Development
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‘Write alt text like you’re talking to a friend‘ This article by Scott Vandehey has got to have the best instructions on writing alt text I have ever seen. A few takeaways: What are you waiting for? Go read it!
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Local development environments are as unique as the developers that work on them. But that’s not exactly right. Local development environments should be as unique as each group of developers that work on them. Every developer on a team should be spinning up the same environment in the same way. I’ve been using Local as…
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I’ve avoided namespacing for years, thinking it was this big complicated beast. While working on my new WordPress starter template, I decided to use it in an attempt to better organise my code. Turns out it’s simpler than it looks. Namespacing is just a way to organise your code. You’re essentailly saying this code is…
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Local development environments are important to have as a web developer and WordPress is no exception. I have used Local by flywheel for many years now because it is extremely easy to get started and has a really nice user interface. You install the program, click a few buttons and an environment is set up.…
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During my career as a web developer, I’ve noticed that a lot of the job is coding. But a lot of it isn’t either. As much as I would love to sit at my computer building out features from fully thought out ideas, beautifully designed for every situation then sent to the test team to…
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This is a follow up post a previous post where I had posted about my web development process. That post was more around how I think about building things for the web. This post will be demonstrating a practical example. I will be walking through how I approach building a list articles in a bento…
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When I was first thrown into leading a team and was mentoring our first junior hire, he asked me a question. “Hey Paul, what’s your approach to building websites?”. I explained to him the gist of how I approach things but also promised to write it out in a bit more detail. That was 2…
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HTML is a fundamental technology of the web. It is literally the language that makes websites work. You can have a website with no CSS, it’ll just look like a formatted text document. You can have a website with no JavaScript, it’ll just not have any interactivity but the content will still be there. You…
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One of the first things we learn when becoming a WordPress developer is how to load scripts and styles using the wp_enqueue_scripts hook. We can take this one step further and, instead of loading these assets on every page, we can conditionally load them only on the pages that need them. This means less things…
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A quick tip when building your theme is to separate any logic to the display of your data. For example you might have this code (taken from the codex) in your single.php to loop through and show the categories for a particular post But by putting the code inside the template you’re mixing logic (looping…
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I’ve recently built a couple of block themes in the last few months, the first was for this website and the second was for Molten, a theme that I built for restaurant owners and people in the food and drink industry. Building block themes has been an interesting and pretty good experience overall but there…