As a general rule in life, you should not apologize for things that are not your fault. Years (decades?) of the half-true mantra of “the customer is always right” have infected the customer service industry to the point where we are now apologizing for things that are not our fault, and using apologies as a…

When you call something “simple,” “easy,” or “self-explanatory” in product documentation, you’re insulting your reader. You should stop doing that. Let’s put it in another context to illustrate my point. Scene: local auto repair shop. Your mechanic emerges from under the hood holding a small piece of rubber between grease-marked pointer finger and thumb. “Here’s…

  Ever updated a plugin, and had it break some functionality on your site? First of all, here’s hoping that you didn’t do that on the live site, because shame on you for cowboy coding. But now’s not the time to chastise you for that: it’s time to fix the problem. If you still have…

Think to yourself: if I dropped in, directly in the middle of a conversation, and was forced to figure out what needs to be done based on the information being presented only from this point forward, would I be able to do so? That’s what a support ticket is. It’s a conversation between you and…

You have an issue, and the first thing the folks on the support forum say is always “deactivate all plugins.” Here’s why:

My neighbors pay someone to cut their grass. As far as I can tell from being an only-mildly-nosy neighbor, here’s how the weekly-ish transaction goes: Yard guy (we’ll call him Pete) shows up to mow the whole lawn. Right before he starts, Pete walks up to a cushioned chair on the front porch, and picks…

I like themes, plugins, and websites that get out of the way. Why do you have a website? Too many folks start with “because we need a website,” and that’s immediately apparent when you look at their site. If they had a specific, measurable, written goal for the website, they’d have a website that gets…

Your plugins are the organs of your WordPress site. They are functional, and enhance content in ways other than just aesthetically. Your theme is the skin of your WordPress site. It’s aesthetic, not primarily functional. In fact, done correctly, your theme could be even more like clothes than skin. Themes change design and plugins change…

Recently in a facebook group someone posted this image, asking for clarification: I thought I’d use that as a jumping-off point to talk about “bargain” hosting. This user is on a large (Super-Bowl-ad-budget large) hosting company’s “shared” plan. The irony is that the user would have no way of knowing what version of PHP they are…

Here’s the thing: I am extremely tight with my money. Some might go so far as to call me stingy. I really don’t like spending money on things, as a rule. On top of that, as a developer I have released plugins into the WordPress ecosystem that are free to download. Even given those two…