WooCommerce is a great E-commerce solution when it comes to building a store with WordPress, although WooCommerce can be a sledgehammer when all you need is something quick and lightweight. If you’re looking to solely offer digital products for purchase you might consider the Easy Digital Downloads plugin. Easy Digital Downloads comes with built-in features to quickly set up a digital...
Image Sliders: The Pro & Cons.
Sliders, otherwise known as a carousel, or image slider, are ubiquitous throughout the web. If you’ve spent any time designing or developing websites than you’ve more than likely implemented a website slider or two. The debate over the use of sliders in websites has been raging for some time. Spend a few minutes Googling and you will easily find innumerable arguments for and against...
Theme Performance and Optimization
It’s easy to forget about the “small” details when we’re neck deep in code, styling, and image creation (You know, all the meaty, fun-to-do aspects of your WordPress projects). It’s the “small” details that can really add up to make a major impact on your WordPress site. What is this small stuff? Theme Performance Optimization! Theme performance optimization sounds more...
Copying Tons of Files From One Site to Another
Have you ever needed to copy or move a ton of files from one website to another? Have you ever run across the issue where only 1998 or 7998 files can be viewed in a directory even though you know there’s more in that folder? We ran across both issues this week. The issue stemmed from when the hosting company for one of our esteemed clients moved our stage server to the new live server...
Add Relevance and Polish to Your Search Results
As site owners and administrators, we understand the importance of creating quality content that has been SEO optimized. We have important information to share and we want that information to make it to the top of search results! Here’s the situation: you’ve spent some quality time researching your keywords and you’ve polished your content to maximize search results. Great! So...
Idea and Sketching Tools For the Designer on The Go
You never know when inspiration will hit and having some easily accessible idea and sketching tools always at the ready is nothing short of awesome. A quick list of iPhone and iPad design tools you can install to ensure you’re always ready when inspiration strikes! Adobe Ideas Adobe Kuler FontBook SketchBook Mobile Evernote Skitch Design Duet Credit to Templatelite for the post...
Why Re-Invent the Wheel?
ABD Web Design subscribes to the idea that one shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, and what better platform than WordPress for that affirmation? Did I hear someone say, “Plugins?”. We’re always on the lookout for useful, well-functioning plugins that simplify our lives while providing a better visitor experience. Today I would like to point you to two plugins I came across...
WordPress Visual/Text Editor Formatting
If you work with WordPress you probably have a good idea what I’m going to write about today just from the title: formatting issues when switching between the visual and text editor. For those whom may not be familiar let me give you a quick scenario to describe what I’m writing about: You’re a developer/designer working in WordPress. Beyond chiseling out the shape of your...
ComiCon & Unnatural Talent
Last month I went to the Emerald City ComiCon in Seattle. The event was absolutely amazing, with entire cities built in Legos, a full sized Tardis, art galleries, booths filled with beautiful comic art and other wares, and of course lots and lots of fans in superhero, Star Wars, and anime costumes. I also saw about a dozen incarnations of Dr. Who, the David Tennant version. The highlight of my...
The Search for Free High Quality Stock Images
Stock images: We all know the standard big dogs when it comes to purchasing stock photos for our websites and other creative content. But what about when we’re simply mocking up a document, image asset, or working on a staging site? We always want our work to look its best and we are often in a position where the client has yet to provide image assets, or to even provide a direction...