Hi! I’m Alex Denning and this is WPShout, my collection of WordPress tutorials, which I started 3 years ago, just before my 16th birthday.

Help yourself to content, and say hi on Twitter if you need anything :)

—Alex

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An Economist’s Look: Competition in the WordPress Theme Marketplace

Published under Editorial, Landing.

I was doing some writing for Siobhan recently, and one of the topics I was covering was WordPress theme shops, and the economy that’s built up around them.

As a former Economics student, I got thinking about how the Premium Theme marketplace has built up from those early days of Revolution Themes over the last couple of years; how the market is structured and what that market structure means for consumers.

That thought process has lead me to this post, where I’m going to run you through the current state of the marketplace, what impact that has and what that means for consumers.

economics-themes

Before we start, a little bit of Economics background: we’ll be looking at things like barriers to entry, which are just any elements of the market which make entry by new businesses difficult, economies of scale which are benefits enjoyed by larger businesses and the aforementioned market structures which is, well, how the market is structured.

Those structures might be things like a monopoly, oligopoly or perfect competition. Take note of these fancy words, we’ll be using them again later!

Carry on reading →

Screencast: Responsive Design Made Easy

This screencast has a running time of 16 minutes.

I’ve written about responsive design here on WPShout before, but I don’t think I emphasised just how easy it is to do.

In this, the first screencast I’ve done here on WPShout for about two or three years, I take you through the very simple steps required to make your WordPress theme responsive.

Read more →

“Blogging Tips”… With A Twist: Introducing BlogBettr

Published under Landing.

Ever since I started blogging, nearly four years ago now, I’ve been fascinated with tracking analytics, tweaking copy and working out how changing little things impacts the “success” of that post.

Here on WPShout I’ve started making little changes here and there and through posts like Effective Landing Pages and my last post here I’ve started to share those techniques, tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.

It’s clear, though, from the analytics I’ve been tracking so religiously, that not everyone’s too interested in these fascinating discoveries I’m making.

Carry on reading →

Your Blog’s Content Is Irrelevant To Its Success

Published under Editorial.

Last week I friend of mine who’s a mathematician was helping me out with a formula I was trying to create which could predict how successful a post from a brand page on Facebook was going to be.

We worked for a couple of hours on what I had already and he changed it around a little and added some distributions I didn’t really understand, but by the time we were done we had a formula which we thought would do the trick.

Ah, but how effective are their posts?

We ran a couple of randomly selected posts through the formula and… yep, as we’d hoped, it was working pretty much perfectly and scoring the posts on a scale of 0 – 100, with 0 being the least successful post possible and 100 being wildly successful.

The results weren’t quite right, though; posts which (subjectively) were really good weren’t being rewarded and equally, posts which weren’t so good weren’t being penalised.

But here’s the thing: even when we added in a variable to account for the subjective quality of a post, it only accounted for roughly 7% of the total score. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, it means the actual content of a Facebook post is virtually irrelevant to the success of the post.

Carry on reading →

My Premium Theme Experience

Published under Editorial.

I’ve been working on a design for my girlfriend’s blog recently.

Heather wanted a blog to document her year studying abroad, so I set her up with a WP install on what’s — even if I do say so myself — an excellent domain, http://heather.in/ (and this is made all-the-more better by the permalink setup, so posts are published as heather.in/england/with-a-cold, for example).

I figured the quickest and easiest way to get the site off the ground was to use a premium theme. Heather was after a simple, personal-feeling theme so it made sense as a time-saver.

The shiny theme on the finished blog.

And so I set about finding The One®.

Carry on reading →