Author: noel saw

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Theme of the Week: Work-a-holic

This week’s WP theme spotlight is “Work-a-holic Pro” by GraphpaperPress. It’s aimed towards designers and photographers who want to show off their work. What do I like about it? I like that it’s clean, it has a negative space, and chunky sized thumbnails of your work show up quickly on the home page.

The theme is laid out with a top area that tells the visitor, “Who am I” and “What I do” and the bottom area shows “What I’ve done.”

I am using the free version of “Work-a-holic” on my site called “SGVPhotos.com“.

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Speeding up your WordPress site – Part 1

In the next few days, we’ll look at some WordPress plugins that will help speed up your site.

Why speed up your site? If you have a WP site with more than 50 visitors a day and have 100 or more pages, you need to keep your site running fast as possible so people don’t leave your site when it takes more than 4-5 seconds to load a page. Also search engines will be more likely to give you higher rankings if your site loads faster than your competitors.

To speed up your front end pages such as home page, a cache system will store a copy of that page as static HTML which will load much faster in your visitor’s browser than WordPress having to dynamically generate a page on the fly. Here are three page caching plugins:

WP Cache is one of the original plugins if you are running older versions of WordPress. The last time it was updated was in 2007, so use with caution.

Here’s another plugin based on WP Cache, it’s called WP Super Cache. The last revision was in September 2010, so it’s well supported. I tried this plugin in a few weeks ago and had some error messages pop up that I couldn’t debug at the time so I disabled it. You may have better luck if you have the attention and time to spend on it.

W3 Total Cache screenshotAnd we’ll save the best for last: W3 Total Cache. Like the previous plugim, the last update was in September 2010, so it’s pretty recent by most standards. They claim up to a 10x improvement when the plugin is completely setup.

After taking a quick look at it, W3 Total Cache (W3TC) seems pretty damn comprehensive including a “preview” mode. You can actually preview your site without enabling the cache for all visitors. Cool, huh? They even support propagating your content on a Content Delivery Network.

My choice? Right now I am running W3TC to give it a whirl.

If you’re interested in seeing why your site may seem slow, give Firebug and Y! Slow plugins a try. Once installed in Firefox, enable the “Net” dashboard at the bottom to see which items on your page are taking their sweet time to load.

If you want someone to do the hard work for you, give my friends at LightSpeedNow a ring. They have a free site analysis tool like Firebug but you won’t have to install anything, just paste in your URL and go.

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WordPress site of the Week: Faebric

WP site of the Week: FaebricThis week’s WP site is FÆBRIC from Germany. What do I like about it? It uses a beautiful photography, squares, and typography in a nice overall package. It reminds me of a Windows 7 phone! I also like that it’s a liquid layout so it fills up your screen nicely regardless of size.

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Plugin of the Week: Exclude Pages

One of my favorite things about WordPress 3 is the new navigation bar menu system. In the pre version 3 days, creating a navigation bar was kind of a pain in the butt. Now with WP 3’s menu system you can easily build a navigation in compatible themes.

But what if you’re using a theme that’s not WP menu friendly and you want to hide or remove certain pages from appearing on the navigation bar? That’s where “Exclude Pages” comes into play. It’s a really easy to use WordPress plugin, that puts a module called “Exclude Pages” right in your page admin below the page ordering where you can specify if that page should not appear on the list of pages. It’s a quick and painless way to hide pages from appearing on the navigation bar. Get it: “Exclude Pages“

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WordPress theme of the week: Vision

This week’s theme of the week is Vision sold at ThemeForest. What’s so different about this theme? Well this is the first one we ran across that has a WYSIYG type home page editor. Instead of posts or an admin panel based forms, it shows you a visual representation of the home page from which you click on areas you want to edit.

While the idea is neat, the execution is not polished as it could be. The lightbox-like dialog boxes lack a “save” button, instead you click on “X” to close the windows and hit “Save Options” to publish the changes. Also the default home page visual preview is a little gaudy (see the screnshot), so if you’re going to give your clients access to it, you’ll need to replace the mockup. We’re going to actually use this theme for a client so we’ll give more feedback on this theme in the next few weeks. Get it: Vision theme

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PadPressed: Tough to use – so far

Remember the AppSumo bundle from a few days ago? I finally got around to installing the PadPressed plugin which is more of a “kit”. It includes a plugin and built-in themes. My first mistake was to install the contents of the ZIP file via FTP into the plugins folder. For whatever reason, WordPress didn’t like it and had a “fatal error.” Ok, PadPressed support asked me to install the ZIP file via WP admin and that worked. Fair enough.

I’ve uploaded quite a few test posts to my test site at ipad.noelsaw.com but I am not sure exactly what to do next. The problem with this kit is a lack of documentation and it’s not easy to find – you have to login to their support site. There’s no mention of it in their “ReadMe” file. Once you’re in support, you’ll find a one page installation/reference guide but it’s not a real tutorial on how to use this “kit.” Until the PadPressed people write up a proper getting started tutorial, I really can’t recommend this one, therwise you may be pulling your hair out.

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New WordPress WYSIWYG Theme Builder – ThemeFrame

We’ve seen a variety of products and services like Artisteer or PSD2CSS that claim to let you build WordPress themes easily and quickly. Let’s add a third product to the mix that I ran into today called ThemeFrame. On paper it looks great with live Preview, CSS Inspector, color pickers, and visual sliders for settings. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to check these guys out in the next few weeks and do a quick review.

Update: if you want to get to the meat, check out their screencast video. A video is worth a 1,000 words!
And if you’re in the San Francisco bay area, check out the EastBay WP meetup for November 21st, where they’ll be taking a closer look at PSD2CSS.

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WordPress theme/tools Bundle

The concept of “bundles” have been quite popular in the Mac community for the past 2 years, now we’re seeing it in the WordPress world. A website called “AppSumo” is offering $926 worth of WP themes and tools for just $32 (not a typo).  Luckily it’s not just a bunch of no-name companies participating. We have two of favorite WP theme design companies, WooThemes and Graphpaper Press offering at least 2-3 select themes each as part of the package. There’s also a theme designed as an iPad native app called “CoverPad” that actually is acceleraometer aware. I think I’ll spring for this and review it in the next few days. Get it: AppSumo bundle

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Great theme for company website

Sometimes it’s a challenge to find a WordPress theme that’s clean but has enough bells and whistles that can be used for a corporate web site. I found a theme called “Breeze” from ThemeForest. I like the home page slider, flexible page layouts, uses custom fonts, and it comes with a bunch of color options – both dark and light. I really liked the support from the developer for it – he was pretty informative and helpful. I am using it here for one of my clients: Biotech Investment Group. Get it: Breeze

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Theme of the Week: zBench

zBench WordPress theme

This week’s WordPress is zBench. On the surface it looks like quite a few other WordPress themes with footer widget area, custom drop down menus, but when digging deeper you’ll see something you won’t see often, different layout options.

Get it: zBench