I just finished up a project that involved an impromptu introduction to WordPress MU – THE mother of all blog-related projects for Absolute (so far). In about one month, we set up 27 blog sites (one of which is a site to rule them all), developed 3 unique themes (with … read more
Today I found a nifty WordPress plugin that gently reminds new visitors to your blog to subscribe to your RSS feed. WP Greet Box shows up when visitors view a post, and even customizes the experience based on where the user arrived from (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). You’ll probably notice … read more
So, how do you get your readers to explore the rest of your blog posts? Maybe you can offer them some more information about the post they’re on, as well as some convenient links to the post(s) immediately following or preceding the post they’re looking at. The magic code, which … read more
You’ve decided to have your web site professionally designed and developed. Good decision! Now what?
You might already be thinking about the look of your web site or thinking about some cool bells-and-whistles that would be fun to have on your web site. Stop now.
First things first – you need to … read more
WordPress is a beast that I love to hate to love. When it works, it works very well, which is 99% of the time. But when it doesn’t, well, then I can usually plan on spending at least 4-6 hours researching why it’s not, and then (most of the time) … read more
A recent example of a debugging episode with IE6 -
We recently discovered that a form on a certain website had mysteriously stopped working in IE7 and Firefox (2 or 3, I don’t know which version) on a PC. More specifically, something was preventing the user from clicking on the form … read more
Here’s the scenario: you’ve just launched a new web site, now you need to get some visitors.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, including but not limited to:
Tell people you know to go there
Put your web site address on all your marketing materials
Work on getting your site … read more
If you are planning to go it alone with Search Engine Optimization, here are a few basics to help climb the search ranks.
1- Avoid pronouns. It, they, these, those, our, he, she and their should be avoided when possible. These words are vague and get overlooked by search engines.
2- Use … read more
I ran across a problem with the WordPress 2.5 plugin EventCalendar where the calendar worked fine, but when you click on a date in the calendar to view the Event post, it would return a Not Found error page. The fix for this is an unofficial patch. Basically two files … read more
After changing a WP blog to display a static home page, I was trying to find a way to also display Posts – the way they normally displayed on a default install – and make a link to that page. What I found instead was a nice, dynamic way to … read more
On a recent site design, I ran across a rare CSS bug in IE 6 & 7. This site has a great demo of what goes wrong (view the buggy pages in IE 6 or 7 to see what I mean), and a very easy hack/fix.
IE6 resize bug position: relative … read more
You’ve probably heard stories from a few friends about their Web site not turning out as expected. There are various reasons as to why some people’s expectations aren’t met. In many instances, it’s due to inadequate content preparation and being unable to effectively communicate your vision to your web designer.
Putting … read more
I get asked this question a lot.
In the world of web site design and development, clients and prospective clients frequently ask “is this possible?”. This question is almost always related to adding features and functionality to a web site.
Most of the time, or actually pretty much all of the time, … read more
For some reason, the hacked code I had in place to make Gravatars show up in Posts and Comments mysteriously broke over the weekend, so after a bit of troubleshooting (and an attempt to guesstimate the issue that turned into a neat feature that makes the author’s email address link … read more
Well, that depends. Does your email subject line length rival some Shakespearean lines, or is it concise and to the point? Does it frequently include the words Reminder, Help, Percent Off or FREE? For that matter, IS IT WRITTEN ALL IN CAPS? According to several best practices studies done on … read more
