kevinleary.net

Creating a WordPress Website for Beginners

Kevin Leary — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:33:21 +0000

As far as blogging platforms go, WordPress is by far one of the best and most flexible – and when used properly can be used as a casual “blog” or even a more corporate website and product sales site. However, before we get onto that – you’ll need to know the basics, because all beginners [...]

My WordPress Development Environment

Kevin Leary — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:08:07 +0000

I’m constantly trying to improve my WordPress development environment. It’s a conundrum I’ve been battling with since I began developing websites with WordPress. How do you reliably make local updates to a website, publish those updates online to a staging website for client review, and then publish them live to production when they are approved? [...]

WordPress 3.5 Admin Error: “jQuery is not defined”

Kevin Leary — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:51:39 +0000

Today is the big day, I’ve begun upgrading various installs to WordPress 3.5. Many of them have been experiencing issues with JavaScript related errors in the admin. WordPress 3.5 has a new performance loading feature that will concatenate all JavaScript resources into a single request (which is awesome). Unfortunately this new method currently caused conflicts [...]

Adding Custom Post Types to Author Archives in WordPress

Kevin Leary — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:56:36 +0000

WordPress automatically generates archives for each blog author, listing all posts created by that author. But what happens when you have a system with custom post types that you want to attribute to appear on an author archive? This requires a small bit of programming, but luckily it’s very easy to do using the following [...]

Taxonomy Term Descriptions & WordPress Archives

Kevin Leary — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:29:03 +0000

If you’re working with custom taxonomies in WordPress, it’s nice to provide site owners the option to display term descriptions in their theme. Optional term descriptions can easily be displayed on a taxonomy archive page using the term_description() function: I generally use this bit of code on the archive.php or taxonomy.php templates in a theme, [...]

When to Use is_home() & is_front_page()

Kevin Leary — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 01:29:03 +0000

In WordPress you can conveniently display, run or show something when certain conditions are met using conditional tags. I frequently find myself using the two most ambiguous tag’s: is_home() and is_front_page(). Don’t be fooled, though these two tags might be seamingly similar, they are two very different beasts. Let’s take a look at how they [...]

Quick Tip: CSS Vertical-align & Inline-block

Kevin Leary — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:21:18 +0000

During the process of working today I came across a CSS issue with vertical-align and two inline-block elements next to each other. Setting vertical-align to baseline for both didn’t solve the issue, but after a little digging I discovered that middle did solve the issue: .menu-utility-container { display:inline-block; vertical-align:middle; } .search-form { display:inline-block; vertical-align:middle; } [...]

Automatic WordPress Image Optimization

Kevin Leary — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:27:02 +0000

If you manage a WordPress blog with multiple authors, you’ve probably experienced issues with slow loading images. Many writer’s don’t understand the importance of image compression and optimization on the web, and it’s completely understandable. So what can you do to make sure that the images your author’s upload aren’t ginormous in size? Automatic WordPress [...]

Smart Software Web Design Inspiration

Kevin Leary — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:10:22 +0000

Let’s take a look at some of the best SAAS website designs on the web, and analyze what they’re doing to drive sales and high conversion rates. Zendesk Zendesk is a SAAS support ticket management tool that is revolutionizing the customer support processes of over 20,000 companies. Their design team’s clever use of customer segmentation, [...]

Testing in Internet Explorer on Mac OS X

Kevin Leary — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 20:00:42 +0000

Testing is a very important part of the web design and development process. If you’re a Mac based web developer then you know how difficult testing in Internet Explorer on Mac OS X can be. Luckily, there’s a free, easy way to do it thanks to Oracle VirtualBox. Follow these steps to start testing your [...]