But there’s a darker side to the internet too. There are the trolls. The haters. The misanthropes. To the unwary or the unprepared, the internet can seem like a cold, heartless place filled with people who delight in dragging others through the mud.

A Personal Example

I went through this personally last week. One of the sites I run was hit with a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which knocked it offline for a few hours. I got a nasty note from my hosting company about hogging resources, and it took a while to get sorted out. After a bit of research, we determined that the problem came from a single IP address in Beijing. The address was blocked and everything is back to normal.

I was – understandably in my opinion – upset about this. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to knock out this website; it’s in no way political or incendiary.

Now, my first reaction was to get mad, run online, and complain to whoever would listen. Of course I knew this was absolutely the wrong way to approach the issue, but I still wanted to. Instead, I waited a day or two to cool down, then posted on CSS-Tricks (one of my all time favorite sites) and was wisely advised to either take something teachable out of the experience, or keep my complaints out of the public record.

Their advice is basically a blogger’s version of the ages-old internet adage of “Don’t Feed the Trolls”. Trolls, as we understand it, are nasty little creatures who live on the internet and thrive on drama and attention. By denying them their needed sustinance, they will – in theory – move on to more habitable environs.

A Counter Example

But this is the internet, no one wants to read about restraint. So let’s take a look at another example of people who didn’t take the time to cool down. Maybe you’ve heard of them, I’m talking about a little business called “Amy’s Baking Company”.

If you haven’t read the whole story – and you should because it’s hilarious – the Cliff’s Notes version is this:

Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, owners Amy’s Baking Company, were having a hard time, and blamed a good deal of this on negative reviews on Yelp. They (allegedly; I don’t want to get sued for libel) didn’t help things by confronting the reviewers online, calling them “losers”, and posting fake five-star reviews.

In an effort to save their business, they went on the Fox show Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, a show where celebrity chef Gordan Ramsey goes into failing restaurants, figures out what’s wrong, and helps the owners get back on the right track. Except in this case, Ramsey walked out on the restaurant’s owners.

This has never happened in the show’s history.

From here, things went downhill fast. The Reddit community started doing their thing, and soon the restaurant’s Facebook page had a bunch of posts calling out the owners on a few of the more unsavory things they did on the show. The Bouzaglo’s, showing perhaps the least amount of common sense I’ve ever seen, decided to take the fight to the commenters, and started an epic brawl on Facebook, Reddit, and Yelp.

It didn’t end well for them.

The next day, perhaps finally calm, they posted that their accounts had been hacked and some nefarious person must have posted all those awful things. Unfortunately for them, no one was buying it.

Amy’s Bakery’s PR Lessons

All that aside, there are a few quick and easy lessons we can take away from the fiasco:

1. Don’t fire back responses when you’re still emotional, just don’t
2. No ad-hominem attacks, by which I means don’t make things personal – address issues not the critic
3. Take ownership – telling the world that you’ve been hacked as a get out of jail free card is just insulting; we’re not that stupid
4. Don’t respond to everyone; you’re just feeding the fire

So could Amy’s Bakery have weathered the storm a bit better with a cool head and a little patience? Absolutely. Instead, they’re the laughing stock of the internet, and people are going to associate their business with this event for a long, long time.

As an article on Lifehacker recently pointed out, one of the times that people are most likely to overspend is when they’re focusing on self-improvement. Producing video content for your blog definitely fits the bill. If you’re not careful, you can spend a lot of money on camera, lights, sound equipment, and editing software. Now, I’m all about investing in quality tools, but if you’re just starting out and want to see if this is something you can actually do, it makes sense to try to do it on the cheap.

Luckily, there are a lot of really great options out there for people who want to try their hands at video blogging without breaking the bank.

Camera

When you want to produce video on the cheap, you’ve generally got two options: webcams and your smartphone. While there are some great webcams out there, I’m going to focus primarily on smart phones for three reasons:

1. People generally always have their phones on them
2. They’re small and easy to setup just about anywhere
3. Phones have an extremely simple user interface, which gets you up and running with almost zero effort

Are you picking up on a theme here? I like the idea of using a phone because it’s fast and easy, which is extremely important in that it helps to eliminate a lot of the excuses you might have for not shooting a quick video. The fewer steps there are between you and a completed video, the more likely you’ll be to actually create one.

Of course, there are a lot of other big pluses to using your phone as well. For instance:

• You can also upload directly to YouTube and other sites directly from your phone
• If you want to do a bit of editing first, getting the files from your phone to your computer is super easy: simply hook up a USB cable and drag the files to your desktop
• You can even setup automatic synching with Dropbox and you video (and photos) will automatically be copied to your computer via Wifi

And let’s not forget, smartphone cameras are surprisingly capable and produce very good quality video. No, you won’t be able to do fancy things like shallow depth of field or fancy focus control, but for regular videos they’re more than up to the task.

Now don’t get me wrong; if you’ve got better equipment available, use that. You should always try to create the highest quality experience possible. However, I’m suggesting smart phones for their convenience and to remove a pretty major barrier to entry. You don’t need to buy a camera; use the one you’re already carrying with you.

Remember: we’re testing the waters here. Before you invest, let’s see if this is something you can actually do.

Getting Better Footage with your Phone

If you do opt to use your smartphone to shoot video, there are a few things you can do you to dramatically improve the quality of your final product.

Planning Your Shoot

While it’s a lot of fun to just break out your camera and start shooting, that rarely makes for good footage. Instead, take a few minutes and formulate a mental plan. Figure out what kind of story you’re trying to tell, and what sort of shots you need to tell it. Better still, plan it out completely in advance.

Nothing looks worse than watching a video of someone trying to capture a moment and panning back and forth without ever focusing on any one thing longer than a few seconds. The video ends up being scattered, unfocused, and – worst of all – boring.

If you’re shooting an event, take a few minutes to get a sense of what’s going on. Rather than randomly jumping around to all the different things competing for your attention, make a quick mental list of a handful of interesting items, then start filming them. Try to vary your shots as well: get larger crowd shots to give the event a sense of scale, medium shots of groups so your audience gets a sense of the composition of things, and close up shots of individual elements (people, protest signs, etc.) for detail. Intermingling these can help add some interest to your final product and make it more dynamic.

If you’re just planning to shoot yourself talking about something or an interview, have an outline of exactly what you want to go over in advance. Make sure you hit all your points, and try to do it as succinctly as you can without rushing. For interviews, ask open ended questions that let the subject talk at length, and resist the urge to interrupt.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional candid moment. If you discover something incredible that isn’t in the plan, shoot it anyway. If it works, great! If it doesn’t, then simply don’t use it. Either way, don’t pass up an interesting moment simply because it’s not in the plan.

Lighting

Lighting is extremely important in getting good video, and it can be difficult to get just right. The easiest way to get decent lighting is to do your video outside on fairly bright but cloudy day. The sun will provide adequate light, and the clouds will help diffuse the light. Be careful of filming on too bright a day, as it will end up washed out your footage.

Shooting indoors can be a bit more challenging, but certainly not impossible. They key is finding nice, consistent light that doesn’t require a complicated setup, because if it’s a pain to do, you’re less likely to do it.

One of the best solutions is to record your video in an area with a lot of windows. Natural light is the best, so if it’s available, use it.

And if natural light isn’t available? It’s time to get out some lights. A great, relatively cheap solution is to grab a couple cheap work lights from your local hardware store and get some bright, daylight-balanced CFL bulbs. CFLs are great because they use a fraction of the power of incandescent bulbs, and generate almost no heat.

Daylight-balanced means that the light that comes from the bulbs has the same tint as normal daylight. Light has all sorts of color tinting, from yellow in traditional incandescent bulbs to the blue of regular florescent. It’s important to try to get evenly colored light.

When you setup your lighting, you might find you get better results if you diffuse the light a bit. A cheap way to do that is to tape some parchment paper over the lights. The light will shine through the paper, which will soften the light and make things look a lot nicer. You could even use a sheet of white printer paper.

Stabilization

One of the biggest issues with footage shot from a phone is that it’s usually really shaky, especially when people try to film themselves talking. Why? Generally, because people hold their cameras at arm’s length, where keeping it stable is extremely difficult. It also makes any sort of reasonable shot framing almost impossible.

Instead, hold the camera with both hands close to your body with your elbows bent. This is a much more stable position, and will make for a lot smoother video. It also makes it easier to frame your shots.

If you want to be on camera, then it’s time to invest in a tripod. You can pick up an inexpensive tripod at any discount retailer to get started. Of course, your phone doesn’t have a tripod mount on it.

But don’t worry, a lot of companies made tripod mounts for phones. I recently reviewed an inexpensive options from Joby called “GripTight“, as well as some of the accessories you can use with it. It’s easy to setup, and works really well. If you’re going to shoot with your phone, a tripod is a worthwhile investment.

For a very minimal investment, you can easily setup your phone pretty much anywhere and get rock-steady footage.

Experiment & Have Fun

The last suggestion is probably the most important of all: if you want get better at producing awesome web video, then you need to experiment and take chances. Not only will this help you to better understand the medium and discover new ways of doing things, it will also keep the process a lot more dynamic and interesting.

At the end of the day, the key to learning how to do something well lies in doing it. If it’s interesting and fun, it’s a lot easier to get off the couch and start shooting.

So how do you experiment with video? There are a lot of ways. Try shooting from different angles, or framing your shot differently. If you’re used to filming everything in your office, mix it up and do a video outside. If you only do “talking head” style videos, try out and interview, a review, or a short documentary-style feature instead.

The Cliff’s Notes version is: be dynamic and don’t get stuck doing the same thing over and over again. And have fun for Pete’s sake.

Conclusion

That’s it for now, but we’ve really just scratched the surface. Stay tuned for more articles that address topics like recording screen-casts, getting better audio, basic editing, and easy DIY projects to improve your productions.

This carries through with their books, which get right to the point, and offer just enough personality and humor to balance out the more technical aspects of the discussion. The result is a book you can read through in a couple of lunch breaks, but it packed with terrific information. Mobile First by Luke Wrobleski fits perfectly into A Book Apart’s overall mission statement.

Mobile design is huge right now, and with the mobile market expanding at a geometric rate, that’s unlikely to change in the near future. Mobile First is as fine a non-technical primer on the subject as you could hope to find.

Who is Mobile First For?

The book is primarily geared toward designers and developers who are exploring mobile. It primarily explores topics from a design perspective, but gets deep enough into the hows and whys to give developers a lot to work with as well.

However, it’s not super technical (there’s only one brief code snippet in the entire book), and would make solid reading for anyone who owns or runs a website, or anyone trying to convince a client or their own management team that mobile is a worthy investment.

What Mobile First Covers

The book is divided into two parts: “Why Mobile First”, and “How to Go Mobile”.

“Why Mobile First” sets the current technological stage, identifying how people are using the web right now, and why it’s so important to design sites to give them the best experience possible without stripping things down to bare bones. If you, your client, or your boss are on the fence about embracing responsive design, this section is for you.

The book’s second section dives into the hows and whys of designing for mobile. Again, it’s not technical, but goes into a lot of important design considerations. This part of the book is extremely well thought out, and should give you some really fresh perspectives on the topic.

One part that really stuck out to me was a diagram of a phone that mapped where the typical user can comfortably reach with his or her thumb. It breaks down how the users approach a device, and how designers and developers can use that information to enrich the experience.

What Works

• I really like how the book works with the idea of embracing the natural constraints of mobile and using them to help you prioritize and determine what is really important.

• The book opens with an extended look at why mobile matters, with both statistical and anecdotal evidence to demonstrate just how important the concept is.

What Doesn’t

• My one complaint about this book is that the example something chop paragraphs and sentences in half, and when I get really into one of the examples, it’s a little jarring to jump back into the half-completed thought from before.

The Verdict

If you’re interested in learning about mobile design and why it matters, Mobile First is a much read. And if you’re just looking for new perspectives on design and user experience, this is a nice book to check out. It’s short and extremely informative; perfect for a flight or lunchtime reading.

Buy a copy of Mobile First.

Stop doing that.

I know it seems like you’ll never be able to compete in the open market with the big dogs, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a small shop or even a single-person business. In fact, a lot of customers are embracing working with smaller companies because they want to help their local economy or because small businesses generally care more about building relationships with their customers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that big businesses are becoming passe. Large businesses are very powerful and have a lot of resources they can leverage.

That’s all very exciting, but small businesses have a lot to offer as well.

Small Business & Community

The nature of a small businesses makes it naturally more connected with the community, and working with someone who is both established with the community and understands how it works offers a number of benefits.

Now, when I say community here, I’m not just talking about a certain town or region. Community can certainly be geographic, but the definition is far more broad than that.

For instance, if you’re a small machine shop and you need to find health insurance for your employees, odds are you’re going to ask around to other small machine shop owners you know about who they’ve worked with in the past and who they would recommend. The insurer that’s established with that community of businesses already knows their specific needs, and has built up his/her network to best suit them.

Small business can – and should – do that. Bigger businesses generally can’t.

Focus

Unlike big businesses, which try to do everything, single-person operations and small shops tend to focus their efforts on specific things. That focus can often have a lot of secondary benefits, especially when it dovetails into their clients’ specific industries.

This one works quite nicely with our previous example, so let’s just build from there.

That small insurer that specializes in insuring employees at machine shops? They can put together specific offerings that target the customers’ exact needs. The big insurers, on the other hand, need their product offerings to appeal to the biggest possible number of customers. Simply put, the big guys can’t afford that level of specialization.

Lean & Mean

The big guys have a lot of infrastructure in place to support themselves. With that massive size comes a lot of power, certainly, but it also comes with an incredible amount of overhead and inefficiency. The little guys, by contrast, have to be lean. If they’re not as efficient as possible, then they’re generally not in business for very long.

Working with a small business means you can take advantage of that efficiency, and that can come out in a number of ways. Pricing structures can be more generous (although the big guys can usually match this on account of volume), but it also means that you won’t get bogged down with a lot of stuff that doesn’t apply to you. There’s less jumping through hoops.

Flexible

This last item is probably the most important. A big business is like a high speed train. It’s a well-oiled and specifically designed machine that goes very fast along a predefined route. When that business wants to expand into other markets, it takes a lot of research and infrastructure changes before it can actually start (you have to build the tracks, after all).

The little guys have a lot more freedom to be flexible, experiment, and put themselves outside their comfort zone. This allows them to get ahead of trends and live on the bleeding edge. There’s a lot of strength in flexibility, and you won’t find that in mega-corporations.

Embrace Being the Little Guy

Big business can do a lot, but it has it’s limitations just like the little guys do. Small business is powerful; you should embrace it and be up front about it. Representing yourself as something different than you really are might get a conversation started (although that’s arguable), but eventually everything is going to come out.

Be the little guy, offer a great product and service, and play to your strengths. Don’t fake it.

1. Personalized Your Product or Service

One of the biggest benefits to video is that you can more easily put a human face on your business. Text is usually impersonal (unless you’re a very talented writer), whereas you talking about what you do is engaging (provided you do it reasonably well). People like to see a real person standing behind a product or service, and no, actors and voice-over artists don’t count.

2. Shows Your Passion

You’re passionate about what you do, and that can be tricky to get across in print. However, it’s much easier to get emotion and passion across in video. Think about it this way: you can only add a couple of exclamation points before they lose all meaning, but in video, your excitement can come right through. Passion and excitement are contagious, so tap into it.

3. Video Blogging (Can Be) Quick and Easy to Produce

This one comes with a pretty big caveat: provided you minimize setup and editing, videos can be quicker and easier to create than textual posts. It takes most people quite a bit of time to type up a 500 word blog post, but sitting in front of the camera and talking for three minutes is a cakewalk. Not only does this save you time, it allows you to produce more content faster.

4. Improves Your Presentation Skills

This is a cool one. Doing videos for your website lets you polish your presentation skills fairly painlessly. You can experiment with speaking styles, try out different ways of demonstrating things, and make a lot of mistakes without embarrassing yourself. If something doesn’t work out, do another take and delete the first one. Nothing helps push you through to the next level like experimentation. Breaking out of your comfort zone and trying new things is an absolute necessity, and this let’s you do it without the pain.

5. Big Fish, Small Pond

There are a lot of blogs out there. A ton of blogs that don’t get a lot of traffic, and aren’t updated terribly frequently. Long story short, the signal to noise ratio in blogging in extremely high. Comparatively speaking, there are a lot fewer people producing video content, making you stand out more. Nothing makes you look like a bigger fish than getting into a smaller pond. As an added bonus, if you can get half-way decent at it, you can quickly outpace a lot of the video bloggers whose content looks and sounds terrible.

6. More Demonstrative

One of the biggest benefits to video is that a lot of things are just easier to demonstrate when your audience can see and hear what’s going on. Conventional wisdom tells us that 65% of people learn visually, which means video is going to work a lot better for them than text. Don’t get me wrong, certain things work better with text and images, the trick is figuring out which is which.

7. Find a Big Audience

Here’s the kicker: YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. That’s right, not Bing or Yahoo, YouTube. Therefore, getting your content on YouTube gives you another fantastic place to promote your brand. And because YouTube has so many bundled social media features, it can also be a great place to network.

Conclusion

Video blogging isn’t for everyone. Getting in front of the camera and talking can be extremely intimidating, especially for people who aren’t comfortable with public speaking (i.e. most of us). However, if you can get over your stage fright and accept the fact that your first few videos are going to suck, then you’ve got a potentially poweful medium to promote your brand and further build up your network.

Now, for bigger shops or people who tend to upgrade every time Adobe releases a new version of their Creative Suite product, this is likely no big deal. They’re pretty much already paying this, and as an added bonus, they get access to the entire collection of products.

However, for those of us who only buy what we need, and only update every few versions, this is a huge price increase. I’m a one man operation here, which means I need to be extremely budget conscious. As a result, I’m still using Adobe’s CS4, and only part of it to boot. I do freelance work on the side; I work a full time (and then some) job Monday through Friday, so I generally only take on a few design projects a year. That $50.00 a month adds up to $600.00 a year, which would be a huge portion of my current operating budget.

Long story short, for small shops and part-time freelancers, it feels like Adobe is saying “You don’t matter”. We’re not big customers that spend hundreds or thousands a year on their product family, so they just don’t care about us.

Furthermore, I hate the subscription model in general. Call me old fashioned, but I like to own something. If I’m going to put my hard earned money toward a product, I want to be able to keep it forever. With this subscription model, as soon as I stop paying, I can no longer use the software. So the longer you pay, the more money you have invested into it, and the harder it is to let it go.

Now I understand the counter-argument here: you’re renting the application for the utility you get from it. You might not own the software at the end of the day, but you own whatever you produced with it during that time. It’s just like cable or mobile phone service in that regard.

I’m sorry, but I’m just not buying it. This feels like a cheap money grab on Adobe’s part, and little more.

I didn’t mind Creative Cloud when it was optional, but as the only option? I hope it fails. Quickly.

When it comes to writing content on the web, “write what you know” is a great maxim to observe, but I think we can build on that to serve two purposes. By writing about what we’re currently learning, we can reinforce our own understanding of the material while also adding very useful content to our blog.

Benefits of Writing What You’re Learning

One of the biggest benefit of writing what you’re trying to learn is that it’s a powerful way of reinforcing your research. By taking what you’re learning, boiling it down, and writing it in a different voice, you’re making it that much easier to remember.

By writing about things for other people to read, you essentially force yourself to cover all the bases. Sure, you can write about just the parts of it that apply to you, but that’s a bit self-serving. Rather, by writing something that’s approachable to anyone else who’s interested in learning, you not only help out your readers, but you broaden your own understanding of the topic.

Instead of just focusing on what you know, as you get more comfortable with writing as part of your learning process, you’ll start branching out more and embracing a more diverse set of topics. This will help you become a better learner, and improve the quality of information on your blog.

One caveat here: while having more content on your blog is great, make sure that it supports the overall theme of you blog. Some things just won’t be appropriate to cover because they fall too far outside of the general subject area of your readership.

Finally, writing about topics you’re learning is a great way to give back to the community. When you’re trying to teach yourself something, odds are you going to be reading a lot of other blogs and tutorial websites walking your through the process. By taking what you learn and reinvesting it back into the community, you’re making it that much easier for others to pick up the same skills.

Implementing This On Your Blog

So now you know the whys of writing while you learn, let’s talk about how you do it.

One thing I like to do when I’m learning something new is to outline as I go. I usually use Google Docs, or simply start a new blog draft. As I go along, I simply add little notes into the document. These notes can be anything from core concepts, useful tips and tricks, or links to really great resources.

You have to find the right balance here. Your notes need to be thorough enough to give a solid overview of the topic, but not so detailed as to become an article draft unto themselves. I struggled with this quite a bit in the beginning, but fell into a good flow soon enough.

The next step is to thoroughly review all your notes, and start organizing them so that they flow together into something that resembles an article. This is the point when you should start to notice areas that need to be fleshed out, or areas that youv’e neglected completely.

That leads us to the next step: additional research to fill in the blanks. Depending on how you learn and what audience you’re writing for, this can be very easy, or very in depth.

Next, you start writing. And then review. And then write some more. Rinse and repeat until you’re happy with your article. When you review, keep in mind that your article should be concise and flow in a natural order. Be judicious and edit it until it reads like something you could learn from instead of simply a summation of what you’ve picked up so far.

The next step is an important one: after you’re done with the piece, give it a break. Let it sit and try not to think about your article or the topic for at least a day. Then, review it again with a fresh set of eyes. If all looks good, publish. If you find things that need to be addressed, get back into the writing/editing iteration cycle.

Conclusion

This is my process when I want to take something I’m learning and turn it into an article or tutorial. I’ve found a lot of success with both content creation and helping my to reinforce what I’m trying to teach myself.

If you have questions, feedback, or other ways to approach this, please let me know in the comments below.

Since I knew what the cause was, it was time to get rid of the offending plugin. However, I discovered that W3 Total Cache isn’t removed by simply deactivating and deleting it. To completely remove W3 Total Cache, you need to follow a multiple step process. Since I ran into this problem, I figured I’d write out the steps for anyone else who needs to remove W3 Super Cache.

Turn Off All Caching, Minifying, Etc.

Sign into WordPress, and browse to the W3 Total Cache settings page, which you can find at Performance > General Settings in the left-hand toolbar.

Scroll down the page and disable all the caching, minifying, and miscellaneous options. Simply remove the check from the “Enable” check box every time you see it.

At the bottom of the page, click “Save All Settings”

Deactivate and Delete the Plugin

Once everything is turned off, go to your plugins page, which you can find at Plugins > Installed Plugins.

Find W3 Total Cache and click the “Deactivate” button.

Once the Plugin has been deactivated it will be grayed out. You should see the “Delete” option available. Click that to remove the folder from your plugin directory.

Remove Files from Webserver

And here is where the uninstall is a little different from most plugins. Fire up your favorite FTP program and log into your site. Browse to the “wp-content” directory, and look for the following files:

• w3-total-cache-config.php
• db.php
• advanced-cache-php

Don’t worry if you don’t see all of them; they don’t seem to be on every install.

Before you remove them, I would recommend backing them up somewhere, just in case. They should be completely safe to delete, but I always like to create a backup before I make and changes to a live site.

Once you’ve backed up the files locally, delete them.

In the same folder, look for these two directories:

• w3tc
• w3tc-config

Back them up, just in case, then delete.

Check .htaccess

Finally, you’ll want to check your .htaccess file to see if it has an W3 Total Cache rules still configured after the uninstall. If you find some here, create a backup of .htaccess. This is a very important file, and you want to be able to restore is, just in case something goes wrong.

Once you have a backup, remove the W3 Total Cache rules, and upload the updated file to your server.

Optional Step: Turn Off WP-Cache in WP-Config.php

This final step is completely optional, and you’ll only want to do it if you aren’t planning to use another caching tool, like WP Super Cache.

Again, you will most likely skip this step.

Go up to the root of your WordPress install and find “wp-config.php”. This is another very important file, so make a backup.

Once you’ve got a back up, edit it, and look for “define (WP_CACHE’, true);”. Change the “true” to “false”, save, and upload.

Conclusion

That’s it, W3 Total Cache is now gone.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that W3 Total Cache is necessarily a bad plugin. I used it quite successfully for a number of years (I even recommended it a while back). However, I ran into an issue with it on one of my sites, and needed to remove it. So think of this as a how-to, not an indictment of W3 Total Cache.

As an alternative, I’m now using WP Super Cache, which seems to be working quite well.

In this tutorial, we covered the follow:

• Turning of Caching, Minifying, Etc.
• Disabling and Deleting W3 Total Cache
• Clearing Files from the Server
• Check .htaccess
• Turn of WP-Cache in WP-Config (Optional)

Any questions? Don’t be shy.

Who is Professional WordPress For?

As the full title, Professional WordPress Design and Development suggests, this book is geared toward designers and developers who work with WordPress. Unlike a lot of other books on the subject, Professional WordPress doesn’t address specific issues, like theme development. Instead, it attempts to give readers a thorough understanding of the CMS, from the various options on setting it up, to how it works with databases, to developing plugins to expand on its functionality.

While the book is primarily geared toward designers and developers, site owners could also get a lot from it, although they might want to skip a few of the more technical chapters. Professional WordPress covers a lot of best practices that most site owners should be aware of and utilize.

What Professional WordPress Covers

The short answer is “a lot”, but let’s get a bit more detailed than that, shall we?

Professional WordPress follows a fairly linear progression, starting with a general overview and history of the CMS, continuing through installation (both in a production environment and locally), and a detailed look at the core and the loop.

After the introductory chapters, it gets a bit more technical by examining how WordPress uses data, which segues into custom post types/taxonomies/meta boxes, plugin development, and theme development.

Beyond that, Professional WordPress dives into a number of more specific discussions, ranging from using and developing for multisite, to search engine optimization (SEO), to embedding advertising.

The last few chapters of the book look at different ways of using WordPress (as a CMS, in an enterprise environment), as well as how you can give back to the community.

As you can see, Professional WordPress covers a lot of ground, but it’s extremely well organized, which allows you to jump back and forth into whatever topics you’re currently working on. The average site owner, for instance, can completely skip over discussions of database management and plugin development.

What Works:

• The biggest strength of Professional WordPress is its comprehensiveness. I like reading online articles as much as the next guy, but having one tome that covers this much – and can introduce you to new topics – is invaluable.
• Throughout the book the authors stress the importance of developing and testing on a local environment, and provided detailed instructions to set one up.
• One thing I really love about this book is that all of the code samples (and there are a lot) are available online, which makes it much easier to use them. Simply copy and paste rather than retyping.
• While the book’s tone is serious, I really enjoyed some of the sillier examples the authors pepper in throughout.

What Doesn’t:

• The book (at least in print; I haven’t read the ebook) is black and white. Color copy might have been easier to read, especially for the code-heavy pages.
• While most sections have detailed introductions to concepts (the chapter on The WordPress Loop is particularly good), sometimes concepts are introduced without enough context for people who aren’t familiar with this, such as the section on the various APIs WordPress uses. Of course, this is an “advanced” book, so this is to be expected to a point.

Verdict

While I have a couple minor improvement suggestions for the book, you’d be hard pressed to find a better volume geared toward web professionals that covers as much ground as Professional WordPress Design and Development. If you work with the CMS in any capacity, this is an essential resource to have in your library.

I would love it if the authors behind this book put out a volume on theme development, like the similarly specialized Professional WordPress Plugin Development (which I’ll be reviewing in a few weeks).

Buy a copy of Professional WordPress: Design and Development

Here are ten online resources that you can use, absolutely free, to help you with your next web design or development project. I use most of these on a regular basis, while others are more of fun one-offs. Either way, they’re really cool, really useful, and really free.

1. Font Squirrel

Webfonts are great, but getting them to work with different browsers can be quite an undertaking. Thankfully, there are tools like Font Squirrel, which does all the hard work for you. Font Squirrel has two fantastic features: a gallery of fonts you can use, and a tool for you to create your own webfont kit. If you’re interested in breaking out of the handful of “web safe” fonts, Font Squirrel should be your first resource.

2. CSSmatic

This is a really cool tool to help you do four effects with CSS: gradients, border radius, drop shadow, and noise texture. CSSmatic gives you a nice, easy tool to work with, then outputs all the code – including all those pesky browser prefixes – so you can just copy and paste. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that you should know how to do these without fancy online CSS generators, but once you’ve got it down, feel free to save yourself a lot of time by using a tool like CSSmatic.

3. Kuler

If you’re anything like me, creating color schemes is something you’ve struggled with. Thankfully, there’s a number of great resources out there to get you inspired and building awesome color schemes, and Adobe’s Kuler is one of the bet. Not only will it help you build a theme, you can also browse through other people’s work, and even export your final selections into Adobe Creative Suite.

4. IcoMoon

One of the really great things to come out of webfonts is the ability to create an icon font, which can scale with a site without all the baggage of SVG. Creating them can be a lot of work, however, but IcoMoon makes it simple. It includes an impressive library of icon fonts for you to choose from, and if you can’t find what you like, you can just upload your own. It’s simple to use out of the gate, but there are also a lot of options available for the typography lovers out there.

5. Layer Styles

Looking for something that works like Photoshop? Check out Layer Styles, which lets you style a box, and then outputs the CSS for you to copy directly into your stylesheet. It handles drop shadow, inner shadow, background (gradient/opacity), border, and border radius. It’s an extremely intuitive and nicely styled tool for anyone who works in Photoshop on a regular basis.

6. resizeMyBrowser

If you’re working with a responsive or liquid layout, testing is absolutely essential. While resizeMyBrowser can’t replicate smart phones and tablets, it can get you on the right path by taking one of your most valuable tools – your browser – and sizing it to the most common resolutions you’ll be working with. And if the resolution you need isn’t on the list, you can create your own preset. This is a very simple, and very useful tool.

7. IconFinder

I love icons, and use them in everything from navigation to flow charts. That’s why I love IconFinder. Not only does it have an absolutely amazing collection, but it also lets you do something I find totally invaluable: search based on the licensing criteria. So if you want something that’s free for commercial use, you just need to tick a box when you search. You can view icons on different backgrounds, download them in different sizes and file types, and even check out related icons based on collection or similarity. I can’t recommend this web design resource highly enough.

8. CSS3 Patterns Gallery

While I can’t say I use CSS3 Patterns Gallery regularly, it’s a really cool idea. It uses some fancy CSS to generate pretty impressive background textures without using a single image. The code is surprisingly tiny. The only caveat here is that browser support is a bit spotty, so do a lot of testing and be prepared to use this as a progressive enhancement.

9. GenerateWP

GenerateWP has a bunch of tools that automate some of the more mindless tasks you’ll run into with WordPress theme and plugin development. They cover everything from Custom Taxonomies (I just wrote about adding custom taxonomies, if you’re curious about learning the long way) to a Shortcode Generator. This is a relatively new one, but they’ve added a few new generators since launching, so hopefully it will continue to be developed as WordPress grows.

10. OverAPI – Cheat Sheet Collection

If you’re ever gotten stuck trying to remember a selector, or a rule for something, then you know how valuable cheat sheets can be. OverAPI.com has a pretty impressive collection of them, ranging from HTML to Ruby to Regular Expressions. They’re quick, searchable, and even print pretty well.

11. The Toolbox

Finally, we get The Toolbox, which is a smorgasbord of awesome web design and development tools, apps, and widgets. They’ve got a ton of great links here, and everything is tagged and searchable, so if you’re stuck on a project and need some help, The Toolbox should be one of your first stops. It’s also constantly being updated, so check back frequently.

Well, those are my eight ten eleven apps (I just couldn’t help myself from adding more as I wrote this; there’s too much great stuff out there), but I guarantee there are loads of other great resources out there. If you know of one that I neglected to mention here, don’t be shy about letting me know.