It's Friday and that means it's time for another weekly roundup. Today we found excellent posts on WordPress security and choosing trustworthy themes and plugins to a beginner's guide on pairing fonts. You'll also find must reads on content marketing mistakes, how to spot links that could be harming your website and why quality over quantity is always best for SEO. Ready to read and take action? Web Design and WordPress Free WordPress Food, Recipe and Restaurant Plugins - These ... Read More
Archives for June 2013
23 Tools for Customizing WordPress Themes
There are tons of tools that can help simplify the process of customizing WordPress themes. In fact, the tools are far better than they were just a few short years ago. If you are kicking around the possibilities of starting to customize themes then this list I've put together will save you some headaches. Hopefully you will be able to avoid some of hassles that I went through over the years. These days I work exclusively on Mac's. In fact, I made the decision when I got to the point where ... Read More
The Good and Bad of Google Analytics Real-Time Data
At the end of each web development project, I give each client an hour training session in WordPress. If time allows, I jump over to Google Analytics and show them some of the available reports and data I use for our company. Most clients are completely new to Google Analytics or if they do own an account, they’ve forgotten all about it. While our clients oh and ah over data like visits, traffic sources, and keyword tracking, the best and funniest responses come from a quick jump into ... Read More
Friday’s Marketing Roundup: Good Reads from the Week Ending June 21st
It's time for another weekly roundup post. We like to roundup some of the best posts on web design, WordPress, and search engine optimization. This week we have posts on conversion optimization, social networking mistakes, content templates and checklists. And if you are need some inspiration for your 404 error pages and web design in general then we found a few great posts on those topics too! Let's get to it. Web Design and WordPress 30 Unusual, Fresh and Creative WordPress Site ... Read More
The Anatomy of a Child Theme
When it comes to WordPress theme customization there are two main approaches. Traditionally, because WordPress is open source you'd just make your edits directly to the theme itself. Very early on the WordPress core developers added the ability to use a child theme. A child theme inherits all of the templates and functionality of the parent theme while allowing you to modify the parent theme output because the child theme files supersede the parent theme files. Advantages of Using Child ... Read More
Google+ Should Be Your Marketing BFF
This month I presented a Social Media Boot Camp for the Long Term Ecological Research Network. I followed up the group session with two days of one on one calls for the individual sites across the country. Each university had an opportunity to discuss any aspect of social media. Much to my delight, everyone had questions about Google+. As I talked about Google+ with each call, I realized I really love Google+. I knew I liked it, but I didn’t know I loved it until I heard myself say it over ... Read More
Websites Are Like the Clothes You Wear
For a while I’ve thought websites are like the clothes you wear. I used to think the clothes to website analogy was just something my quirky head thought of, but I was wrong. One of our clients recently said the same thing. Once I regained my composure, we chatted a bit about it and I realized websites really are like the clothes you wear! Websites Are Personal A lot of our clients ask for our opinion during the web design process. I’m an opinionated person and while I openly share my ... Read More
Friday’s Marketing Roundup: Good Reads from the Week Ending June 14th
It's time for another weekly roundup. At the end of each week we round up the top posts for the week. This week we have great information on how to improve your website, must-have content for your homepage, and some great WordPress plugins to let you know about. We also have good reads on content marketing and some SEO mistakes you might be making. Ready to get reading? Let's go! Web Design and WordPress 5 Minute Fixes: Improve Your Website Even If You're Short On Time and Budget - ... Read More
A Great Tool for Finding WordPress Themes and Plugins
Have you ever stumbled across an awesome website or blog and wondered if it was built using WordPress and if a stock theme was used? Yep, I thought so. You’re not alone. We all do it. The grass always looks greener on someone else's website, so we are on an never ending path of finding WordPress themes and plugins. Back in 2011 a little website called What WP Theme is That? was launched. This simple, but super cool website allows you to quickly locate the theme of any WordPress website and ... Read More
Six Reasons Your Should Embrace Your Online Competition
Over the last four years our firm has had exceptional growth. I believe our competition has been an instrumental source of this growth and maturity. Since forming the firm I have embraced our competition. I don’t know why I went this route, but I did and it has helped us year over year. I believe and hope my philosophy can be adopted by other organizations. Competitors Are My Friends Inspiration – When I bumped into Jennifer Bourn online I immediately liked her. She is a direct competitor ... Read More
Best Practices for Genesis Theme Customization
There is so much to cover when it comes to Genesis theme customization, that I've mapped out an entire series of posts to throughly cover it. I'm hoping this series will help people get a basic understanding of what it takes to start customizing their own WordPress sites and have the confidence to get started. While my specific examples will be aimed at the Genesis theme framework, most of what I share will have general application as well and can be used on most WordPress websites. Here ... Read More
Favorite Genesis Framework Plugins
Did you know there are over seventy-five Genesis framework plugins in the WordPress.org repository? Holy WordPress Batman! That’s a lot of plugins considering the framework alone is already chalked full of features and functions. While I’ve been using a few Genesis plugins for quite a while, I had no idea so many more have been developed. When we build a custom theme or create a stock Genesis child theme, we tend to stick with plugins that we’ve used already and we've labeled “solid”. Knowing ... Read More
Friday’s Marketing Roundup: Good Reads from the Week Ending June 7th
Happy Friday! Welcome back to another weekly roundup post. This week you will find interesting articles on WordPress plugin creation, resources for the upcoming Genesis 2.o release, how to tweaks for WordPress themes and more. On the SEO side of things there were some great posts on SEO misconceptions, Google authorship, and negative SEO. There is always a lot of great information to read in the world of internet marketing! Ready to get reading? Here we go... Web Design and WordPress A ... Read More
Preparing for Genesis 2.0
If you’re active in the Genesis community or if you simply use a Genesis child theme, you probably know Genesis 2.0 is coming and right around the corner. We’re excited about the release and we know our customers are because we’re starting to get oodles of questions about the release of Genesis 2.0 and how HTML5 will alter things for existing Genesis users. Fear not my Genesis children, Brian Gardner and his team of uber smart WordPress coders have you covered. Genesis upgrades have always ... Read More
Using a Genesis Theme XML File to Jump Start Your Website
Over the last month I've realized there is a lot of confusion surrounding Genesis theme XML files, what they include, and how they work. I'm a bit surprised by this since the XML export and import process is handled by WordPress and not Genesis. The key to understanding the XML import process is understanding that WordPress controls the data export and import and in this case, Genesis is just coming along for the ride. Why Use XML Data? I've blogged before about my negative feelings towards ... Read More
Introducing Elbe Blake: WordPress Marketing Templates Designed for Real-World Marketers
We're happy to announce the release of Elbe Blake, the twenty-fourth template added to our premium WordPress theme store. We believe WordPress marketing templates should be designed for real-world marketers and this one certainly was. If you've been to our website before, this template might look familiar. It was used on Web Savvy Marketing's website. We recently updated the look and feel of our own website and we decided to convert our older theme into a WordPress template for marketers. It ... Read More
Web Savvy Marketing
TwitterYoutubeFacebookLinkedinGoogle +