Thoughts On Ghost: Let’s Embrace Opinion

Published under Editorial.

Like nearly a hundred thousand others last week, I was very interested to see John O’Nolan’s concept of a simplified blogging platform, Ghost.

And like quite a few of those others, I really liked John’s ideas. He suggested things like totally revamping the Dashboard so that it’s “like your iPhone home screen”; adopting an email client split-view approach to managing posts and — my favourite bit — “a new writing screen that actually makes sense for blogging”. I’ll come to that in a bit.

Ghost’s Dashboard concept.

The main idea of Ghost is to tailor-make a blogging platform that does blogging, and blogging only. WordPress is, without a doubt, a fully-fledged content management system, but it seems it’s always been fighting to be accepted as so.

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• Posted: 12. Nov, 2012
• Comments: 3

Effective Landing Pages for WordPress

Published under Marketing.

If you have absolutely anything you want people to do when visiting your website — be that subscribe, download, purchase,  whatever — you need a landing page.

I realised I needed a landing page earlier this year after I released my eBook WordPress Blogging Guide and nobody was downloading it! This puzzled me as it was, you know, free.

I figured I needed a landing page of sorts. The graph above shows downloads from July, when the eBook was launched, through October. I added the landing page at the start of October and it nearly doubled download rates.

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• Posted: 25. Oct, 2012
• Comments: 7

Thesis 2.0 & The State of Premium Frameworks

Published under Premium Themes.

At the start of the month, DIYThemes launched the latest version of their hugely successful theme framework, Thesis.

Due to Thesis’ closed-source licensing, outside the tight-knit Thesis community, it is, to be honest, a little bit of a taboo to talk, write about Thesis unless you’re giving it a hard time.

I’m not setting out here to give Thesis a hard time, but I am setting out to look at what the launch of the latest version of the framework says about premium WordPress themes at the moment, specifically premium “frameworks”.

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• Posted: 15. Oct, 2012
• Comments: 27

Social Media “Share” Button Plugins For WordPress

Published under Coding.

I recently added some social media sharing buttons to WPShout via a plugin, something I thought I’d never actually do.

My reasoning behind this logic was simple: I assumed if people wanted to share my posts, then they would do so and use whatever way they preferred — a tool like Buffer, a browser plugin or just posting the link manually.

Sharing buttons in action on Mashable

I didn’t think I needed to prompt people to share posts, but it turns out, I was wrong.

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• Posted: 08. Oct, 2012
• Comments: 7

Better WordPress Captions

Published under Coding.

The latest WordPress update introduced HTML editing captions, reminding us all that captions are in fact a feature in WordPress.

They’ve not exactly been embraced as the über feature we initially hoped for; many sites still prefer to go for writing under an image in italics instead of using the captions. Smashing Magazine, for example still just have their images and then a short description underneath acting as a caption:

So why don’t we like them? I’d like to suggest it’s because the default captions, well… I’m trying to think of an eloquent way of putting this. Essentially, they look a bit pants. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Today I’ll be showing off how I do my fancy overlay captions here on WPShout, as introduced in the latest redesign.

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• Posted: 25. Sep, 2012
• Comments: 9