Category: Weekly Watch

In the latest instalment of the WordPress Weekly Watch series, I take a look at some of the posts I’ve published elsewhere, as well as some of the posts I didn’t write, but wish I did.

March 30th to April 5th 2015

If you are looking for a way to promote your most popular posts more effectively, the WordPress Popular Posts Widget plugin that I reviewed on the Pagely blog, might be something you want to check out. Over at Pagely, I also took the Code Snippets plugin for a test-drive. Its a great way to safely add code to your theme’s functions.php file, without editing the file directly yourself.

As part of the series for new WordPress users I’m writing on the Theme-Fusion blog, I added a post on creating the essential pages that all WordPress websites should probably have.

From elsewhere from the World of WordPress, Kim Doyal, the WP Chick, interviews Dan Norris to find out what it takes to build a 7-figure business in 18 months (WP Curve).

The WP Beginner team highlight the 7 things you must do when starting a WordPress business. I’ve only done two of the seven so far, you?

If you want to reduce the bounce rate of your home page, Brenda tells you all you need to know, over at the WPMU Dev blog.

Need help managing those $5k to $15k web design projects? Matt spills the beans over at the Matt Report. Also, don’t forget to check out their handy Conductor plugin while you’re there.

Did you know these 15 big brands use WordPress for their website? View the list at WP Kube.

That’s it for this week, don’t forget to join the mailing list, or follow us on Twitter to get more WordPress goodness throughout the week.

The WordPress Weekly Watch highlights all the posts I’ve written about WordPress for other sites in my role as freelance blogger for hire, in the past week. Its part shameless self-promotion and part spreading the word about some plugins, themes, and other aspects of WordPress you might find useful.

February 9th to 15th 2015

First up the review I wrote of the mega-theme Avada went live over at WinningWP. This is one of the best selling themes on ThemeForest so it was great to get my hands on it and take it for a test drive. Avada is fully multi-purpose theme and includes truck loads of features. Purists won’t have much love for this theme, but anyone else looking for a versatile tool that can be used to build pretty much any type of website will find Avada a great buy.

What with the recent comments about Jetpack being the reason for the success of WordPress, I thought it was time to take another look at what this plugin has to offer; so I wrote a post to establish what are the best modules of Jetpack. After writing that post I activated Jetpack on a number of my sites and am now using a few of its modules.

Over at the WPMU Dev blog, my post on plugins that let you do more with WordPress categories went live. There are some good options there for anyone that wants to get more out of this feature of WordPress.

On the Pagely managed hosting blog I wrote about the Post Type Requirements Checklist plugin which forces bloggers to complete certain steps before their posts can go live. This can include making sure a featured image had been set, choosing a category, and other options of your choice.

The other plugin I looked at was wpDiscuz which aims to overhaul the WordPress comments system and does a pretty good job.

I also activated the Monarch social sharing plugin from Elegant Themes on this site. Its a great plugin which I reviewed a while back for BeginWP.

Don’t forget to check back next week – or subscribe – for the next instalment.

Hey all,

This is a new series I’m going to start in which I will be sharing all the posts I’ve written about WordPress in the past week.

Hopefully you can learn something new about our favourite publishing platform and discover some useful tools, services, or products related to WordPress.

February 1st to 8th 2015

Over at the Colorlib blog I took at look at their 3-in-1 employment theme WPJobus. This theme includes everything you need to build an online job board – although it can be used to create a website to publish your online resume, or a company profile website.

Sometimes feature rich themes are tricky to use but WPJobus does a good job of keeping things simple without missing any important features out. The appearance of the theme is really impressive too making this a useful resource for anyone building a job portal with WordPress.

My post series at Pagely continues with two more useful free plugins you might be interested in: NextScripts Social Network Auto Poster and Meta Slider. The latter plugin is a good free options for adding slideshows to WordPress websites. I like writing these short posts on plugins as it gives me a good excuse to try out lots of the best add-ons for WordPress.

I recently started writing for the massive WPMU DEV blog and this week had a post published featuring 20 of the best agency themes for WordPress.  Yeah its a list post but I think I did a pretty good job of explaining the themes to help readers get a better sense on what’s on offer – I hope! Last week I reviewed the Envira Gallery plugin for WPMU DEV which is a really impressive tool if you can afford it.

If you want more themes, I wrote a list of over 15 drag and drop WordPress themes over at the aThemes blog. Again I think I added some value to readers with my theme descriptions, rather than just listing features. I’ve used a lot of these drag and drop plugins before so it helps when writing about themes that make use of them.

I also worked on a massive list of 30 WordPress themes that follow the flat design trend – there are some really nice templates covering a range of website styles here so make sure you check it out.

I’ve also started writing for the Theme-Fusion blog – the guys behind the massively popular Avada theme over at ThemeForest. This will be a series for new users of WordPress to help them get started.

Finally, I did a piece on managed WordPress hosting for the Hosting Kingdom website to help readers decide if this type of hosting is web hosting is right for them.

I think that about covers the WordPress posts I wrote that were published last week. If you’d like to get the weekly list of posts like this, direct to your inbox each week, please enter your email address below to join the newsletter.