When I wrote about the things I had learned from releasing 20 WordPress themes, I mentioned that I had automated as much as I could. One of the things I automated was the build and deployment process for my themes...
In 2007 I partnered with Darren Hoyt to release Mimbo Pro, one of the earliest premium WordPress themes. In 2012 Mimbo Pro was published on wordpress.com. Last week – on October 5th 2016 to be precise – my 20th theme...
Posting regular content is essential when you’re trying to build a successful blog or website – but it’s something I struggle with. I think I’ve found a solution that works for me though. Regular content is great for Google (and...
My old website projects page was a mess. It was basically a page containing a list of ‘things’ I had developed. Whether thats websites, WordPress themes, Games. There was all sorts of things there. But it wasn’t pretty – it...
Recently, I’ve received a couple of emails asking about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org versions of WordPress. The reason for the confusion is that I sell themes for both sites – and I often get people buying my themes...
I’m currently working on a new WordPress course (MasterWP – first email is sent on Monday 12th September) that helps to teach things beyond the basics – and to do it I need a website. I’m making the course with...
As a premium theme seller my target audience is implementors, people who buy themes for clients and then customize them. But how do people get to be implementors to start with? This is something I wanted to tackle – helping...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...