Blog - page 7

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...

WordPress 4.1 is bringing with it a couple of cool new additions for theme developers. They’re things that are currently a bit messy to implement in themes. For me they are things that I do the same way in all...

I did quite a lot of maths at school. I wasn’t amazing at it but because I knew I wanted to work in computers I thought it would be handy. Fast forward 16 years and I now realise that I’ve...

At work we use Git for versioning our code. We also use the suite of Atlassian products for managing tasks, code, and deployment. As such I use SourceTree a lot to manage my code. We’re also security conscious and so...

Back in 1998, enthusiastic about the launch of my first proper website, I spent a lot of time thinking about the content, the design and the marketing tools to use to make it the next big thing. Overwhelmed by the...