It’s this time of year again where we have a few days to relax and recharge our batteries. From us here at XLD Studios, we want to wish you a very Happy Easter. While we are working on some exciting projects through the weekend, we hope that you are taking some time off to spend time with family (we will be), eat good and enjoy yourself.
When it comes to eCommerce for WordPress, there is arguably no better plugin available than WooCommerce from WooThemes. The plugin just got a major update, WooCommerce 2.0 with lots of new features available.
As you would expect from a major update, the new version has some sought after features for store managers, developers and customers, who all benefit greatly from an upgrade, which isn’t all too hard to do either. Compatibility with previous themes and modifications (if done rightly) is a breeze.
You can read more about what’s new over on the WooThemes blog.
One of the great resources for webmasters that Google put out, is their videos on the GoogleWebmasterHelp channel on YouTube. They are constantly uploading videos answering questions they get, all very good questions with usually excellent answers.
A personal favorite are the videos with Matt Cutts who usually talks about items related to SEO and what Google considers to be spammy. Check out the channel. It’s a great resource.
It’s that time again if you have a WordPress site to get the updater running. The latest update is a maintenance and security release, WordPress 3.5.1, to fix some important bugs and security vulnerabilities. It is as always a simple update from the admin panel but may we just remind you to make sure you have a backup of your site just in case something goes wrong.
An overview of what is new and what they have fixed in this version, head over to the official blog post on WordPress.org where they outline a few of the most important ones and link to the trac for the full changelog.
If you don’t want to worry about the updates yourself, just contact us and we will happy to update your site for you to save some time, or invite you to sign up for our service plan where we make sure your site is safely backed up and updated at all times.
Facebook today at an event, unveiled their new Graph Search which essentially wants to pick up the battle with Google over search. As everyone is well aware of by now, finding things on Facebook isn’t exactly easy. You can try using their search box, but it is unlikely that it is going to get you very far.
Facebook’s new Graph Search aims to change that completely, and is Facebook’s way of saying that people and social connections ultimately matter much more than algorithms, or to put it in another way, that you should now stay within Facebook when searching too.
Have you ever noticed how differently we tend to think as website owners and as website visitors? Despite also being a website user, becoming annoyed at bad user experience practices, we are constantly accepting workflows and ways that we don’t really like when in the other role. Read More »
One of the best plugins to enable caching and speed up your WordPress site is W3 Total Cache. It can however be a bit tricky to configure properly. In this video tutorial, I walk you through how to configure it for maximum performance on your WordPress site.
While some settings will need to be set specifically for your goals and site specifics, the tutorial gives you a good set of defaults and in it, I point out if there are settings you can experiment with on your own to tweak the performance.
We would like to take this moment to wish you all a very Happy New Year and we hope that it will be filled with exciting things and much fun.
This summer we abstracted much of the work that we do on every new WordPress theme into our own theme development framework (Ilmenite Framework) which we of course is sharing on GitHub. Fundamentally, the reason is not to make the greatest framework known to man, it is more of a base theme and framework that speeds up our development process. Read More »
A couple of weeks ago, Paul Boag wrote an article on Smashing Magazine that I personally thought had many good points in it. This post was slammed in the comments by people in the SEO industry, telling Paul why he was wrong and was followed up by a most excellent post “What The Heck is SEO? A Rebuttal” collaboratively written by trustworthy people in the SEO industry, explaining that in fact, Paul has the SEO industry all wrong, explaining what they really do.
What I find interesting about this, is reading the follow up post on Smashing Magazine, and one by Joost de Valk to learn that I, like Paul, have another image of the SEO industry that they so fiercely want to defend, and rightly so. Read More »