Don’t Over-@extend Yourself in Sass (Or: There’s a Class for That!)
I recently built the theme for WPShout.com in Sass, the well-loved CSS preprocessor and that we’ve written about a few times. As I dug deeper into the project, I noticed a conceptual issue coming up...
View ArticleSite Support: Hiring Your Developer on Retainer
This post continues an earlier post on site support, which we can summarize as follows: You’re going to need site support. You’re going to need a plan for site support. Here, we cover one of your best...
View ArticleSite Support: Understanding Your Options
This post continues an earlier post on site support, which we can summarize as follows: You’re going to need site support. You’re going to need a plan for site support. We’ve also covered one of the...
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Why Bad Software Succeeds
One of the hardest things to accept, as a justice-loving maker of software, is that a perfectly engineered and beautifully designed piece of software can go completely unused. Similarly, a lot of the...
View ArticleOn Video, From a Web Developer Just Getting Into It
Over the past month or so, I’ve been getting really excited about video production. http://pressupinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/video_is_good.mp4 I thought I’d say a little bit about the...
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Your Code Should Be Comprehensible: A Simple Case Study
This past weekend, I refactored a little bit of jQuery for a WordPress plugin I’d written, open-sourced, and released a few years ago. It wasn’t a particularly good bit of jQuery to start, but it...
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If Freelance Developers Wrote Online Personals
Hello… Is It Me You’re Looking For? Okay, let’s start with the obvious: I work with software, and you need help with software. You already know that, or you wouldn’t be on this site trawling through...
View ArticleTernary Operators Considered Harmful
Conditionals are, if we’re honest, an embarrassingly large part of most programs deployed in the world. I say “embarrassingly” because a two-year-old understands conditionals, and we as developers...
View ArticleHow Not to Talk to Nontechnical People
Software engineers and other technical people often struggle to be understood by people who don’t share their technical knowledge. Their frustration is widely known; it’s led, for example, to a YouTube...
View ArticleWhy Software Becomes a Big Ball of Mud
“Big ball of mud” is one of the more common pejoratives thrown at “legacy” code. Systems suffering from a wide variety of different problems get tarred with the brush of “mud,” but generally the...
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New Plugin: “Display All Image Sizes”
Once in a blue moon, we author a new WordPress plugin. Today the moon is blue, because we’ve just released: Display All Image Sizes! The plugin grew out of my frustration at not being able to actually...
View ArticleRefactoring is Like Exercise
Refactoring, they say, is vital to maintaining a healthy code base. We all know we should do it, but many of us don’t. Exercise, they say, is vital to living a long and healthy life. We all know we’ve...
View ArticleWhy Site Speed Matters to Your Business
Having a fast-loading website should be a top priority for any business, for two main reasons. One is the positive impact it can have on user engagement with your website, and, conversely, the negative...
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Web Hosting for WordPress Sites: Finding The Right Hosting for You
Choosing a web host for your website can be difficult. With so many companies in operation, each offering multiple plans and packages, making a decision can quickly become overwhelming. Even once...
View ArticleA Quick Guide to the Services that Make Up the Web Industry
If you’ve got a new web project, you may not know where to start. What does it take to get a web project off the ground? Who do you need to hire? Should you hire just one person, or will you need a...
View ArticleWhy the Web Development Industry is a Jungle
Most people I talk to who need web development help are frustrated and unsure. Many have had painful experiences with previous developers, and almost all are suspicious about being taken advantage of....
View ArticleWhat to Look For in a Web Developer
It’s hard to find a good web developer. Part of that is because web development is a jungle of unlicensed practitioners with very different interests, price points, and skill levels—meaning it’s a lot...
View ArticleCut Your Web Development Costs by Making Your Developer Happy
In general, developers are a lot more flexible on price for projects they really want to work on, and a lot less flexible when they’ll have to grit their teeth for the money. Web developers are like...
View ArticleControlling Website Costs: Don’t Flail
If you’re investing in a website, one of your primary concerns will naturally be to pay as little as possible. As we’ve argued before, looking only at cost is not the correct way to approach a website...
View ArticleTechnical Debt: What It Is, and What It Means for Your Web Project
We recently wrote that a website, web app, or any other kind of software is best thought of as an investment in your business. Because it’s an investment, it’s best not to think in terms of simply...
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