WordPress development is a hugely useful skill, but it’s also tricky to learn—especially if you learn things out-of-order and try to tackle advanced topics while remaining confused on the fundamentals.

This article explains what I’ve needed to know to work as a freelance WordPress developer.

This Cyber Monday deal roundup includes only WordPress products that we like, use, and recommend.

I was recently talking to a friend about new projects for Writers.com. He suggested developing a writing clarity checker “like the Hemingway app.” I’d heard of Hemingway the writer, but not of an app by that name, so I checked it out. It’s very cool.

I recently bought a drawing tablet (googling “Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphic Drawing Tablet (Medium)” should find it for you), because I had no way I liked to write out visual notes, especially timelines and complex process flows. It was one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time—I wish I’d thought of it five years ago.

I need to A/B test lots of parts of Writers.com, and I’ve been putting it off because I wasn’t sure which tool to use. Third-party SaaS solutions and WordPress plugins both feel to me like they’ll be a bummer to implement.

We use Slack to coordinate our work, and the Slack Notifications by dorzki plugin makes a very handy addition, by allowing us to create Slack alerts based on WordPress events on the WPShout site itself. We currently have it configured to alert the entire team whenever we publish a new post.

I’m always looking for tools that can give me a leg up on design, and I find that choosing a good color palette is one of the hardest and most subjective parts of designing a site.

Our site Writers.com has a lot of 404s stretching back across its long history. As I’ve started to work to clean them up, I flirted with simply 301 redirecting every 404ing link to the homepage. (There are a few plugins that do just that.)

WordPress has a number of lazy loading solutions, but the one I’ve most recently used to improve Writers.com‘s performance on our image-heavy pages is a3 Lazy Load, and I’m very happy with my choice.