Wp Builds

Writing is such a complex process. When we started to think about this topic, we thought that it would be really straightforward, but after some reflection, it turns out that there's a lot to say. Are you writing for yourself, for prose, for business, for a third party? Your relationship with that writing will be dramatically altered by the 'why' of the writing. What about this interface? Do you like it plain and simple, or perhaps you like all the bells and whistles so that you can get in the weeds of sizing and fonts? Perhaps writing is becoming a dying art. With social platforms promoting short, disposable text, are we dumbing down on what we write, as well as destroying our attention spans for reading? And what about AI? Perhaps there's going to be no need to write in the future; you'll just suggest things to some SaaS app and the writing is done for you? As I say, there's lots to discuss here and I hope that you enjoy the podcast...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 25th October 2021

So... you build WordPress websites and you love it. You know what you don't love? Policies. Admit it, you don't do you? The last thing that you want to be spending your time on is ensuring that you've got all your websites, and those of your clients, up-to-date with the latest policies. The reason for this is pretty obvious. You're the website building expert, but you're not a legal expert... well, you're not likely to be. Step up Termageddon to make all this go away! On the podcast today we learn about how Termageddon can make all of your legal dramas go away with their easy to use service. Check out the podcast...

It was going to be V for Virus, but we have probably had enough of the word right now, and vulnerabilities perhaps better describes what we are really talking about here - WordPress security. This is where we are different and roles are reversed. Nathan listens to podcasts on IT security and sees the worst that can happen. David remains relatively clueless and feel invincible! He's fixed about 7 hacked sites. None due to his management and the issues have not returned. It made him feel like he was king of the world! We're not experts in this by any means, but we do like to think about it and talk about it... So check out the podcast today and let us know what you think...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 4th October 2021

So you have a WordPress website and it's all built and handed over to the client. You're done! Hurrah! Wait a minute, you're not done are you? Chances are that you've used some simple tools for uptime monitoring. You know what I mean. The kind of tools that periodically ping your website and report back if the site is still alive. You might even have gone a step further and employed a tool that offers you some sort of visual feedback. It will make sure that the site of yesterday looks like the site of today, and in this way you can be sure that nothing untoward has occurred. But what if you wanted to go a step further? What if you wanted to check all-the-things, and not just make sure that the website is up, but that the website is working. There is a difference! Today we speak to Justin Klemm about Ghost Inspector, which is tool which can do many, many things to make sure that your site is up and working. It's more options than you can shake a stick and might save you the late night client call, because you

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 27th September 2021

This is about common WordPress mistakes and how to get out of a pickle if things go wrong. With all the plugins, themes and community work in WordPress, it's often surprising that any of it hangs together, and that WordPress websites even work at all... (even more so since the Gutenberg Project says David!). Yet, despite that, neither of us have really had any issues over the years. How can this be? There's certainly plenty of scope for things to go wrong on your WordPress website, and to go wrong badly, and that's the subject of the podcast today. What can go wrong and how might you recover. Check out the podcast...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 20th September 2021

So on the podcast today we have Joshua Vandercar from Gravity Hopper which is a plug that allows you to have a central dashboard for all your Gravity Forms. Joshua is employed by Rocket Genius, the developers of Gravity Forms, so he knows a thing or two about how it all works! The idea is that you create a standalone install of WordPress is put the Gravity Hopper plugin on there and from that moment on you have a central dashboard from which you can handle all of your forms on all of your websites. With Gravity Hopper you can squirrel those forms away and deploy them with just a few clicks on other sites. In fact the magic goes a little further than that, because it might be that you only want to deploy a collection of commonly used fields and not entire forms? That's possible too, and so are field groups, sections and so on. There's a lot more to the plugin than this, so check out the podcast today and see if Gravity Hopper can help you save time and effort with your Gravity Forms.

WordPress themes are crucial, you have to have one, but will they continue to be so in an era of Full Site Editing? We talk on the podcast today about the WordPress themes that we've used over the years. Starting out by being beguiled by themes which could do all-the-things, then moving towards theme frameworks and minimal themes which allowed some basic styling, but then got out of the way of our Page Builder so that we could create headers and footers that way. Which themes do we like and what do we think the future holds with themes appearing to be of less importance in WordPress' future. Are you exploring new themes? Are you a theme developer worried about the direction of travel? Listen to the podcast and let us know your thoughts...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 6th September 2021

So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love... You get the idea! If you're anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you've spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they've been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we're even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we've got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he's built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 30th August 2021

So today on the podcast David and Nathan talk about SEO. David certainly knows more about this than Nathan does, but neither of us claim to be experts! It's a hard subject to ever feel happy about as there's never an end to it all. Google keeps changing what you need to do and you're always under a barrage of new information from all over the internet. So in this episode, we just say it as we see it. What do we need to do and what are some of the tools that we've used to make our WordPress websites have good SEO and page ranking in the search engines? Go check out the podcast...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 23rd August 2021

There are so many tools that you open up each day to do your job as a WordPress website builder or developer. In fact, I'd go as far as say that if you actually counted up the tools that you use each month, it's going to be way more that you think. There's graphics to create, template to conjure up, themes and plugins to discover and implement, emails to send, ways of getting client content... Honestly, the list just goes on and on. Inspired by suggestions from the WP Builds Facebook Group, we decided to put together a podcast highlighting some of the resources you use. There's some real gems in here... honestly, so go check out the podcast today to find out more...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 16th August 2021

If I got you to list out all of the things that you'd like your WordPress websites to be, I'm pretty sure that the word "fast" would be pretty close to the top of that list. It's super important for your website to be fast. Good hosting is crucial to your website's speed and today on the podcast we've got Remkus de Vries from Servebolt to explain why they think that they're fast, like really fast! There's a whole lot going on with their technology stack which is pretty unique and so it's well worth a listen to the podcast to find out if Servebolt is a good choice for your next WordPress website. Go listen...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 9th August 2021