Ones I made or Like
I just got back from WordCamp Grand Rapids, and the theme of the camp was tools and services to make WordPress better. I spoke about some tools I use for Creator Courses, specifically revolving around the e-commerce portion. I also learned about some great WooCommerce tools from the attendees. I’d love to share some of them with you.
I work with WordPress on a daily basis. By working within my own sites, setting up new sites, and testing new things, I come across a lot of WordPress tools. As a result, I have a group of WordPress plugins that I’ve come to rely on. There are some that are site specific (like WooCommerce and LearnDash on this site), but there are also those plugins I install on every single WordPress site I set up. Here’s a list of those WordPress plugins in no particular order.
So you need to buy a car. You start by setting a budget and picking a make and model you like. Determine if you want new or used. Do some research online; perhaps you consult a Kelly Blue Book. Then, armed with a good idea of what you need, what you’d like, and how much you can spend, you go to the car dealer. You shop around a bit. But you know for sure, if you want a Ford Fusion, you’re paying between $20K and $25K. There’s a sticker price and most dealers will stay within a few thousand of that. But what about website cost?
I’m going to cut to the quick with this one. Last week AgileBits, the company behind popular password manager 1Password, rolled out a new subscription-based service and with it, 6 months of 1Password for free. While I have been a big proponent of Dashlane I’ve noticed that the quality of the service has been steadily decreasing – problems with syncing, crashing, inconsistencies between platforms, and a really, really ugly Windows 10 app. I decided to give 1Password a try, and along with that, export all of my data out of Dashlane. It was an adventure, but with the help of 1Password’s support, I managed. Here’s how.
You have definitely been here before. You’re on a website for a restaurant or store you perhaps what to visit. You look for some information that will help you, but all you see is some blurb about the business, maybe a slider of images, and other miscellaneous information. But that’s not what most people need – especially if the business is a brick-and-mortar business. And while I’ve written about websites for small businesses before, I’d like to talk about 5 things every business’ website should show on the homepage.
When I launched WP in One Month in November, it was admittedly a bit rushed. I set up a “preview” class (whatever that is) and promised a discount without really explaining what attendees would get out of it. I’d like to take a moment in this blog post to answer these questions:
I went to Catholic school my entire life, from Pre-K all the way up to when I got my Master’s Degree. While I haven’t always been the best at practicing my religion, something I have always done was adhere to the activities surrounding Lent: no meat on Fridays, and to ‘give something up’. The real reasoning behind giving something up is to have you do something that will ultimately make you a better person, hopefully in some long-lasting fashion. That’s why this year I wanted to do something different, and why I created a new website: 40 Days of Help.
Every year I publish my list of resolutions as well as a scorecard from the previous year. For 2015, I’ve redesign the site (well, I used HTML5 Boilerplate) and broke my resolutions down into 2 categories: “Do More” and “Do Less.”
Over the weekend I happened to be awake and in front of a computer when I came across this tweet from @jenseninman, where she mentioned that she had 2+ hours of uninterrupted time to work on the amazing @CenterCentre project. This got me thinking that it’s been a while since I had some solid time to myself, uninterrupted and distraction free. I also thought that a dedicated blog for how to becoming distraction free seemed like a good idea. When I looked, the (amazing) domain uninterrupt.me was available. What was I supposed to do?
Recently I was faced with a pretty interesting problem where I wanted to have a page that was structured: Content – Widgets – Content. Instead of hacking together some sort of Content – Sidebar – Metadata on the backend, I decided to make sidebar widgets accessible via a shortcode you can use in the WordPress editor. You can download the code on Github here.
(and use it to your advantage instead)
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