Category: WordPress Tips

Practical advice to help you get more from your WordPress website, from everyday content management to making informed decisions about features, plugins, and updates.

  • The Best Website-Building Advice I Ever Received

    The Best Website-Building Advice I Ever Received

    The best advice I ever received as a website designer was simple: choose a content management system with a strong community behind it.

    When I began working with WordPress, I was fortunate to live near an active WordPress community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tech Liminal hosted WordPress support meetups in Oakland twice a week. The meetings moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue virtually today.

    Tech Liminal was founded by Anca Mosoiu, an MIT-trained software engineer who created a community where people could learn, solve problems, and connect with others working in technology.

    As a WordPress newcomer, Tech Liminal gave me a place to bring my questions, learn new skills, and meet people with different areas of expertise.

    It was also where I frequently discovered that “there’s a plugin for that”—thanks in large part to Pieter Hartsook.

    More importantly, the community introduced me to Anca Mosiou, who became an invaluable collaborator on websites requiring more advanced technical development.

    The meetups did more than help me solve the problems directly in front of me. I also learned by listening to other people describe the challenges they were facing. Exploring their questions exposed me to WordPress features, troubleshooting techniques, and potential solutions I might not have encountered through my own projects.

    My work with WordPress has evolved considerably since then. I moved from customizing StudioPress themes to designing complete websites with Beaver Builder. Today, I increasingly build with blocks and WordPress Full Site Editing.

    For someone who enjoys learning, it has been a rewarding journey.

    Attending WordCamps added another dimension to the experience. Okay, they may not have been quite as exciting as a Star Trek convention, but I did meet a few instructors whose courses I had watched on Lynda.com. I got to be a fangirl for a minute.

    The moment when I recognized how much I had grown happened during Contributor Day. Instead of being the person asking all the questions, I realized I could answer some of them.

    That is the value of a strong technology community. It helps you solve immediate problems, but it also gives you opportunities to learn, collaborate, contribute, and grow.

    My advice to anyone choosing a content management system or website-building platform is to look beyond its list of features. Find out whether it has an active and generous community behind it.

    The tools will continue to change. A good community helps you change with them.

  • A Simple Subscribe Button Isn’t Always Simple

    A Simple Subscribe Button Isn’t Always Simple

    As many of you may know, WordPress is my go-to website builder. Clients often ask me to integrate or embed features I am not familiar with. Today, a client sent me a link from Beehiiv and asked me to add it as a Subscribe button in the main navigation of her WordPress website.

    At first glance, that sounds simple enough.

    But when I clicked the link, it asked me to log in or create a Beehiiv account. That told me right away that this was not the public subscription link. It was an internal Beehiiv Website Builder link.

    That matters because visitors to client website.com should not need a Beehiiv account to subscribe to a newsletter.

    After logging into the client’s Beehiiv account, I saw that clients-newsletter.beehiiv.com already had subscription forms on the public Beehiiv page. Those forms work there, but they are part of the Beehiiv-hosted website. They are not the same as an embeddable subscribe form for the WordPress site.

    So the solution was to clarify the options to the client:

    • The Subscribe button in the WordPress navigation can link directly to the public Beehiiv newsletter page.
    • Or, if the client wants the subscription form to appear directly on clientwebsite.com, she needs to create an external subscription form in Beehiiv and send me the embed code.

    This is one of the things I enjoy about website work. I do not need to be an expert in every platform my clients use, but I do need to understand how to ask the right questions, test the link, and make sure the visitor experience is clear.

    A small detail like using the wrong link can create unnecessary friction for the audience.

    The goal is always simple: make it easy for people to take the next step.