Blog - page 6

WordPress 4.6 has recently been released, and now plans are being made for WordPress 4.7. At the start of each new version the WordPress team ask for ideas and suggestions for areas people would like them to focus on. This...

I recently mentioned how I am now ‘DogFooding’ my WordPress themes. Part of the reason for this is that I want to make sure that my themes are ready for the real world before I make them available for sale...

Marketing & self promotion is definitely my weak point. It’s something I feel I should be better at (or hire someone to do) but I just never feel the motivation. I enjoy building things, so that’s what I tend to...

In April I entered the #LowRezJam, a game jam about making a game in a limited resolution. I had to make a game that fit within a screen that was 64×64 pixels. Quite small. I spent 5 days on it....

There’s a few rules that I live by, that have helped to get me where I am. You’ve probably heard of all of them, but I thought I’d write them down and explain how they have benefitted me! 🙂You don’t...

I wasn’t able to make WordCamp Europe this year, but they’ve been really quick at getting all of the talks online, and so I have been watching some of them – and this one stood out.Morten Rand-Hendriksen is an experienced...

I’ve mentioned it before but I run a WordPress themes site called Pro Theme Design. On it, I sell premium WordPress themes – but I don’t use WordPress to power the site.This probably seems like a strange thing to do...

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to test and promote the product.Wikipedia – DogfoodingThis is another thing on the long list...

A lot has happened in my life in the last year – so much that I’ve probably missed some things. In an effort to remember what’s happened I thought I’d break the blogging silence with a post summarising how and...

The Zelda series has been with me for a long time. I first played it on the original gameboy with The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening. The sense of adventure and exploration in that game is fantastic. I never played...

I recently submitted my first free theme to WordPress.org.Kent is a theme I made for wordpress.com. It’s been code reviewed by the team there and is in use on a few hundred sites. I was considering selling it on Creative...

Recently I showed the research I did into other WordPress theme shops and their theme clubs – and now I’ve released the Pro Theme Design Theme Club.The club is an easy way for people to purchase all of our themes,...

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Jetpack. All the themes we sell on Pro Theme Design support features in Jetpack so I found the slides from this talk about Jetpack for Theme Developers (from WordCamp Montreal 2015) really...

I’m working on adding a Theme Club to Pro Theme Design. I’ve been asked about it before but have always been put off because of the amount of effort involved in setting one up – however I have now found...

Late last year we switched Pro Theme Design over to a static html powered site – but that meant we couldn’t do anything clever with it – like have a contact form. Initially we relied on Twitter and Facebook, but...

A couple of months ago I was given a Huawei Honor 6 Android phone in return for blogging about the Honor 6 Design competition. Today is the last day to enter the competition so, as a final post, I thought...

The other day I was updating my WordPress plugin, BM Custom Login, and I need some simple colour manipulation functions. In the plugin you can pick colours for different elements of the WordPress login interface, and I wanted to colour...

In WordPress there’s an option to add custom descriptions to Menu links – but by default there’s no way to display these descriptions. I’m currently redesigning Binary Moon and wanted to add descriptions to the menu – so I thought...

These days a lot of spammers submit spam comments that are perfectly legitimate apart from the fact that they link somewhere. So I thought I would disable the website url field in the comments so that comments can focus on...

I recently spoke on a panel at WordCamp London 2015e. Lance – who used to be the Theme Team lead at WordPress.com – asked me if I wanted to speak on a panel with him at WordCamp London 2015. I’ve...

I’m a bit of a gamer – I used to write a gaming blog, and I like to make games as a hobby. These days I mostly play iPhone games but I do still like to sit down and have...