use it mostly for photography). Do you still switch between themes to meet a functionality purpose or do you bend a framework to your will?

December 31, 2012

4 Tips to Speed up Your WordPress Site

Speed is crucial in those precious first seconds someone visits your site. If you can’t satisfy someone’s basic desire to get content quickly, they won’t care how good your content is and won’t stick around to find out if it was worth the wait.

There should be no wait.

People are an impatient breed. In separate studies, Amazon showed a 1% decrease in purchases for every 1/10th of a second of delay they intentionally added to their servers and Google experienced decreased searches when tripling results by taking 0.5 seconds longer. Page load speed directly influences how long people will stay on your site. Google ranks slower sites lower than sites with a faster load, all other things equal. The numbers any way you look at it tell you to speed things up.

I’ve been a constant tweaker of code, plugins, servers, hosting plans, and all of that stuff isn’t for everyone, so here is the quick version of all that work to find speed success.

Use a FAST host

If your hosting company/plan can’t serve up content quickly, it won’t matter what you do on the server, no one will be able to see content faster. You’re at the mercy (or benefit) of your host first and foremost.

I use WP Engine – a managed WordPress host – after a steady progression from bad shared hosting to good shared hosting to VPS to managed hosting. I have about 10 solid reasons why its $29/mo is the best money you’ll spend on your WordPress site and more than 25 of my clients have migrated their business sites to WP Engine, with more making the move soon.

Use an optimized theme

I’ve seen lots of free and “premium” themes do things that would make Hannibal Lecter cringe – things that ought not to be. Ever. Some slow a site down by multiple seconds because they were poorly written to load all of the “features” on every pageview and in the header rather than the footer (more on that later).

The best advice is to go with a reputable developer with a proven track record of quality and support. For me, that’s landed me with the Genesis framework by StudioPress since 2010. There are others, but I’ve been down “the path of many roads” and it led me to sticking to one and I’ve not yet regretted my choice in over the past 18 months.

Cache your content as much as possible

Some really good hosts offer automatic caching and CDNs while others just require you to use a caching plugin or a good 3rd party CDN to vastly improve the load times of content that’s already been processed and quickly fetched from the cache. CloudFlare is a great option for simple CDN setup and many hosts offer it as a simple option to enable it.

Be conservative in your use of plugins

Plugins can slow a site down just as much as any or all of the previous points. Sometimes, they’re five times worse than all of the other downfalls put together, taking 20-30 seconds to load a page. Not every new benefit or feature you want to add to a site requires a plugin. Often, there is a simple line or snippet of code that you can easily add using any one of hundreds of tutorials to avoid a plugin.

Simple, eh?

That’s not too much for the average semi-proficient WordPress user, at least not to receive the core benefits of these steps. You might have a more cookie-cutter site unless you happen to be able to do all of the changes (and modify the theme to suit your design style, if you change to a framework), but your site will instantly be a hit with Google and readers who aren’t so caught up in fancy design.

If you want/need any help, I’m always available via the comments or my contact page.

December 5, 2012

How to Use the WordPress 3.5 Media Manager

The new WordPress 3.5 Media Manager is arguably the biggest improvement to the WordPress core since 3.0 added custom menus, custom post-types, and the header/background customizations in 2010. That was a huge release and stands as the update that added the most functionality at once.

WordPress 3.5 is a milestone because it’s an exercise in efficiency — options and functions being removed — and improvements to existing functions. Fluff has been removed and what remains has been improved drastically.

Media Manager

You’ll notice as soon as you’re ready to insert your first image of WP 3.5 that the buttons above the post/page toolbar has changed. Gone are the words “Upload/Insert” with the icon of a camera and musical note. It’s also sporting a cleaner toolbar without shading or button outlines.

Once you click the Add Media button, you’re introduced to the new image experience: a full-screen drag-and-drop zone. Everything within the browser viewport is a drop zone now.

That’s just the start, though. Once you navigate to or drag in images, the new uploader shows itself. I’m putting so many images in this article, I wish I’d upgraded this install to 3.5 RC3, because it’s that much better than 3.4.2. Anyway, you’ll see all of the media in the Media Library after it’s done crunching the new images. There is a drop-down menu for various media, and you’ll most likely want to stay in the current post image, but a nice addition is being able to add a gallery using any image in the library. Prior to 3.5, only images attached to a post/page could be used in a gallery unless you edited the shortcode.

New to 3.5, you can now include/exclude images attached to the post (or just in the library) without editing any shortcode, which was one of the biggest pains of using galleries up until now. Pick and choose and sort the order. Man, I wish I was using 3.5 right now… because this sucks in 3.4.2 — I’m editing shortcode now to get 3 images above and a few below, which requires finding the image ID number. Trust me, it’s awful if you’ve ever tried.

Wrap-up

That’s it for an overview of the changes to the Media Manager in WordPress 3.5 for now. Hit me in the comments if you want a tutorial on something specific once you update and start using it. I’m here to help. I’ll be posting some more info on 3.5 in the following weeks highlighting the other changes.

Response to comments

I have a comment below that you can’t NOT link to anything and that the insert from URL is missing. Here are screenshots that say otherwise… although both of these images are already shown in the images above if clicked to see the entire windows of the Media Manager – these are just small areas of the larger shots above.