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What’s the easiest way to launch a WordPress site? It seems like all the hard work is already done. You’ve designed and built the site. Now, it’s just a matter of getting the site on the server. It seems straightforward, enough. So, where’s the hold up? Plenty of things. Personally, my biggest frustration is time.…
I’ve been working on a build for a site where I designed a massive mega menu. There were a couple of tricks, here (the criteria): I didn’t want the user to have to click to reveal the menu. The top item doesn’t link to a page, it simply launches the mega menu. Not all the…
Recently, I was working on some custom code within WordPress. I was trying to do a little bit of testing and troubleshooting to determine what values were available to me within the objects WordPress was returning. <?php var_dump($some_variable); ?> The PHP function var_dump() is great for dumping out whatever value is being stored in your…
I love MailChimp. Let’s be honest, the price is right (forever free under 2,000 subscribers). — As an added bonus, I’ve always been fascinated by their design and user interface. But, still keep in the interest of honesty, it’s not quite as intuitive as I’d like it to be. If you want to use some…
It seems like background video is all the rage. — or maybe it’s on the way out? Regardless, how do you do it? What are the best methods for file compression? and loading? It’s really not as hard as you might initially think. It just has that cloud of unknown hovering over it. So, let’s…
Last week, Danny Lewandowski, commented on my post My Sass Mixins, Extends, and Functions, asking my thoughts on Sass Extends vs. Mixins. Let me provide a little bit of context: The post was about a Sass broilerplate that I’ve created and use with every project. — It’s great because I don’t have to reinvent the…
As a designer, one of my favorite touches is to customize the design of a radio button and checkbox. In my humble opinion, it’s just one more step toward finesse that says, “I’ve taken the extra step to make sure that my site, in its entirety, is branded and cohesive.” Compare this: To this: See…
You’re building a site and you want something to look like this: It looks straight forward. It would be pretty easy to just write some HTML along these lines: <strong>Tags:</strong> <a href="#">Front End</a>, <a href="#">HTML</a>, <a href="#">Workflow</a>, <a href="#">Web Development</a> But, is that really semantic? You have a list of items, so it would make…
What is a framework? This seemed like a good place to start. Don’t worry, I’m not going to throw out Webster’s definition, or Wikipedia’s for that matter. A framework is simply a standard way of dealing with a common type of problem. In our case, in the world of front-end development, it means creating a…
A while back, I wrote about the WordPress plugins I put on every site I build. There’s another set that I keep in my back pocket for specific use cases. MemberPress There are a bunch of membership plugin options out there. I’ve tried several: Restrict Content Pro, Wishlist Member, Members, I could go on, but…
This week, I’ve had to step back into the dark ages and develop a site on the server. Ugh. I hate it. It feels clunky. I’m paranoid I’m going to overwrite the wrong file. If I mess something up, I’m scrambling. I’ve developed (what I consider) a pretty perfect workflow. I’ll break down my workflow,…
We’ve talked about developing sites locally using MAMP. Awesome, right?! The only “problem” is suddenly you’re juggling multiple database configurations. How do you manage that…easily? I’ll show you two different ways. The first way, is my go to. I’ve been using this method for a couple of years. The second way, I ran across this…
Introduction A long time ago when animals could talk and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I would make updates to a site directly on the live server. My workflow involved: duplicating the existing file (say style.css) prepending the date to the filename (style-100812.css) then editing the original file (style.css) It worked…most of the time. But, it…
One of the things that I’ve been experimenting with in my workflow is Style Guide Driven Development (I’ve seen it abbreviated as SDD or SGDD.) It’s the idea that you develop the user interface separately, within a style guide, first. Style Guides on the Design Side Let’s talk about style guides. On the design side…
One of the design “tricks” in my hat, I’ve been using quite a bit lately is styling the numbers differently than the rest of the content. In fact, I’m implementing this technique on this site: Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 IMHO, this gives your content more umph, creating more character and demonstrating your attention…
First, I’ll explain where we’re going: We want a horizontal navigation system that will span the entire width of the container element. As you resize the browser window, it continues to span the entire width. Then, once the items get so close together, the menu can readjust. Let’s take the following HTML: <nav class=“nav”> <ul>…
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