At the start of this year I made 5 Predictions about where I thought WordPress would be by the end of the year.
So let’s see how I did…
At WordCamp Sydney 2012 I gave a talk entitled “There’s More Than 1 Way To Skin a Theme” which was aimed at encouraging other developers to plan and develop websites in a more “client friendly” way. What I mean by this is developers should think more about how a client would use and manage their website, and less like how a developer would code it, after all, the client will be the one who uses the website long after the developer has finished.
After watching the recent Mixergy interview with Jason Cohen as few weeks back I felt like I should write a quick thank you to WP Engine.
Ever since we started Sennza I have been on the look out for a hosting company that knows WordPress back to front. We have had our fair share of war stories from hosting companies. Believe it or not, we once used Distribute IT before they died a painful death, but that’s another story.
After using upwards of 7 different hosting companies plus experiencing many other hosting environments with our clients I can say that for hosting WordPress websites, WP Engine is second to none.
Yesterday we had a call from someone that who had their WordPress website hacked and was in a panic to get it fixed ASAP.
For something that is easily avoidable this happens way to often. After getting in and fixing the website we were asked for a list of things to ensure this doesn’t happen again going forward, which made us realise, although there is some great documentation on this online, we don’t have a post about it on our blog.
First thing we did was enlist Sucuri to fix the malware. We could have poked around for serveral hours and fixed the problem, but that the end of the day these guys know security and malware back to front and for such a reasonable price it simply a no brainer. They found the malware pretty quickly so that left us to harden WordPress.
If you look inside most WordPress themes <head> tags, you will find a function called wp_head(). From a first glance, this function may seem fairly useless, however it is extremely important. A large percentage of plugins require the wp_head(); function to “hook” into the WordPress header. Without this code between your <head> and </head> tags, you may find that a large portion of your plugins will not work. Similar to wp_head(), you will find wp_footer() in the footer.php file of a majority of themes. This function is used by plugins to hook into your footer to hook code in. An example of something that requires this is Google Analytics.
Ok, so first up I know it might be a little late to be doing yearly predictions in February. I’ve had this post sitting here for a few weeks now so I thought I would publish my thoughts anyway. The predictions I have might be a little bold, but frankly safe predictions are boring. Having said that, although they may be bold I think that all these predictions are definitely more than possible. Continue reading
Hey everyone,
My name is Mat and I am proud to be the newest addition to the Sennza team.
I will start with a little bit about me. I am 22 years old and have a passion for Web Development. When I’m not behind the monitor, you will find me riding my bike or at the beach.
Like Bronson and Lachlan, I too have fallen in love with WordPress. After starting on other CMS (Joomla, Drupal), I found WordPress and have never looked back since!
If you want to keep in touch with what I am doing, feel free to follow me on twitter @MathewHood.
I look forward to interacting with you all and hope you get some benefit from what I have to offer.
-Mat
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
- Jony Ive
(From Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson)
Design: The practical solution to a problem.
Mike Monteiro – Let’s Make Mistakes Podcast #23
In response to the the Obama campaign requesting designers to submit free work for the governments “Support American Jobs” campaign, Mike explains why design is so important.
If you define design as:
Google has made more changes to its search algorithm in recents months than any other time I can remember,with the Panada update and the 4 corresponding revisions since Feb 2010.
I believe that all these things now mean one thing for SEO’s. Design now matters for search engine optimisation, and design will continue to matter more and more.
