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
We’ve recently been working on a horoscopes website for one of our clients that has some content that is for members only. The Cart66 WordPress eCommerce has been great for handling the PayPal subscriptions but I had to add some custom functionality so that new members on certain levels would be automatically signed up to a mailing list which is handled by Constant Contact.
Cart66 actually has Constant Contact integration which adds an “opt-in” style mailing list signup that is added to the checkout which would normally work fine for most eCommerce sites however I we needed to make the signup compulsory for the user and to do it seamlessly without the user knowing that this has occurred so they receive the daily emails that they have purchased.
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)
I love going to the monthly Brisbane Web Design Meetups that are held at The Edge and I occasionally put my hand up to speak so that I can share information about projects I’ve been working on and to hopefully inspire and educate the attendees.
The theme for Novembers Meetup was ‘What I Learn in 2011′ so I volunteered to do a 5 minute lightning talk titled ‘WordPress Is Taking Over The Internet’. I hope you enjoy it!
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:
Any of you who follow WordPress news sites or any WordPress geeks on Twitter will be well aware of the vulnerabilities that were found in the PHP image resizing script, TimThumb. TimThumb is being used in many free and premium WordPress themes so this vulnerability caused a bit of a stir around the place. I actually used the script on the current sennza WordPress theme because this theme was whipped up over 18 months ago very quickly and back then I hadn’t used WordPress inbuilt add_image_size which I’m using almost every day on clients sites these days.
Our blog uses VaultPress for backups and security and VaultPress were onto the vulnerability post haste. I’m often singing VaultPress’s praises on Twitter but I wanted to post on the record about just how amazing the VaultPress plugin and team are when it comes to backups and security! Read on to find out about yet another amazing VaultPress experience of mine!
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.
As my post titled ‘WordPress Is Not Just For Blogs Dammit‘ resonated so well across the world last year I decided to take up the Ignite challenge and do a 5 minute talk at Ignite Brisbane called ‘WordPress is Not Just For Blogs Dammit!’
I hope you enjoy watching this and learn some creative uses of WordPress!
There is a great discussion lead every time a company with no blog asks why they can’t get links. Another question, usually before that, is why do we need a blog at all, our product pages show everything there is to know about us and our services? And lastly, why on earth do we need to spend hours on social media chatting with people; we don’t call people on the phone just to chat with them and make them feel better do we? Well, no matter how many times these questions are asked, they are good questions that deserve a good answer.
