Not everyone relies on shared web hosting for the sites they work on. Many developers have turned to dedicated hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), colocation hosting and other methods that give them greater freedom to work and allow for more control over the environments where they host sites for their clients or business. While these hosting environments offer a developer much more flexibility, they do put the responsibility of securing that server in the hands of the developer. This can pose...
You’ve just landed a large agency client for a custom WordPress theme project. The specs include 20 non-standard templates and a large set of complex mobile screens. With a daunting task list for this project, as well as other client work, you’re anxious to get started right away. So where to start? For many developers, selecting a WordPress starter theme is the most efficient route. Starter themes generally include basic, required WordPress files, commonly used templates (e.g., pages,...
Social media is an effective way of driving more traffic to a website and reaching a new audience for published content. If you or your clients use WordPress, you probably know there is a myriad of plugins that allow anyone to quickly share every published article across a variety of social media networks. But, sharing is not the only way to integrate social media into WordPress. In fact, there are a few other ways of making a website more social and helping your clients get more eyes on their content. 1....
One of the biggest problems with new year’s resolutions is that they’re often arbitrary goals based on how we feel in the moment; “I need to lose 15 pounds…I should volunteer more…I have to sign ten more clients by year’s end.” When it comes to web development, who’s to say that looking back is such a bad thing? Success in web development depends on one’s ability to learn new skills, practice, and then learn some more. Why not tap into the lessons learned from last year and use them to build...
HTTP versus HTTPS: How much of a difference can one additional letter make? As it happens, quite a lot. Ever since Google confirmed that it considers whether a site uses HTTP or HTTPS as a ranking factor, there’s been a lot of debate about the merits of making the switch. I don’t know about you, but I’m the type of person who likes to play it safe; if Google recommends something, I’m all for it. Still, while switching to HTTPS makes sense for most websites, it’s not always worth it. Is it time to switch?...
I realize that some of you reading this tutorial may have never used an icon font before. You may even be asking yourself, what exactly is an icon font? Icon fonts are simply another way of displaying icons on your websites. In the past, it was a common practice to use images as icons. But using images for icons usually results in additional requests to the server. So to address this problem, designers have turned to icon fonts. An icon font is exactly like a normal font. The only difference is, instead of a...
Working as a web developer, you probably spend a lot of time using your browser of choice. While almost every browser has its own developer tools that allow you to see what’s going on behind the scenes, some of them have plenty of extensions that help you streamline the development process. In this post, we have rounded up our favorite Chrome extensions for web developers. 1. Web Developer ... Web Developer Tools is one of the most useful extensions for any developer. It adds a toolbar to Chrome with...
Co-Authors Plus is a free WordPress plugin to manage multi-author blogs. If you accept guest posts from your readers and give them credit, you can use this free plugin to manage guest authors very easily. You don’t need to create a new user account for each new guest author. Co-Authors Plus makes it very simple and easy to manage guest authors but this plugin is not for beginner WordPress users. Because you will have to edit your theme to properly display author information on each blog post. After installing...