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You have four seconds – the exact amount of time you need to create a lasting first impression on your web visitors – to answer this next question. What would you possibly do to differentiate your online business from the myriad other businesses out there? Tick tock…three, two, one. Time’s up. You probably came up with these among other answers: Have the most awesome of products Tell a great personal story why you do what is it that you do Build a formidable online presence Talk to someone over at Finally Famous, Inc, which is a totally fictitious company Fiction aside, let’s back up to bullet number three on our list; building a formidable online presence. Easier said than done, building an online presence that lets you standout from the crowd involves a couple of factors that tie back to having a great website. A great website you say? That’s right; your website is, among other things, the face of your online business – your one and only chance to make a great first … [Read more...] about Customize Your WordPress Theme With These Helpful Tools

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Here it is! Named “Eckstine” in honor of Billy Eckstine, this latest and greatest version of WordPress is available for download or update in your dashboard. Welcome to WordPress 5.5. In WordPress 5.5, your site gets new power in three major areas: speed, search, and security. Speed Posts and pages feel faster, thanks to lazy-loaded images. Images give your story a lot of impact, but they can sometimes make your site seem slow. In WordPress 5.5, images wait to load until they’re just about to scroll into view. The technical term is ‘lazy loading.’ On mobile, lazy loading can also keep browsers from loading files meant for other devices. That can save your readers money on data — and help preserve battery life. Search Say hello to your new sitemap. WordPress sites work well with search engines. Now, by default, WordPress 5.5 includes an XML sitemap that helps search engines discover your most important pages from the very minute you go live. So … [Read more...] about WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine”

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WordPress 4.0 Beta 2 is now available for download and testing. This is software still in development, so we don’t recommend that you run it on a production site. To get the beta, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip). For more of what’s new in version 4.0, check out the Beta 1 blog post . Some of the changes in Beta 2 include: Further refinements for the the plugin installation and media library experiences. Updated TinyMCE, which now includes better indentation for lists and the restoration of the color picker. Cookies are now tied to a session internally, so if you have trouble logging in, #20276 may be the culprit. Various bug fixes (there were nearly 170 changes since last week). If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac . There, you can also find … [Read more...] about WordPress 4.0 Beta 2

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We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action. meet·up \ mēt -əp\ noun a meetup for new moms in the neighborhood; a meetup to plan the trip; a meetup for WordPress users. 1 So what is a WordPress Meetup ? Basically, it’s people in a community getting together — meeting up — who share an interest in WordPress, whether they be bloggers, business users, developers, consultants, or any other category of person able to say, “I use WordPress in some way and I like it, and I want to meet other people who can say the same.” Meetups come in different shapes and sizes, but they all carry the benefit of connecting you with potential collaborators and friends, and helping you learn more about what you can do with WordPress. Here are some of the common types of WordPress meetups: Hang out and work on your WordPress sites together Social/happy hour type gatherings Mini-lectures/presentations Developer hacking meetups … [Read more...] about Year of the Meetup

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Last Wednesday, the core development team and a number of contributing developers met in the IRC #wordpress-dev channel to talk about which features should be included in version 2.9, which is now entering the development phase. We’ve been planning to focus on media features in 2.9 for some time, and unsurprisingly, it was media features that dominated the discussion.* A large percentage of the requests we get from users are for more/better media features, so we’ve decided to focus 2.9 on building an infrastructure for improved media handling that we can continue to build on in versions to come. In that vein, we need your input to determine which features to prioritize and build sooner rather than later. These are the features that we’re asking people to vote on (in alphabetical, not prioritized, order): Additional Media Filters: In the uploader, you can currently upload an image from your hard drive, link to an image from a URL, or select an image from the Media Library. This … [Read more...] about Vote for 2.9 Media Features

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