There is an overwhelming choice of web hosts these days and it can be hard to determine which would be a good fit. A Google search will reveal many blog posts on the subject which are really are just a roundup of that blog’s sub-par affiliates that haven’t been vetted for quality.
I’ve been running my own sites for over 14 years now, and have also had many years experience with client websites and all their various hosts. So I have direct experience with many different hosts and have also interacted with the technical support departments of many of them.
In the past, I’ve had mixed feelings about StudioPress’ Genesis framework. It was frequently recommended to beginners and non-developers, but the problem was that they would install it, and even with a nicely designed child theme, they would then complain, “but, where’s all the options?”
People immediately wanted to change things and when they didn’t see a massive options panel, they felt shortchanged. “I have to do CSS to customize this thing??”
But, herein lies the beauty of the Genesis framework. It’s not supposed to be Avada, Divi, X or any of the other “be everything to everyone” type of themes. When you purchase a Genesis child theme, you’re paying for the expertly-designed look and feel you see on the demo. They are not intended to be completely customizable by the user through an options panel. Of course, if you have the chops, you can certainly do anything you want with Genesis and its child themes, you just have to use their hooks system and know some CSS and PHP.
Some of you may be asking, “Well, where’s the beauty in that?”
Since working with WP Rocket (a premium caching plugin) I became painfully aware of just how badly some themes drag down a website’s load time. While researching a blog post to showcase some of our customers’ fastest pages, I found that most of the fastest sites I looked at ran on Genesis.
Because it doesn’t try to be everything to everyone, it’s really fast out of the box. And that’s the beauty.
“Yea, yea…..but…..customize! Fonts! Colors!” you may be grumbling at your screen.
Finding a good WordPress theme is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks in getting your site set up. It’s like the Wild West out there, with all kinds of cowboys claiming they’ve got the best theme to beat all themes. Who can you believe?!
Here are a few trusted resources for finding a reliable theme.
Premium & Free WordPress Themes
AlienWP – Their themes, which range from magazine-style, to portfolio, all share a minimalist aesthetic. They offer some free ones as well.
Array Themes – Thoughtfully designed themes with great typography. Some great choices for bloggers, photographers/designers and more. They have both free and premium themes.
Thanksgiving is a great time to stock up on some new WordPress treats :) Many WordPress shops are discounting their products for a limited time. There are many, many deals out there, but here are the ones I recommend.
Web Hosting
WP Engine
5 months free on a pre-prepaid annual plan!
Rock-solid hosting, security, reliability, one-click staging sites, daily backups…..just a few of the reasons I love WP Engine. If you have a mission-critical business site, paying a little extra for Premium WordPress hosting is absolutely worth it.
The deal: For Cyber Weekend they are offering 30% off your first monthly or annual payment, and 5 months free if you pre-pay for an annual plan! Coupon code:cyberwknd
Bonus: If you are a WordPress developer, or create sites for clients, I recommend looking into their Developer Program, which features automatic migrations, git integration and much more.
In situations where you are working with a development/text site and a live site, there are often times when you want to be able to sync up individual posts/pages, without having to migrate the whole site, or even the whole database. Until now there really hasn’t been a good, user-friendly tool to allow this.
Enter: WP Site Sync
As you’ll see from the quick demo video, syncing content is now a matter of clicking a button!
This year (2016) I gave a talk at WordCamp San Diego as part of the Beginners’ Bootcamp, entitled “Customizing Without Hacking”. It was an introduction to best practices for customizing WordPress without doing anything that will break your site or make it a nightmare to maintain.
Learning from the beginning how to customize the right way will make your future-self’s life much easier:
Your changes will be future-proofed to keep each layer of your site update-able: WordPress core, themes, plugins.
Using WordPress best practices means that if you are building the site for someone else to maintain, or if you will have someone else helping you in the future, they won’t have be Sherlock Holmes to figure out how the site works.
You’ll have confidence and peace of mind when experimenting with your site, knowing that you’re not going to break something beyond your own ability to repair.
