Hello, pleased to meet you!
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Hi everyone, Alex here. It's been a while; two years, specifically, since I last wrote anything vaguely personal on WPShout, so I thought I'd give you a little update about me and how that's going to impact WPShout in the coming future. The good news is that it's all good news!
(read more)First Steps On A Fresh WordPress Install
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As I'm sure most of you do too, I'm now managing a good handful of sites which are running WordPress. I've now got a solid routine going when it comes to getting WordPress up and running and in this post, I thought I'd share it with you.
(read more)Affiliate Marketing For WordPress
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In recent weeks I've been trying to diversify WPShout's income -- you'll notice that Shout now sports some links in the sidebar pointing to WooThemes and WPWebHost, both using affiliate links to do so. There are a couple of ways I'm now handling my affiliate marketing through my WordPress Dashboard and this post will run down the different ways I'm now doing this.
(read more)Why WordPress?
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Nearly two years ago now, I asked a number of members of the WordPress community why they used WordPress. Over those last two years WordPress has changed vastly and thus it's time to update that post with the reasons I still use WordPress in 2011.
(read more)Single Page Portfolios With WordPress
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I'll admit, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do this. I was tasked with making a single page design easily editable. Obviously, I looked to WordPress so that I had a nice backend. Question was how to do it? Posts were out of the questionso I looked to pages. But you can't display multiple pages on the same page, can you?
(read more)Email Newsletters For WordPress
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As you may have seen in last week's competition post, I recently created an email newsletter for WPShout. You may have also noticed I ended up using MailChimp instead of a built-into-WordPress solution. This post shows the how I did it.
(read more)Integrating Facebook With WordPress
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Despite Facebook being the most successful of all of the social media sites, I've never made WPShout a presence on the site or attempted to integrate Facebook onto WPShout in any way. I tend to view Facebook as more personal and other sites such as Twitter more appropriate for both marketing the site and interacting with the people who read it.
(read more)Plugin-less WordPress e-Commerce
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I recently worked on a typical small e-Commerce site: about twenty products, a couple of buying options, a couple of pages for about and whatnot and a little blog added on the end. Naturally, I looked to WordPress to handle everything -- the products, the blog and the pages. With custom post types, this wasn't a problem; a custom post type for the products and then an individual entry for each of the products, with standard posts being used for the blog and custom page templates for the pages. We're not going to look at those, though, instead we're going to look at how the e-Commerce part of the site worked.
(read more)Stopping WordPress Comment Spam
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I recently set up a blog for my band, Ellipsis. Just using a simple theme which I customised a little so it worked better as a band website. There's also a load of fancy CSS3 goodness, naturally. I ran into a problem, though. The blog was getting a ton and a half of comment spam. All of it was being blocked by Akismet, which is great, but that wasn't stopping it getting there in the first place. This is where we roll out the super-duper-ways-of-stopping-comment-spam.
(read more)Speeding Up WordPress: 2.0
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A couple of weeks ago I ran a series of posts on Shout about making WordPress run faster. We explored concepts like caching, CDNs; the usual. I always felt the series never really got off the ground and wasn't suited to small posts, hence I embarked on writing what I thought would be WPShout's first eBook!
(read more)Optimize WordPress For Heavy Traffic
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Following on from Faster WordPress, which went up on Shout a couple of weeks ago, this post explores how to optimise WordPress for high traffic. We'll take high traffic in a small blog context -- 1,000 or so visits in a day, but exactly the same techniques apply to much larger traffic blogs. The average WordPress theme isn't optimised. Whilst it may claim to be or may in fact be to an extent, the nature of WordPress themes means they have to be able to fit in any situation and so they are never going to be as well optimised as a theme which has been designed specifically for a single purpose. I'm not saying don't use an off-the-shelf theme, just you'll need to customise it in order to get the best performance out of it. This post shows how to make your site faster.
(read more)Premium WordPress Plugins Discussed
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Premium plugins have been around for a while now. They started off as a way for people to express their support for a plugin developer and over the past year have started to take off. GravityForms, PluginBuddy and CodeCanyon have all contributed to the rise to prominence. But where next for premium plugins? This post explores.
(read more)WPShout Hacked (But Everything’s Fine Now)
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As you may have heard, on Friday evening I got what was to be the first of a couple of emails from some very helpful people telling me that there was a big message up from Google saying that WPShout contained viruses, spyware, the lot! I took a look for myself and sure enough, WPShout had been hacked somehow. This isn't good. I'm fairly happy with my security; there are lots of little tips and tricks I use that make the site harder to hack than most, leaving me with the impression most hackers just wouldn't bother and move on to the thousands more WordPress blogs without the extra layer of security. I was wrong, evidently.
(read more)Documenting A Premium Theme
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Documentation is the first thing that a customer will see once buying a WordPress theme, but it's often very poor. Why? Documentation is done last
(read more)WPShout Needs Your Help!
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Hello! It's a new WPShout article! That hasn't happened for way too long! Sorry for the unexplained absence. What have I been doing? Excellent question. I've been uber busy at college, to answer it. In this post I just wanted to clear up a couple of things and ask for your help in maintaining WPShout in the future.
(read more)A Guide For Selling WordPress Themes
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Recently there's been a lot of (mis) information around about "how to start your own premium WordPress themes site". They make all make it sound fairly easy: just make a design, hack it into a WordPress theme, buckle on a zillion theme options using the old Woo options panel and you have yourself a wonderful theme that'll make you rich. Not so, this tutorial explains some of the things to look out for when building a premium theme.
(read more)Really Easy Custom Post Backgrounds For WordPress
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As I mentioned before, I've been having great fun with the new Nometet.com design. It's now sporting a feature that allows the author to set a custom background for the post just by uploading an image. This image doesn't even need to be the correct size; that's all done on the fly. Uploading isn't hard either; I've implemented an uploader that sits inside a meta box so the hardest bit is choosing the image! In this post we'll have a look at how it's done.
(read more)Art Direction For WordPress
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"Art direction", custom post designs, whatever you want to call them have taken off in a big way recently. First it was Jason Santa Maria amongst others, then Smashing Magazine picked up on it and as a trend it exploded. For good reason too; they're awesome and great fun to do. In this post we'll see how art direction and WordPress can be combined to create something awesome.
(read more)Better iPhone WordPress Themes
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Your iPhone optimised WordPress theme doesn't have to be the single column look we often see; there's no reason at all why you can't just slightly simplify your theme and still give iPhone users a decent experience when visiting your site. That's what we'll be doing in today's post, using just CSS.
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