In WordPress development, sometimes you’ve just got to use a Text widget. By default, that takes you back to the bad old days of writing your <em>s and <img>s and <a>s manually. If your client needs to edit the widgets you’re creating, that may not be acceptable.

This week over at Press Up, we share the third post the in our series on search engine optimization (SEO). We take a look at SEO keywords and how they can deliver more visitors to your website. If you’re not quite sure how to advise web development clients on best SEO practices, this article is a great place to start and pass along.

In this post over at Generate WP, Maor Chassen discusses creating an automated work flow in WordPress using Gulp or Bower. If you’ve heard about automation, but are intimidated at the thought of getting started with it, this is a nice read to help you get over that hurdle.

Last week over at WP Tavern, Jeff Chandler published a call for those of us who consider ourselves a part of the WordPress community to explore the brewing animosity that seems to exist between individual developers and core leadership. While the WordPress frequently speaks to creating a community of compassion, empathy, and personal understanding it appears that some of our interactions contradict that. If you have thoughts and experiences about this issue, check out and get involved in the discussion over at WP Tavern.

Image optimization is one of the most important factors in creating a fast site. This great post from WPExplorer shows you how to integrate Google’s WebP files into your WordPress site to increase load times as much as 70%! While WebP has been around since 2010, it’s a technology we haven’t used very much, and this tutorial was a great way to get our feet wet.

In this great post from The WP Crowd, designer Chris Flannagan talks about bootstrapped design frameworks, and how the prioritization of UX has led to a uniformity of design within themes available in the WordPress theme repository. It’s a trend that’s hard to miss, and I really appreciated Chris’ theory about its origins and how we can start to be more innovative in our design choices moving forward.

As of yesterday, WordPress 4.6 is officially available! It includes plenty of front-end improvements like streamlined plugin updates, native fonts, and content recovery in the editor,  as well as translations on demand and improved multisite capabilities. Let us know in the comments what your favorite 4.6 improvement is!

If you’re doing custom development in WordPress, having a firm grasp on how to use custom hooks is an absolute essential. While we’ve written on the topic a lot, there’s always more to learn. This nice tutorial from WordPress leader Tom McFarlin does a great job of explaining the hook system and how to implement it. Understanding this topic is very empowering as a developer and will make you significantly more flexible in the work you can accomplish, so don’t miss this one!

If you’ve ever wondered if you’re underpricing your services as a developer, check out “How Much Does a Website Cost” by Crew. It’s a cool tool that allows you to pick the features that will be included on a site and spits out a final estimate for custom work. It’s not WordPress specific, but does allow you to select CMS as a feature. I used a pretty simple site as my own example and was pretty shocked by the final number. It seems like the WordPress community is constantly struggling with pricing, so let us know if the comments if this lines up with what you charge!

If you’ve ever worked on a project as a new developer that you’ve later scaled up, this most recent post from Pippin of Pippin’s Plugins is a must read. Pippin shares his thoughts on dealing with an early implemented design pattern that later presented some major difficulties after the project grew. While it’s difficult to have the foresight to predict how choices you make in your code will impact things down the road, Pippen provides some great insight which will hopefully prevent you from making some of the same frustrating mistakes.