At Nexcess, we specialize in Magento, WordPress, and ExpressionEngine hosting, and we like to keep up to date with the best of what’s happening in those communities. Today’s blog post is a roundup of content published over the last month that we think is worth your time to look at. You’ll find a mixture of content to suit both experienced users and those who are looking to gain a foothold in a complex area. We hope you enjoy!
WordPress and Blogging
- Integrating With WordPress’ UI: Meta Boxes on Custom Pages – The use of meta boxes is common in WordPress. It’s used on the Widgets, Menus and Dashboard pages – and of course, the post edit screen. They can be a fantastic tool for improving the user experience.
- Beginners Guide on How to Add Twitter Cards in WordPress – Twitter is slowly rolling out this experimental technology called Twitter Cards which makes it possible for you to attach media experiences to your tweets that link to your content.
- How to Back Up Your WordPress or Blogger Blog – You should back up your blog at least once a week. Daily is recommended (if you update it daily) so you can always have the latest, greatest copy of your site.
- WordPress Revolution: Check out What Could be in the Store For the Future – Doesn’t it sometimes surprise you that WordPress started as a mere blogging platform? In less than a decade it has become the most powerful web publishing tool cutting across the globe allowing users to manage different genre of websites.
- SQL for Dummies: Demystifying The WordPress Database – WP uses its database to store and retrieve information as and when needed. The following article gives you a crash course knowledge of the WordPress data storage.
- 10+ Hacks to Add Functionality to Your WordPress Theme – With a few lines of code you can get some cool customization and new features with all those filters, actions and hooks.
- Display Personalized Messages to Multisite Users with the Custom Dashboard Widget – As your WordPress Multisite network grows, you need the ability to send important announcements like network outages, support updates, popular posts, or just a quick hello to let them know you’re thinking about their site.
- How to Choose a Reliable Live Chat for Your WordPress Site – A live chat feature could be just the thing you are looking for. You can use it in a variety of ways that will help your potential customers: allowing them to talk and exchange opinions among themselves, providing a live support chat box or even installing a whole set of chat rooms in case you want to expand the social power of your site.
- WordPress, Facebook, Disqus, Oh My! Which Comment System Should You Use? – Blog comments used to be simple. If you used WordPress, then your comments used WordPress, too. But, then the world of blogging got more complicated.
- Turn WordPress into a CMS with Pods Framework – The only content types supported by WordPress out of the box are pages and articles, which is fine for most websites, but what if you want more? Luckily you can use the Pods Framework.
- 10 Free WordPress Themes for Photographers – Many photographers are young, hungry freelancers, or just wishing they’d have enough work to turn freelance. Spending hard-earned money on premium themes may seem, at least at first, superfluous.
Magento and eCommerce
- The Starter’s Guide to Effective eCommerce Fulfillment – In this article, I’ll focus on how to excel at fulfillment and grow your operation so that you keep costs low, maintain accuracy and effectively scale your operation.
- 5 ways to test the Usability of your E-commerce Site – Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a product, service or website by testing it on users and it’s good practice to perform tests in combination with Split testing.
- Best practices for mobile e-commerce – Ever since e-commerce websites went mobile, the playing field changed beyond recognition. New rules were made. Older ones were rewritten. And in some cases, traditional design approaches were abandoned altogether in favor of new versatile web design practices.
- Fast and Painless Magento Admin Navigation – Technical people are users too. I’ve built a new, open source Magento extension for lightening fast admin navigation.
- Managing Your Ecommerce Sales Funnel – This article will focus on the various activities that support a sales funnel and how to manage them to optimize your conversion rate.
ExpressionEngine
- How to Build a Simple Tumblr Blog with ExpressionEngine – If you have even a foundational knowledge of ExpressionEngine, and know the difference between a channel, a template, and a field group, you should be able to follow along just fine.
- Marcus Neto’s ExpressionEngine Demo Video – Marcus Neto, former Product Evangelist for EllisLab, has put together a video demonstrating some of the features of ExpressionEngine. This 30 minute video walks through all the ins and outs one would want to cover in pitching ExpressionEngine to a potential client.
Hosting, Development, and Design
- How & When to Build Website Content using Tables – Even following modern practices of HTML5/CSS3 we can still find a use for tables. The specifications haven’t changed much since HTML4 and with good reasoning.
- 40 Awesome jQuery Plugins You Need to Check Out – The jQuery developer community has to be one of the most generous and hardworking group of people on the web. They’re constantly churning out amazingly useful and completely free tools that they share with anyone and everyone who wants to use them.
- Top Five Dangers of Cloud Hosting You Ought To Know – Cloud computing is a growing trend among small businesses across the world, and is commonly seen as a universal panacea for all data sharing needs.
- Top Mobile Apps for Web Designers – Adjusting to using a mobile app to work on design projects is easier when the web designer uses the best mobile apps for web design.
- 20 User Experience Twitter accounts you should follow – In the world of user experience, there’s no shortage of fresh design inspiration and new techniques to get your creative juices flowing. But where do you find it?
- Best Reasons to Use Chrome Developer Tools – Google Chrome Developer Tools can help you save more time and effort when building your web page than using programs such as PhotoShop exclusively to make it.
- Why a Misunderstanding of Art Can Kill Your Conversion Rate – In this post we’ll talk about the difference between art and applied art and how an understanding of the distinction will increase conversions on your website.
If all that reading has exhausted you, take a moment to relax and check out this completely unrelated, but quite adorable, animation.
the Song for Rain from Yawen on Vimeo.
