There’s a curious design trend among WordPress themes that shows no signs of stopping. The prominent use of mint green has become designers’ favorite highlight color. The trend started in the greater design community, as recently illustrated by Automattic design engineer Mel Choyce in her tweet commentary: https://twitter.com/melchoyce/status/432888899862794240 The color is often seen accompanying a…
The founders of UpThemes, a commercial WordPress theme business started in March of 2010 has published an open letter to their customers and to the wider WordPress community. It’s a fascinating look into how the company has evolved over the past four years. The letter is filled with lessons learned and contains what I consider…
Prospecting theme designers should take note of the nine WordPress design trends outlined by Rachel Adnyana of WPKube.com. Many of the trends on her list are carry overs from last year. Responsive is definitely not a trend but an expectation. Websites that are not responsive are at a serious disadvantage considering at least 17.4% of…
Earlier today, I read an article that took all of the hard work volunteers completed for inclusion into WordPress 3.8 and flushed it down the toilet. The main reason for their criticism is that WordPress is boring. The software is not changing enough to keep pace with competitors such as SquareSpace, Ghost, or Medium. The…
If you use WordPress every day, you may not take much notice of the wp-admin screen anymore. More than likely you’re quickly clicking through to where you need to go, expecting the same old screen you see on every site. Hold on to your hats, folks, things are about to get exciting in the WordPress…
Amidst all of the conversation taking place on improving the WordPress back-end user interface, there is now a public survey you are encouraged to participate in that will help determine how people use the dashboard and where improvements need to take place. The survey is only 5 questions long but should provide enough information to…
In one of the slides for Matt Mullenweg’s state of the WordPress Presentation at WordCamp San Francisco, there was a concept screenshot of the post writing panel. Some of those concepts can be viewed here with the discussion surrounding those designs found on the WordPress UI blog.
While reading an article on WPLift about Ghost by Nathan B Weller there were a couple of points brought up that I thought would make for a good discussion. One of the issues deals with the attractiveness of the WordPress back-end. Additionally, the drawbacks of the WordPress platform do not stop at its growing complexity.…
I’ve taken the MP6 plugin for a test drive and so far, my eyes love what they see. MP6 is an experimental plugin for testing out new ideas for the various UI elements that are within WordPress. My first reaction after activating the plugin was, WOW. The textual elements on the screen instantly became easier…
Theme.FM has reopened to the public with a brand new theme store. After browsing around the store for a little while, I like the overall design and how the theme information is laid out. Simple, excellent use of white space and I don’t feel overwhelmed when looking over a design. Nice job fellas.
While browsing for specific plugins today on WordPress.org, I noticed a link at the top of the site that took me to a short survey where the answers will be used to improve the WordPress.org website. Please consider taking part in this survey as the WordPress.org website is one of the weakest links of the…
I stumbled across this theme the other day called Tachyon by RocketTheme and noticed that is has 70 widget positions. That is insane. I can’t imagine how much of a burden or a nightmare it would be to manage something like that from the back-end of WordPress as just having 15 or so widgets can…
Within the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the term ‘Responsive‘ showing up everywhere, especially as it relates to WordPress 3.3 and the administrative area. Having no idea what this term meant, I got in touch with Sara Cannon to figure it out. Unfortunately (or fortunately), she is pretty busy helping with making the back-end of…
From the screen shots I’ve seen as well as the feedback from a couple of different websites, it looks like Blogger has finally taken a few pages out of the book of WordPress in terms of the interface. Econsultancy.com thinks the refresh is too little, too late. I wonder how many people who participated in…
During an email conversation one day, Paul Mycroft who operates his own web design firm told me something that I thought was interesting. In fact, he’s been the first one to say such a thing and that is that the commercial themes being produced in the WordPress community are eroding his web design business. When…