WordPress Themes and Plugins Expert

Split testing is a way to experiment with a live site and find which headlines and text are the most effective. Amazon uses split testing to determine which versions of their site convert customers better. We’ll use WordPress and Google’s Website Optimizer to test two different headlines, and find which works best at capturing customer [...]

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With virtually any WordPress release (or the release of any open-source software, for that matter), there are bound to be bugs. In a lot of cases the bugs are minor, and are just annoying. In other cases, these bugs can completely disable your site. Kind of like the difference between a mosquito bite and being attacked by a swarm of wasps. WordPress 3.0 is no different. Almost as soon as the official release came out, reports of bugs starting pouring in. In the vast majority of cases, these bugs had to do with either customizations based on deprecated code or plugins that aren’t yet compatible with 3.0.

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The WordPress community is buzzing with excitement over the soon-to-be-released WordPress 3.0. Currently in Beta 2 now, WordPress 3.0 will have a lot of exciting new features , such as a new default theme and better menu management. Quite possibly the most exciting of these features is custom post types. In this tutorial, we’ll talk [...]

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WordPress 3.0 is, without doubt, one of the most exciting updates to the platform in a very long time. As well as things that all users will notice such as custom menus, custom backgrounds and a new default theme, there are also massive additions to the code-base such as the ability to run multiple sites [...]

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Feedburner is a free, Google-owned service that provides great feed statistics and services to bloggers and other feed publishers. Here’s how to integrate Feedburner with a self-hosted WordPress blog: Sign up — First of all, you’ll need to sign up for a Feedburner feed if you haven’t already. MyBrand (optional) — This isn’t required, but [...]

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Not all visitors to your WordPress blog will be familiar with RSS feeds or how they work, while some other visitors just don’t want to mess with using a feed reader. RSS isn’t the only push-delivery method out there: email subscription is another great service to offer to your visitors. First you’ll need an email [...]

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Cool WordPress-as-a-CMS tip: If your WordPress-powered site includes a blog as a component, rather than the main function, you can opt to put blog posts and archives (category/tag/date/author) into their own subdirectory (such as “blog”). As of this writing, I have this set up on my site; just go to one of my post pages [...]

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Say you have a list like this: Item A Item B Item C …And you want it to look like this: Item A Item B Item C When you have lists that contain a lot of text, spacing out the items can improve readability. As far as I know, this isn’t possible in the visual [...]

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If you’ve changed post slugs, taxonomy slugs, or permalink structures, you likely created 404 pages (page-not-found URLs) along the way. These 404 pages certainly aren’t helpful for visitors who stumble across them and can increase your bounce rate. It can be a particular problem if search engines, pingbacks, and/or internal and external links are sending [...]

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As time goes on, all the database operations performed on your WordPress tables (which are what store your blog posts and other data) will create what’s called “overhead.” To keep your database running smoothly, you can get rid of this overhead by “optimizing” your tables (similar to defragmenting your hard drive). Here are two ways [...]

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In this tutorial, I will guide you through the process of making a beautiful “Register” form, using Fancybox, jQuery, and, of course, WordPress. As you’ll find, the process is really quite simple. Step 1. The Markup First, let’s place our button at the top of the page, replacing the default description in the theme. <div [...]

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