Beginners

I had just written the #1 resumes bestseller on Amazon and had hit over 40,000 Kindle downloads. All I had to do next was to build a website to help promote it. “That should be easy!” I thought. I was so wrong. When I created my first website, I overspent on my budget, couldn’t complete the project, and ultimately failed. I know firsthand some of the challenges faced when building a WordPress site. I’m here to share my lessons so that you don’t have to experience the challenges that I ran into. At the time, this was my first foray into […]

“Is WordPress right for my website?” Anyone building WordPress sites for clients likely has to deal with this question on a regular basis. As it turns out, client education is as much part of this business as installing plugins and writing CSS. For WordPress professionals, the platform is second nature and the benefits of using WordPress for building websites are completely obvious. However, we often forget that clients don’t possess that same knowledge. For some, that really isn’t a problem. All they want is a website and they don’t care about what’s running it. Others, however, do care and sometimes […]

WordPress has, without a doubt, been very successful. It is by now a powerful content management system powering millions of websites. However, that doesn’t mean that the development of the WordPress platform has come to an end. Quite the contrary, WordPress continues to evolve rapidly, with three majors releases in 2015 alone. Besides code improvements, every new WordPress version also brings new features. Some, like the WP REST API get talked about quite a lot. Others come in more under the radar. Because that is the way it is, in 2014 I wrote an article for Torque on lesser-known WordPress […]

Is it possible to run a successful website without an understanding of key web metrics? Possibly, but you would certainly face an uphill battle. The truth is, in today’s increasingly competitive environment, stunning aesthetics and solid content alone won’t cut it. Unless you get very lucky indeed, your chances of success are massively increased by understanding how your audience engages with your website. As the saying goes: knowledge is power. And, if you want a greater knowledge of your website, one tool stands head and shoulders above the rest: Google Analytics. In fact, almost a prerequisite for running a thriving […]

Many beginners find themselves awestruck by the  thousands of plugins available for WordPress. With all the shiny five-star options, it’s easy to slip into the trap of installing too many plugins in an attempt to bolster your website’s functionality. It is absolutely critical to understand that each plugin you add represents another moving part, which makes your site more fragile, complex, and bloated. As such, minimizing your plugin count is one of the best routes to a fast and stable site. With that necessary preface behind us, here are some warning signs you can check for to ensure that the […]