I Put Myself Out There

This year I made a firm commitment to put myself out there – presenting, writing more, and networking more than I ever have. In February, I volunteered to give a presentation on Custom Post Types at the Stamford WordPress Meetup Group. At the time I knew relatively little about custom post types, but I spent weeks researching, writing code, outlining my presentation, and rehearsing it in my living room. Shortly after giving the presentation, I was contacted by Jennifer Carello of TechCare LLC, asking if I’d be interested in helping her build her WordPress business. I was offered the opportunity to present again at the Hudson Valley WordPress Meetup group, and by doing so met Alex Miranda, Gina Nieves, and Laura Hartwig of MarkNet Group. We’ve since collaborated on several projects.

I volunteered again to present on WordPress site security after my website got hacked in mid-March. Again I spent weeks researching and outlining a presentation. On the day of the presentation, D.K. Smith showed up – the founder of WPSecurity.com. I knew I better give an accurate presentation or I’d look like a real idiot. Fortunately it went off without a hitch, and it was a real pleasure to have D.K. concur with much of what I presented, adding additional information from his years of experience in the WordPress security field.

As I got more comfortable presenting, I started speaking more frequently – presenting at the New Haven WordPress Meetup Group on creating an e-commerce site using WooCommerce, at Hudson Valley WordPress Meetup Group on Intro to WordPress Development, then at the Westchester County WordPress Meetup Group on WordPress Development. As a direct result of these presentations, I’m routinely contacted for help with development on projects. In June, I started working on-site several days per week at Kim Ronemus Design in Westport, CT. I met Kim through Mark Hannon, who met me at the Stamford WordPress Meetup Group.

I also stepped up my efforts writing quality content on the topics I was most interested in and knew the most about. Instead of frequently putting out short, mediocre posts, I started spending a month at a time putting out real quality content. On September 10, I published my post “Search Engine Optimization Resource Guide”, a culmination of months of research. I posted the article to Reddit.com, made it to the /r/web_design frontpage, and saw traffic to my website spike to 2000 hits that day. I got calls from several people around the country looking for help with their SEO needs. Other posts I published on Intro to WordPress Development and Creating an E-Commerce Site Using WooCommerce led to a significant, sustained increase in traffic. Traffic to my site went from averaging ~10 hits per day to now consistently ~50-60 hits per day.

I Built A Network

I spent this year being a Meetup.com group junkie. I joined every web development Meetup Group in my area, including Fairfield County Javascript, Fairfield County PHP, WordPress Westchester, WordPress New Haven, and Hudson Valley WordPress. Through these groups I built a wide network of friends and colleagues. I found people I could rely on for advice and collaboration on projects. I started exchanging leads with other developers — when I got too busy I would send my leads their way and vice versa. No matter how much I read and how many tutorials I walk through, I learn more in one hour of interacting with other developers a couple times per month. I attended WordCamp in New York City and made several contacts there and attended all the development presentations I could.

I Found My Niche and Optimized My Site Around It

I re-built my website 5 times between 2011 – 2012. I kept finding sites that looked better than mine and I wanted to best present my information. Working in web development, my website is typically the first impression people get of me. I wanted it to look nice, allowing me to showcase some recent projects and write more. I took Brian Casel’s advice and just settled on a nice theme (instead of spending weeks trying to build my own), customized it a bit, then filled it with content – recent work, testimonials, etc. Equally important, I followed Alex Miranda’s advice on search engine optimization, and optimized my site around what I specialize in – WordPress development. I now get 2-3 ‘walk-in’ leads per week on projects, people who find me through organic search. It has been one of the most effective forms of marketing I’ve ever done.

I Stopped Trying to Do Things I Wasn’t Great At

I stopped trying to do design work and stopped trying to manage content for clients. I suck at design. If I had it my way, all sites would be black and white with 12 pt Times New Roman font. But I didn’t realize how much time I was wasting trying to design until I stopped doing it. I found a couple solid graphic designers in my area and subcontract out all design work to them. This allows me to focus more on what I’m best at – development. Likewise, I stopped trying to write for clients. I did this for a short time during my big SEO kick – helping clients publish blog posts and manage content on their sites. It was becoming a huge time vacuum and I wasn’t great at it. It was frustrating for everyone involved. I found a couple reliable writers in my area and started sending work to them. What I found also by doing this is that these writers and graphic designers also started sending me more work – they would have people looking to build a website so they’d hire me to do the development.

I Studied, And Prioritized My Studying.

I know I’m never going to know everything, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. As I networked more and met experienced web developers, one thing was readily apparent – none of them got to where they are by accident. They worked their asses off, spent tons of time writing code, and kept up to date on the latest trends in development. I made a commitment to myself to really understand PHP and Javascript. Alex Bachuk made an excellent point to me that I won’t forget – he said “don’t try to learn PHP by understanding WordPress, do it the other way around.” It makes complete sense. I was trying to understand and learn PHP by simply working a lot with WordPress. Once he told me that, I started going to the basics of PHP. I bought Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional. I set aside time each week to study 1-2 chapters, and used what I had learned to write simple applications to test my knowledge. I also learned that there’s no substitute for writing code. By actually typing out the code samples I was reading in books, I got more familiar with the syntax and the actual process of writing code. I also stopped trying to learn Javascript by learning JQuery. I bought Professional Javascript for Web Developers and started reading one chapter per week and practiced typing out the code. As I read more, I took note of which chapters were more relevant to what I needed than others. For example, I paid close attention to DOM Manipulation and Events, and less time on cookies.

I dedicated time (read: started getting up at 5am every day of the week) to doing tutorials through Nettuts, WP Tuts, and Pippins Plugins, which have been amazing resources for seeing real-world applications of programming. I try to do one WPTuts and Pippins Plugin tutorial per week. Right now I’m working through Custom Database Tables by Stephen Harris…a really great way to apply the fundamentals of PHP/mySQL to WordPress. I also bought and read the following books:

• Professional WordPress Plugin Development
• Introducing HTML5
• Javascript: The Good Parts
• Eloquent Javascript
• Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog
• PHP: Object Oriented Solutions
• PHP Objects, Patterns, Practice
• JQuery Cookbook
• JQuery: Novice to Ninja
• Professional WordPress
• WordPress Bible
• WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook
• WordPress 3 Cookbook

As I went to more and more Meetup groups, I also got really interested in topics like Node.js, MongoDB, and CodeIgniter. I started doing some tutorials on these topics, then asked myself what the hell I was doing. Were these topics interesting? Absolutely. But they weren’t going to be directly contributing to the mastery of my niche (WordPress development) as much as WordPress tutorials, so I kept the WordPress tutorials as my highest priority. Sometimes it can be distracting and overwhelming with the amount of information out there — so many ways to build the exact same web application. I found it helpful to frequently ask myself not so much what I was studying, but why I was studying it. With an increasingly limited amount of study time each week, I need to make sure I’m getting the most bang for my buck.

I Made Myself Available as Much as Possible

It can be a dangerous precedent to set with some clients, but I try to be available 7 days per week, including early mornings and nights. I will always get back to you within 1 day, no exceptions so far. By making myself available, I don’t miss opportunities. A couple weeks ago I got a call at 8am on a Saturday morning while I was at the gym. I picked up and told the guy I’d call him back as soon as I got home. “Calling you at this time was actually kind of a test,” he said. Fair enough. Over the next 5 days he paid me a little over $1000 to help finish up a website another developer had walked away from. Most of that time was spent between 5-7am then again at night when I wasn’t working on-site.

I’ve found that clients really appreciate me being willing to bend over backwards for them. There may very well be a point in the future when I scale back my availability, but I really enjoy solving problems and helping people out. It gives me great satisfaction and has allowed me to grow my business steadily.

I Focused on Communicating as Clearly As Possible

This might be one of the most important skills to have as a web developer. There tends to be a pretty big language barrier between web developers and clients. My job, aside from developing, is to clearly communicate with clients what the problems are, how I intend to fix them, exactly what I’m going to do, when I’m going to do it, how much it will cost, how long it will take, etc. Communicating clearly saves everyone time. When appropriate, I share my screen with clients using Join.me to show them how I intend to make the changes – i.e. positioning of elements on a page, color of items, etc.

I also studied several other proposals and contracts from web developers. Brian Casel gave an excellent presentation on Managing A Client Web Design Project from Start to Finish at the Fairfield County Web Design and Development Meetup Group. He generously shared the format of his proposals and contracts which I adopted for future projects. Having a proposal template saves me time not only writing proposals, but also saves time on any misunderstandings once the project is underway – when I expect to be paid, what I will deliver, when I will deliver it, etc.

I Stopped Biting Off More Than I Could Chew

When I was struggling to make ends meet, I tended to dive into any web development opportunity that came my way, thinking I could program my way out of it. I made this mistake twice this year, and both times lost great amounts of sleep over it, agonizing for days over whether I would miss a deadline because I was in over my head try to develop something I didn’t know enough about. I was very fortunate to find outside help to bail me out, but I learned a very important lesson – don’t bite off more than I can chew. I realized there’s no shame in saying “this is beyond my skill level”. In fact, everyone I said that to greatly appreciated it, and some used me for other projects more suitable for my skill set. I also started putting these leads in touch with other people in my network who could better handle the project, then later asked them to show me how they did it, using it as a learning tool.

I Stopped Being Afraid to Reach (A Little)

As I studied more, learned more, and grew more confident in my abilities, I became a little less hesitant to take on bigger projects that I knew would push my skills as a developer. One of the advantages of working on-site at a design agency is having access to senior developer Richard Testani, who has helped me navigate large-scale projects. Ultimately it was a lot of practice and time spent reading and using WordPress that made me fairly confident in most projects that came my way.

I Started Charging More

I raised my hourly rate twice this year, from $50/hr to $60/hr, then from $60/hr to $75/hr. As I grew more confident in my work and learned what other people are charging for the same service, I realized I was worth it. I also took a colleague’s advice and started pricing out larger projects with a fixed rate not necessarily tied to a number of hours. I realized that as I got better at what I do, I can complete projects more quickly, and if I charge these on an hourly basis I’ll be making less money. So while a standard site might have taken me 30 hours in 2011, I can bang it out now in about 20 hours. Regardless, the fixed price stays the same.

I Practiced Saying No

As more leads started coming my way, I streamlined my process for qualifying prospects (another great portion of Brian Casel’s presentation). After a few bad experiences in 2011, I became a little more aware of some common red flags and learned to say no to these clients. They generally will require so much time and energy that you don’t have anything left to deal with your other clients – keeping you on the phone for hours, changing their minds frequently, and never being satisfied with anything you produce. Here are a few examples:

• I got a call around 6pm on a Friday evening from a web developer in Oregon who had a client in Connecticut she didn’t have time to deal with anymore. She found me online and wanted to put the client in touch with me. I said sure – feel free to send my contact info along and she can call me tomorrow afternoon. 7pm that night I got a call from the client, who I politely asked to call me back the next day (Saturday) and I could evaluate her project. The next day, I called her at 1pm and we walked through her project for 1.5 hours. I told her I would get back to her early the next week after carefully reviewing her needs. The next morning (Sunday), I had two missed calls from her by 9:30am. In speaking with her, it became apparent that she would require an enormous time commitment, and simply wasn’t worth what she was willing to pay. I gave her the names of a couple other web developers and wished her well.
• Another client had paid me a 50% deposit but we couldn’t get past the design phase. I spent several hours each week meeting with her and a designer before I finally refunded her and wished her the best. This was before I had put a stipulation of 2 rounds of design revisions in my proposal and contract.
• Another web developer tried to pull me into projects that were just too time-consuming to take on and too difficult to evaluate. Both of them were projects where I would need to go in and ‘fix’ something. Because I couldn’t guarantee that I could fix it, and had no idea how long it would take if I did fix it, I said no.
• A restaurant proprietor tried to lowball my price quote, offered cash in exchange for a reduced price, and promised that it would lead to more business down the road. Again, I realized that the entire project would have required so much time that I couldn’t possibly justify it.

I’m interested to hear how everyone made it through 2012 and what experiences you had business-wise. Feel free to drop me a line or comment on this post. Share it if you’ve learned something.

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Download the Slides for the Presentation Here

Why Develop For WordPress?

I recently read an excellent article in Smashing Magazine titled “How to Become a Top WordPress Developer”.  If you’re looking for a fast growing, profitable industry, look no further.  Wordpress developers are in high demand and if qualified can charge whatever they want.  Check out this infographic by Joost de Valk illustrating the dominance of WordPress in the CMS market:

Opportunities for WordPress Development

WordPress offers several opportunities for development:

• Theme Developer – Theme developers build themes for sale to the public or for private clients.  My presentation includes a short demonstration on the basics of theme creation.  This is usually the starting point for many WordPress developers.
• Plugin Developer – Plugin developers code plugins that offer standalone functionality either for sale to the public or for specific client needs.
• Core Contributor – Core contributors are a group of developers that actively contribute to the WordPress core code itself.

Developing for WordPress – and Introduction to How WordPress Works, Theme Structure, Template Tags, and the Loop

This is going to be a very challenging write up, particularly because the title of this section could easily encompass multiple blog posts for each element.  My goal is to provide as many of the best resources for each element and give you a basic understanding of how WordPress works, how themes are structures, what template tags are, and how to use the Loop.

This guide assumes that you have a basic understanding of HTML/CSS.  If you don’t, I recommend the following resource to get up to speed: HTMLDog.com.

Developing Locally Using XAMPP / MAMP

I highly recommend installing a local copy of WordPress using XAMPP (for Windows) or MAMP (for Mac).  XAMPP and MAMP run a local php/mySQL setup on your machine that allows you to install and run WordPress locally.  I can develop in realtime without having to upload changes online.  Instructions for getting setup are here:

• Installing WordPress on XAMPP
• Installing WordPress on MAMP
• Using XAMPP for Local Theme Development

What is WordPress / How does it work?

It helps to start with a general understanding of what WordPress is and how it works.  Wordpress is a PHP-powered content management system.  PHP is an open-source programming language used to power millions of dynamic websites.  mySQL is an open-source database software that stores information.  Think of it this way — PHP is the language that communicates with your  mySQL database where all of your website’s content is stored. We use PHP to retrieve information from the database by sending ‘queries’ to the database.  When you run ‘the famous 5 minute install’, WordPress is setting up several tables (using mySQL commands) within your database to store your posts, site options, user information, comments, terms/taxonomies, and term relationships.   The following links are excellent resources to gain a better understanding of the database, PHP, mySQL, and the WordPress inner-workings.  Read them over and email me or call me if you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer:

• WordPress Database Description
• Understanding How WordPress Works
• How WordPress Works (video)

Introduction to Themes

What is a Theme?

Taken from WordPress Codex:

Fundamentally, the WordPress Theme system is a way to “skin” your weblog. Yet, it is more than just a “skin.” Skinning your site implies that only the design is changed. WordPress Themes can provide much more control over the look and presentation of the material on your website.

A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A Theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software. Themes may include customized template files, image files (*.jpg, *.gif), style sheets (*.css), custom Pages, as well as any necessary code files (*.php). For an introduction to template files, see Stepping Into Templates.

Let’s say you write a lot about cheese and gadgets. Through the use of the WordPress Loop and template files, you can customize your Cheese category posts to look different from your Gadgets category posts. With this powerful control over what different pages and categories look like on your site, you are limited only by your imagination. For information on how to use different Themes for different categories or posts, see The Loop in Action and Category Templates.

Put simply, themes are what control how the content of your site is displayed.  By default WordPress ships with the Twenty-Ten and Twenty Eleven themes.  You can find them in your WordPress installation directory under /wp-content/themes/.  If you look in these folders, you’ll see a group of PHP files with names like header.php, footer.php, index.php, etc.  I encourage everyone to open these files up and inspect them.  Do this with every theme you come across and start to play around with them (on your local server).  You can learn a lot just by adding and removing elements from the theme files and seeing what happens and why — deleting elements from the header and footer, for example.

Changing themes will not affect the content of your site because the ‘content’ is stored in database.  It’s important to realize this if your theme files get hacked.  Even if you delete your theme entirely, your content is still stored in the database, hanging out, ready for a theme to tell it how to display on a webpage.

Back-End vs. Front-End Development

These are terms you’ll inevitably encounter in the development world.  I’m going to quote Ian Peters-Campbell here for a great explanation from Quora.com:

Backend development means the part of the system that isn’t user facing: the databases, big algorithms, etc. In the modern day that usually means a server.

Frontend development is the part that users see and interact with. That includes the UI, the animations, and usually a bunch of logic to talk to the backend. In the modern day that can mean an app running on your iPhone or the HTML and Javascript in a web browser.

If you use the metaphor of a car you can think of the frontend developer as the guy who installs the leather seats, steering wheel, pedals, shifters, and the stereo. The backend developer is  the guy who puts in the engine and the transmission.

How does this relate to WordPress development?  Think of theme design and programming as front-end development.  The theme, because it controls the user-facing side of the website, is considered front-end.  Even changes to the WordPress dashboard are considered frontend, because they are still things that you see.  Backend development can be creating plugins that interact behind the scenes with the WordPress database or actual changes to the WordPress core itself (things you wouldn’t see).

WordPress Theme Anatomy

A WordPress theme is a collection of files within your /wp-content/themes/YOUR-THEME folder in your WordPress installation.  Each file within the theme controls a specific piece of your theme, such as your header, sidebar, and footer files.  It is possible to make these pieces ‘dynamic’ – adjusting for whatever page you’re on – for example, changing the header when on a certain blog category page, however most of the time these elements remain static.  For a quick overview of static vs. dynamic websites, please read this.  Technically the only files your need to have a working WordPress theme is the index.php files and the style.css file.  Most themes you’ll encounter and develop will usually contain the following files (taken from WordPress Codex):

• Style.css – The main stylehseet.  This file must be included with your theme, and must contain the information header for your theme
• Index.php - The main template.  If your theme provides its own templates, index.php must be present
• Comments.php – the template that controls the display of user comments
• Home.php – The home page template, which is the front page by default.  If you use a static front page this is the template for the page with the latest posts
• Front-page.php - The front page template, it is only used if you use a static front page
• Single.php - The single post template.  Used when a single post is queried.  For this and all other query templates, index.php is used if the query template is not present
• Single-<post-type>.php - The single post template used when a single post from a custom post type is queried. For example, single-books.php would be used for displaying single posts from the custom post type books. index.php is used if the query template for the custom post type is not present.
• Page.php - The page template.  Used when an individual page is queried

For a great infographic breaking down the anatomy of a WordPress theme, check out this infographic by Joost de Valk: Anatomy of a WordPress Theme by Joost de Valk.

Template Tags

A template tag is code that instructs WordPress to “do” or “get” something. In the case of the header.php template tag for your WordPress site’s name, it looks like this:

<h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1>

The template tag is <?php bloginfo(); ?> wrapped in an H1 heading tag. The bloginfo()tag gets information from your User Profile and Options > General in the Administration Panels. In the example here, the word name inside of the quote marks in the tag instructs the tag to “get the blog’s site name”. This is called a parameter.

There are numerous tags at your disposal for outputting the date, the author of the post, the permalink, the category, the post content, etc.  For a full list of all available template tags, check out the full list from the WordPress Codex.

How do you use template tags?

One of the first questions I usually get asked is where to put template tags.  You put them in your theme files.  Since the theme files are controlling the information that is output to the front end of the site, we use template tags within the theme to control which information we are displaying.  Using the example above of:

<?php bloginfo('name')?>

We could wrap that information in <title> </title> tags and put it in our header.php theme file.  Whenever the header is loaded, it will use the bloginfo(‘name’) template tag to make a request to the database to get the blog name, then output that information within the <title> tags on the frontend of the site.  Certain template tags are meant to be used within the Loop and others outside of the Loop.  I’ll dive into the loop in the next section.

Resources for Learning More About Template Tags: 

• List of All Available Template Tags (WordPress Codex)
• Stepping Into Template Tags (WordPress Codex)
• Template Tag Broken Down by Category 
• Anatomy of a WordPress Template Tag (WordPress Codex)
• How to Pass Tag Parameters (WordPress Codex)

The Loop

From the WordPress Codex:

The Loop is used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML orPHP code contained in the Loop will be processed on each post.

When WordPress documentation states “This tag must be within The Loop”, such as for specific Template Tag or plugins, the tag will be repeated for each post. For example, The Loop displays the following information by default for each post:

• Title (the_title())
• Time (the_time())
• Categories (the_category()).

Other information about each post can be displayed using the appropriateTemplate Tags or (for advanced users) by accessing the $post variable, which is set with the current post’s information while The Loop is running.

The Loop is where the magic happens.  It’s the most important WordPress feature you will need to understand to build your own themes or modify existing themes.  Take time to read through the links and resources below and play around with some code yourself.  The sooner you start messing around coding your own loop, the sooner you’ll understand the mechanics of it.  A solid understanding of the loop is what separates casual WordPress users from beginning WordPress developers.

How to Use the Loop

The loop is placed within theme files to make a query to the database requesting posts, then outputting them.  In its most basic form, the loop looks like this:

 Let’s walk through that step by step in English, explaining what each line is doing so you can better understand it:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

This line opens the loop with a conditional ‘if’ statement.  It determines if there are any posts and won’t proceed to the next portion if there are no posts.  The next chunk of code initiates the ‘while’ loop – executing its contents while posts exist.  It will end when there are no more posts to output.  ’the_post()’ calls up information about the post and sets up the global $post variable. An important element to note is that this is a ‘while’ loop, so the section outputting the post title and content will run multiple times, outputting all posts until the loop is finished when there are none left to display.

<div <?php post_class(); ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

<h1><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

<?php the_content(); ?>

</div>

This next chunk of code is what will be output multiple times within the loop – as many time as there are posts.  For each post, the loop will output a div with a class of post_class(), a template tag function that outputs various post-related classes to the div tag, useful for styling the post div later.  The ID of the div will be post-[the post ID].  If the ID of the post is ’1′, then the ID of the first div will be #post-1.  This gives control over styling individual divs and adding custom styles to elements.  Next we output a link to the post using the_permalink(); function and the title of the post using the_title().  We wrap the link and the title in the header 1 tag.  The last function, the_content(), outputs the content of the post.  Lastly, we close the div.  It’s important to understand that this chunk will be executed multiple times — hence ‘the loop’.  It will be iterated over for each post, outputting the information specific to that post.

<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php else : ?>

<div <?php post_class(); ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

<h1>Not Found</h1>

</div>

<?php endif; ?>

There are a couple things going on in this last chunk of code.  The first part is an ‘endwhile’ statement – this closes the ‘while’ loop that we opened earlier with ‘while(have_posts())’.  The ‘else’ statement isn’t required in the loop but I prefer to use it.  It is the code executed if the opening ‘if’ statement returns false.  The opening statement in this case is ‘if (have_posts())’.  Therefore this code will run only if there aren’t any posts that match the query.  So using the code above, if there aren’t any posts, we will output a div with a header 1 tag telling the user that there are no posts found matching those criteria.  The final ‘endif’ statement closes the opening ‘if’ statement and closes the loop entirely.

Resources to Better Understand the Loop

• Introduction to the Loop (WordPress Codex)
• The Loop in Action (WordPress Codex)
• 4 Ways to Loop with WordPress
• Ultimate Guide to the Loop
• WordPress Cheat Sheet – The Loop Code Snippet
• A Beginner’s Guide to the WordPress Loop
• Coding the WordPress Loop
• WordPress Loop Tutorial Screencast

Continuing Education

I’d like to close with a short bit on continuing education.  It’s tempting once you get familiar with WordPress to slack off in pushing yourself to continuously learn more every day.  Sometimes you’ll find you know ‘just enough to be dangerous’ and work your way through most jobs.  But to truly become a top WordPress developer, you need to dedicate time every week to studying, coding, and continuing to learn.  This is a very fast changing industry and it’s important to stay on top of it.  Personally I set aside several hours each week to further my understanding of PHP, mySQL, and Javascript.  I work with others on test projects, present whenever given the opportunity, and occasionally take projects outside my comfort zone to push myself.  The following links are a collection of resources I’ve found most helpful for continuing to learn WordPress and its underlying languages, broken down by category, with notes/explanations.

Tutorials

• PippinsPlugins.com - Pippin Williamson is one of the hardest working individuals in the history of mankind, as far as I can tell.  I try to set aside time each week to work through his tutorials because they provide real-world application of the WordPress development concepts.  He will walk you through how to build plugins from scratch.  I highly recommend investing in the premium membership.
• WP Tuts+ - Another great tutorial site dedicated to providing quality WordPress tutorials.  The topics covered range from building themes from scratch, basic plugin development, structuring workflow, and general development techniques.  Try to set aside time to do a tutorial each week.  You’ll start to absorb the coding practices and approaches to common WordPress problems.

Forums/Discussion

You are inevitably going to get stuck many, many times along the way while developing for WordPress.  Fortunately there is a huge, vocal community of WordPress enthusiasts standing by ready to answer your questions.  Chances are, your issue have been encountered before and others have a solution.  When posting questions to forums, make sure to be as thorough as possible when describing your problem.  Oftentimes people will get frustrated when they don’t immediately receive an answer.  If no one can understand you question or what steps you’ve taken thusfar to solve it, they probably won’t bother helping you out.  Be specific — describe exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, what steps you’ve taken to get there, and what issues you are running into.

• Reddit.com/r/Wordpress
• WordPress StackExchange
• WordPress.org support forum

Books/General Reference

 People to Follow on Twitter

• Andrew Nacin (@nacin)
• Alex King (@alexkingorg)
• Bill Erickson (@billerickson)
• Carl Hancock (@carlhancock)
• Cory Miller (@corymiller303)
• Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith)
• Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt)
• Mike Schinkel (@mikeschinkel)
• Nathan Rice (@nathanrice)
• Peter Westwood (@westi)
• Jeff Starr (@perishable)
• Joost de Valk (@yoast)
• Justin Tadlock (@justintadlock)
• Silviu-Cristian Burcă (@scribu)

Blogs to Follow

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Before we dive into search engine optimization, let me recommend a few guides for anyone new to SEO entirely or just getting back into it.  I have found SEO to be one of the fastest changing industries I’ve ever been involved in.  Strategies are constantly changing and techniques that once worked can quickly become obsolete.  My goal in this post is to guide you through the current ‘best practices’ of SEO that should work for the foreseeable future.

Getting Started With Search Engine Optimization – Overall Guides

• What is SEO?  - A 10 section overview of SEO covering ranking factors, linkbuilding, on-page optimization, penalization, social media strategy, and more.
• Beginner’s Guide to SEO - A great beginner’s guide to search engine optimization
• The SEO Fundamentals Pyramid - Covers the most important aspects of search engine optimization
• How Search Engines Work - Great guide explaining how search engines deliver results
• Blogger’s Guide to SEO - A guide dedicated to bloggers looking to optimize their posts

Initial SEO Strategy and Optimization

I’ve broken this post down into two sections because this is how I work with clients and how other SEO strategists I know work with clients.  The search engine optimization is broken down into two parts – the initial research and optimizing of your site, then the ongoing search engine optimization.  Some of these processes might overlap – for example you should continue to conduct keyword research on an ongoing basis, but the majority of your keyword research will likely be done during the initial investigation phase.

Keyword Research 

This may be the most important phase of search engine optimization, because a mistake here will sidetrack all subsequent efforts.  Keyword research is determining which keywords you want to optimize your site for.  You want to determine which keywords have the highest amount of traffic with the least amount of competition.  By selecting the right keywords and properly optimizing your content, it is possible to rank quickly, in some cases within hours.  Everyone I talked to conducts keyword research in different ways.  I have tried numerous methods, and can’t honestly determine which works best.  Here are the best resources and guides I’ve found to gain a thorough understanding of keyword research:

• The Beginner’s Keyword Research Guide, by SEOMOZ
• Professional Keyword Research Guide, by SEOMOZ
• Keyword Research Articles, by SEOMOZ
• How to do Basic Keyword Research

Tools for Keyword Research:

I use a variety of tools for keyword research.  I start by writing out keywords that I think are relevant to my site or my clients’ business.  I then run those keywords through Google Adwords Keyword Tool to analyze the level of competition and search volume.  What I’m looking to find are keywords with high search volume but low competition.  I then create a list of variations for each set of keywords.  I run this list through both SerpIQ and SEOMoz, and I’ve also started playing around with Market Samurai.

Google Insights for Search - I use this to see the average volume and trend for search terms over time.  This can help determine seasonal patterns that would help me adjust my marketing approach accordingly.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool - Sign up for a free Google Adwords account to use this tool.  I start by brainstorming some keywords then enter them here to gauge the level of competition and monthly search volume.  If I can find terms that are searched frequently enough with medium or lower competition, I will try to rank for them.

SerpIQ.com - This is a paid product which can help you determine variations on keywords and gauge their difficulty when it comes to ranking for them.

Market Samurai – This is paid software that offers a free trial and is one of the most highly recommended pieces of software by the SEO ‘gurus’.  I am going through the training videos to get fully acclimated

SEOMoz Keyword Research Tool – The SEOMoz Pro software offers a free 30 day trial, then cost $99/month thereafter.  I love the keyword research tool for analyzing keywords, difficulty, and competition.  Currently this is my preferred tool for keyword research.

LongTail Pro - Paid keyword research tool offering a free 10 day trial.  I haven’t had a chance to mess around with this much yet but I have heard positive feedback.

Competition Analysis:

While compiling a list of keywords, I make sure to carefully analyze my competition for each set of keywords.  I do this by looking at the top 10 results for those keywords, then looking at their backlink profiles.  I have found that SEOMoz’s pro software doesn’t re-index regularly, and that MajesticSEO offers better backlink analysis.  Nonetheless, while reviewing my competitors backlinks I also take note of where there links are coming from and use this when building links later on.  For example, when trying to rank for “connecticut web design“, I noticed that the top competitors had numerous backlinks from free web designer directories.  Although many of these directories did not have a very high ‘page authority’, the links still carry some relevance in Google’s eyes.

On-Page Optimization

Armed with my researched keywords, my next step is to optimize each page for the chosen keywords.  I use one set of keywords per page.  Read through the on-page optimization guide below, then feel free to use tools to double check your work.

On-Page Optimization Guide - This is the best guide to on-page optimization I’ve come across.

Tools for On-Page Optimization:

• SEOMoz Pro - as part of the SEO Software package, SEOMoz offers a nice tool which will review your on-page optimization for selected keywords and generate a report card offering actionable steps to improve the page
• Pineberry On-Page Analysis Tool - Similar to the SEOMoz tool, Pineberry is a free on-page optimization tool which will offer suggestions to better optimize your pages/posts

WordPress Settings

The clients I work with have their sites built on WordPress, typically because I’ve built it for them.  The clients that I work with who had a non-Wordpress based site I asked to rebuild in WordPress.  Wordpress allows for numerous SEO plugins to greatly increase the rate at which you rank for terms.  I am going to devote a separate post to optimizing your WordPress based site for SEO, but in the meantime please check out Alex Miranda’s presentation from this year’s  Wordcamp in New York City: Why Google Loves WordPress.

Ongoing Optimization Strategies

Write Quality Content – BLOG!

If there’s one area of consensus amongst SEO professionals, it’s that the primary focus of your ongoing optimization strategy should be to produce quality content relevant to your keywords.  Quality content can include blog posts, infographics, and social media press releases.  The goal of writing quality content is to get more traffic and links to your site.  Additionally, writing a timeless piece such as the SEOMoz guides to SEO mentioned earlier in this post are guaranteed to generate thousands of backlinks.  While researching Connecticut Web Design competition, I found an amazing example of the power of a single infographic image for a company’s website and online reputation:

I came across this infographic which breaks down the social demographics between Facebook and Twitter in 2010.  The company that produced it, Digital Surgeons, generated thousands of backlinks from other blogs mentioning and reproducing this infographic.  If Digital Surgeons sees this post, I’m letting them know – nice freakin work.

That being said, it’s important to have a strategy for producing quality content on an ongoing basis.  Many clients I work with are too busy to think about blogging, so I work with writers to help produce content then run it by the clients before publishing.  Here are the best guides I’ve found for content strategy:

• The Definitive Guide to Awesome Content
• In-Depth Guide to Content Creation
• How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Niche
• The SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics

LinkBuilding

In order to build your sites’ credibility, you need to have other sites linking to you.  A variety of factors will also affect the ‘weight’ of these links when Google calculates your rank for search terms – primarily the authority of the page linking to you and the link anchor text.  Like I mentioned earlier, my first step when creating a linkbuilding strategy is analyzing my competition.  I use Majestic SEO to view the top 10 competitors for search terms and comb through their backlinks, determining where they are getting links from.  Sometimes this will uncover easy targets – business directories typically appear.  I submit my site or my clients’ site to these directories immediately.  Once the low hanging fruit has been picked, I create a long term link building strategy based around the continual creation of relevant content.  The following resources are the best guides I’ve found to get started creating a linkbuilding strategy. In particular, my current strategy revolves around what I’ve learned from “The 6 Month Link Building Game (see link below)”:

• The Noob Guide To Link Building
• Learn Link Building
• Link Building Strategies
• The 6 Month Link Building Game
• The Professional Guide to Link Building
• Really Easy Guide to Link Building

Social Media Press Releases

I first learned about the value of Social Media Press Releases from Alex Miranda in March of 2012.  When used effectively, social media press releases are a great way to build backlinks and generate spikes in traffic to your website.  Alex talks about how to write an effective Social Media Press Release in his presentation Why Google Loves WordPress.  In addition, here are some guides to get started writing high quality social media press releases:

• How to Write a Social Media Press Release
• 5 Tips for a Successful Social Media Press Release

Monitoring Progress

As you continue each month to blog, submit press releases, guest post, comment on other blogs, and promote your business through social media, you need objective metrics to measure your progress.  Google Analytics is my preferred tool for monitoring website traffic and referral sources.  Google Webmaster tools I use to measure click through rates, average ranking for terms, site impressions, and what terms people are using to find me.  Oftentimes it’s surprising seeing which search terms direct people to your site.  I still routinely get a decent amount of traffic to my website from an article I wrote on nutrition earlier this year.  A mention of intermittent fasting results has me in the 47th position for that term with a 4% click through rate.  Another article I wrote on my current training protocol generates ~100 site views per month.  Here are the tools and metrics I use to measure progress month to month:

Google Analytics

This is a mandatory tool for any website.  Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s traffic, new vs. returning visitors, bounce rate, page views, referral sources, and tons of other metrics.  It’s not only important to know how to use Google Analytics, it’s equally important knowing what to do with the data you receive.  Here is the best guide I’ve found explaining how to use Google Analytics:

• A Guide To Google Analytics and Useful Tools by Smashing Magazine - This may be the only resource you need.  The article covers all the basic elements of Google Analytics with videos and text then dives deeper into desktop applications to use Google Analytics data, Analytics WordPress plugins, Drupal Plugins, mobile apps, and links to other Analytics resources and guide.

Google Webmaster Tools

Another mandatory tool for any website owner.  Webmaster tools allows you to submit your sitemap and robots.txt files to Google to help with indexing.  You can view the number of times your site appeared in search results and for what search terms, the average rank for search terms, number of clicks, click through rate, view crawl errors, scan for malware, ask Google to ‘fetch’ one of your pages for indexing, and more features than I’m going to bother listing here.  There are some excellent guides available online to get started using Webmaster tools and to use the data more effectively if you’ve been working with the application for awhile.  Here are some of my personal favorites:

• 2012 Guide to Google Webmaster Tools - Basic overview of Webmaster Tools covering the initial setup and most important metrics.
• Official Google Webmaster Tools Tutorial – A series of videos covering the most important features found in Google Webmaster Tools
• Making Data from GWT Actionable – A more advanced presentation from Richard Baxter at SMX in Sydney, Australia.

SEO Rank Reporting

There are several different tools that can measure rank progress for keywords over time.  Personally I prefer SEOMoz Pro.  I have used SEOMoz Pro, Raven Tools, Market Samurai, and Advanced Web Ranking.  I find SEOMoz the most user friendly.  It may not be the most robust software, but for rank reporting it produces clean, easy to read reports that I can show to clients.  SEO Rank reporter is a plugin I also use on WordPress sites to monitor ranking over time.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve found this starting guide useful while learning about SEO or polishing up on your skills.  Keep in mind this is only the tip of the iceberg in this fast changing industry.  Check back in a few weeks for my post on optimizing your WordPress-based site for search engine optimization.  I’d also advise you to devote a couple hours per week reading up on SEO from the resources at the end of this post.  If you need help optimizing your site and are interested in a free consultation about how I can help you expand your business, feel free to contact me.

Resources

• SEOMoz Blog
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Book
• Matt Cutts
• Search Engine Watch
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Link Building Blog

The post Search Engine Optimization Resource Guide by a Connecticut SEO Specialist appeared first on Clinton Warren | CT Wordpress Developer | Connecticut Web Design | SEO.

1. Become a Top WordPress Developer (Smashing Magazine) – This is pretty much the article I’ve been waiting for – outlining a course of action to become a top WordPress developer.  What to do, who to follow, etc.
2. Using Genesis Connect for WooCommerce – I had to use this reference for a site I am working on.  I have run into issues with Genesis before because so much of their theme is controlled by hooks and filters.  Sometimes it’s difficult to manipulate the theme the way you want.
3. Underscores: A Starter Theme for WordPress - I haven’t had a chance to play around with this yet, but I’m always looking for cleanly coded base templates to create WordPress themes off of.  Increasingly clients are demanding responsive themes which makes it more challenging from a design perspective.  Fortunately a lot of starter themes like Underscores are cropping up that help speed up this process.
4. 14 Essential WordPress Development and Design Cheat Sheets - I’m giving a presentation in September at Hudson Valley WordPress Meetup Group and came across this while starting my outline.  This list contains cheat sheet for basic WordPress theme development.
5. Creating a Responsive, Mobile-First WordPress Theme – Another great article from the fine folks at Smashing Magazine detailing the process for creating a responsive WordPress theme.  I have been running into issues with a theme I’m currently working on, and this has been an excellent resource.

The post Weekly Roundup for August 20 – 26 appeared first on Clinton Warren | CT Wordpress Developer | Connecticut Web Design | SEO.

On August 20th I’ll be presenting at the Meetup.com WordPress Developers New Haven group, hosted by Sandra Christie of M Squared Web Design, on WooCommerce.  I am very fortunate to have access to so many WordPress groups in Connecticut and New York.  I’ve used WooCommerce to develop several simple e-commerce sites, and prefer it to Jigoshop, Cart66, and WP E-Commerce.  Below is an overview of what I’ll be discussing in my presentation as well as some additional links and resources.

What is WooCommerce?

Simply put, WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily sell products through your WordPress site.  It is created by the WooThemes.com developers, has a large community of support, and an increasingly large following. I got turned onto WooCommerce about 6 months ago by my friend Alex Bachuk of the Stamford WordPress Meetup Group.  Alex is a WordPress pro, so whenever he recommends something I follow his lead.  I checked around a bit online for other e-commerce solutions and played with JigoShop, Cart66, and WP E-Commerce, but WooCommerce seemed to have the best support, documentation, cleanest code, and best selection of add-ons.

Setup/Installation

For my presentation I’m using the Canvas E-Commerce child theme from WooThemes.  I like Canvas because it provides a nice ‘blank slate’ for simple sites and is highly customizable.  The only drawback I have run into is that it is highly bloated (check out the 9+ megabyte theme files), but that is bound to happen when you design a theme with so many built-in options.    There are 3 places you can grab the plugin from – GitHub, WooThemes.com, or the official WordPress plugin directory.  For my presentation I’ll simply be downloading the plugin from the official repository using the one-click installation from the backend of my site.  I want to mention GitHub though because you can grab the absolute most recent version of WooCommerce there – at the time of this writing it had been updated 2 days ago.

Moving CSS and Template Files into the Theme Directory

One of the first things I like to do to have control over the display of the store is move the CSS and Template files from the plugin directory into my theme directory.  By default, WooCommerce will use their woocommerce.css file in the plugin directory to style the appearance of the store.  Don’t get into the habit of editing the woocommerce.css file directly (in the plugin folder), because when upgrading the plugin you will lose your changes.  The same applies to the template files, which are included in woocommerce/templates.  That being said, here are the steps to move these files:

1. On the WooCommerce > Settings page, uncheck the box near the bottom ‘Enable WooCommerce CSS Styles’
2. In the WooCommerce plugin folder, copy woocommerce.css from woocommerce/assets/css/woocommerce.css and entire woocommerce/templates folder
3. Paste the woocommerce.css file
4. At the top of your theme stylesheet, include the Woocommerce.css file using @import.  So if the woocommerce.css file is in the same folder as your stylesheet, simply put ‘@import url(‘woocommerce.css’);’
5. Create a folder called ‘woocommerce’ in your theme folder and place the templates folder that you copied earlier into here, this will overrride the default template files in the plugin directory, so you can modify the display of template files without losing your changes when you upgrade the theme

Settings Page

WooThemes has great documentation, so I’m not going to spend too much time here paraphrasing their setup guide.  Upon installation, WooCommerce will ask your permission to ‘install the WooCommerce pages’ (click yes) – this will generate pages for the cart, checkout, store, etc.  I then go through and update settings accordingly – specifying location, tax rate, allowing for inventory management, shipping options, payment gateways, the email template, and analytics integration.

Adding Products, Product Types, Attributes/Variations

Click here to view the user guide on adding and managing products.  It’s important to get comfortable with setting up product attributes and using those to generate variations – this is something I see frequently in online shops.

One tip I want to throw out there is to standardize your product images ahead of time.  The layout of the site doesn’t look as clean (in my experience) with different product images sizes.  I pick a large image size dimension and base the “Image Options” on the Settings > Catalog page off of these numbers.  For example if I use 500×500 as my image dimensions, the catalog images I’ll set at 75% – 375×375 and the product thumbnails at 50% – 250×250.    This will save you some headache and help preserve image quality.  Definitely don’t upload small images and scale them up – always upload larger images and scale them down.

Shipping Classes

Properly setting up shipping classes is important, so I recommend viewing the documentation here.  In my presentation I show how products can be grouped in similar categories – shirts are charged one rate to ship while equipment is charged another rate.  I prefer to use the Table Rate Shipping Extension to have full control over the product rates – configuring shipping class and the cost to ship per zone.  For example, I had a client who wanted 1-3 shirts to ship in the USA for $5, 4-6 shirts to ship for $10, etc.  This was easy to do with the Table Rate Shipping Extension by setting up a ‘shirts’ shipping class, creating a USA shipping zone in the table rate settings page, then specifying different tiers of pricing based on the number of items ordered.

I have also used the UPS Shipping calculator which worked well but requires a UPS business account to access their API.

Setting Up Coupons, Viewing Sales Reports

• Setting Up Coupons
• Viewing Sales Reports

Useful Extensions

For a list of all available extensions, check out the official WooThemes extension directory and CodeCanyon.net.  Here are the ones I’ve used and recommend:

• Table Rate Shipping - I use this in almost all my WooCommerce installations.  From the plugin developers:  ”Define separate shipping rates location, zone, price, weight, or item count. Wildcards may be used to match multiple regions too.”
• UPS Shipping Calculator
• Product Add Ons - This extension allows you to add customized fields (radio boxes, dropdowns, text fields) to products to allow for personalized messages, image uploads, and attaching extra product data.
• Custom Panels – I found this while posting on a message board trying to figure out the best way to build a shop.  It allows you to add an additional panel on the individual product page that can include any information you want.  You can customize the title of the tab, and the information contained within it is editable with the TinyMCE editor.
• PayPal Pro – This plugin requires an SSL certificate and a PayPal merchant account.  It allows users to checkout from your site without being redirected to PayPal.

Plugins I definitely do not recommend:

• QuickBooks (Intuit) Payment Gateway for WooCommerce - I spent 2 weeks going back and forth with the hosting company, Intuit, and the plugin developer trying to get this plugin to work.  The hosting company pointed the blame at Intuit, Intuit pointed the blame at the plugin developer, and the plugin developer pointed the blame at Intuit after taking several weeks to respond.  Save yourself the time and hassle and don’t ever use this plugin.

Common Issues and Quick Fixes

1. The Image Blurring Problem – This drove me crazy when I first started using WooCommerce.  Even after standardizing my image sizes WooCommerce was resizing them, causing them to look awful.  I found this solution online and have been using it ever since.
2. Change the Number of Products Per Row
3. Remove the sidebar on single products pages – Drop this snippet of code into your functions.php file: remove_action( ‘woocommerce_sidebar’, ‘woocommerce_get_sidebar’, 10);
4. Remove Related Products Info
5. Remove pagination on products page – show all products:  add the following line of code to your functions.php file: add_filter(‘loop_shop_per_page’, create_function(‘$cols’, ‘return 40;’));

Tweaking Template Files and Developing for WooCommerce

The template files that we moved into our theme directory in the first step are what controls the display of products and product pages.  Single-Product.php, for example, controls the display on single product pages.  It’s worth noting that these template files are coded in such a way that encourages the use of action and filter hooks to modify them without hacking them apart.  Here are some helpful resources to gain a better understanding of the hooks and filters, as well as an overview on theming these files:

• Introduction to Hooks: actions and Filters
• How to Use Actions and Filters
• Action and Filter Reference for WooCommerce
• Extending WooCommerce (Lists the Settings API, Payment API, Shipping Method API)
• API Docs
• Code Snippets – examples of hooks and filters in action within WooCommerce
• Amber Weinberg – Developing Custom WooCommerce Themes
• How to Edit and Disable Checkout Fields

Other Resources

1. WordPress.stackexchange.com
2. Reddit.com/r/wordpress
3. WooThemes Support Forum

The post Creating an E-Commerce Site Using WooCommerce appeared first on Clinton Warren | CT Wordpress Developer | Connecticut Web Design | SEO.

1. The Noob Guide to Linkbuilding - Written by Michael King, this is a six-month strategy to start building links back to you or your clients’ sites.  This is a must-read guide to anyone serious about ongoing SEO strategies.
2.  Black Hat World - I’m not going to recommend any of the tactics listed on this site, but I thought it was an interesting forum worth mentioning.  Often times it’s easy to overlook and dismiss ‘black hat’ SEO tactics, but I want to know all strategies available.  If you want to read about automated submission programs, affiliate programs, link buying, and other ‘frowned-upon’ tactics, read on.
3. A Responsive Design Approach for Navigation - I’m currently working a website that is responsive and based on the 1140 GS grid system.  One of the biggest challenges I’ve tweaking the page for small screens.  I was only given layouts for large screens, so despite elements stacking on lower screens items like the navigation don’t look clean.  I have wanted to implement a strategy I see used frequently on responsive WordPress themes – creating a dropdown navigation menu on lower resolutions.  This article provides a great tutorial on how to do so.
4. A Tale of Two Viewports - A found this article while researching Javascript Browser Object Models.  I thought it was an interesting read showing differences in viewport size across different screens.
5. Pineberry Webpage SEO Analysis Tool - A free too for analyzing individual webpages for on-page SEO.  This will check multiple elements on your site and grade it on a scale of 1-100, providing recommendations for improvement.
6. Developing Custom WooCommerce Themes - I stumbled upon this article while researching for my upcoming presentation at the New Haven WordPress Meetup group.  I wanted to see if there are any tutorials available for WooCommerce theme development.  This is a great article by Amber Weinberg detailing how to show cart details in a theme and how to code custom category loop with images.

I’ll have more to share next week, so please check back.  Feel free to comment or email me with any thoughts.

The post Weekly Roundup for August 6-12 appeared first on Clinton Warren | CT Wordpress Developer | Connecticut Web Design | SEO.

On August 1st, Nicholas launched Art and Social Activism, an exhibit hosted in Long Island City, New York.  Having never met Nicholas personally, I drove down Saturday August 4th to support his project and shake his hand.  The artwork on display was beautiful, and I was very proud to have been able to provide a website that does it justice.

The post Nicholas Cohn Art Projects appeared first on Clinton Warren | CT Wordpress Developer | Connecticut Web Design | SEO.