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We are super excited to announce our Agency Member Partner status with WP Engine, the leading provider of WordPress Manage Hosting solutions for startups, small business, and entrepreneurs.
Digital Strategy Works partnered with WP Engine over 4-years ago to host all of our client websites. We couldn’t be happier WP Engine’s service and support. Prior to WP Engine, we worked with Media Temple and even tried our hand at running our own VPS on Linode, but things being as they were at the time, both solutions were simply not the right fit. We needed top-notch WordPress-trained support technicians and we also needed to get out from under being system administrators, because hosting and securing WordPress were two businesses that took away from our core focus serving our clients branding, web development, SEO, and social media needs.
As a WP Engine Member Agency partner, we can continue to do what we do best – build exceptional WordPress websites. And, we can feel confident as a WP Engine Agency Member Partner, that our clients are supported 100% by experts in WordPress hosting and security.
An accomplished tech house and house music DJ with a music industry and DJ culture career spanning over 30+ years, Tony Zeoli brings a unique blend of accessible underground dance music to a global audience through his Netmix Global House Sessions Podcast broadcast over Netmix.com, iTunes and MixCloud. Originally from Boston, Tony is a former Billboard Dance Chart Reporter who held residencies at The Loft, Roxy, Europa, Venus De Milo, M80, Cat Club, and other notable venues. Tony Z is also known as an influencer, innovator, and entrepreneur. He was a founding member of X-Mix, Inc DJ Remix and Management company, he inspired DJ and remix culture globally and subsequently went on to launch Netmix in 1995 – being the first to bring mix shows to the Internet.
The world of WordPress theme development has advanced over the years to give small business owners an incredible array of options to layout and style their WordPress blogs, websites, and ecommerce stores at minimal cost. In the past, theme development was costly. Building themes from scratch and writing all the rules of how a how a theme should function or how it should be laid out needed to be planned, designed, and coded from scratch. Today, theme frameworks, the new WordPress “Customizer” (introduced in WordPress 3.4), and “child themes” make it far easier to develop custom themes that are visually exciting while also including additional functionality using javaScript (or variations of javaScript, like jQuery, Backbone, or Node).
Every year since 2010, WordPress has released a default theme that is added to the Theme management panel in your WordPress install. These themes are usually white background and black text – so they are literally a blank slate for you or your developer to color around the lines. They are called frameworks, because they already include the complete layout and rules about how to handle font sizes, font colors, rollovers, bullet points, block quotes, featured images, and overall page layouts. It’s sort of like a coloring book. You get the book and there are already sketches available for you or your child to apply a design aesthetic using crayons or colored pencils.
As we’ve learned how themes should be developed, we’ve coalesced around the concept of standardization. The commonalities in theme development are applied in theme frameworks, allowing theme developers to focus on style and advanced functionality, rather than writing the same line of code across multiple themes to display something as common as a post title, post excerpt, or featured image. In addition, today’s theme framework developers have also advanced the idea of page builder templating tools, which provide a website owner with the ability to add a homepage carousel themselves or layout the home page as columns and rows with blocks of content by replacing the WordPress post engine and making the layout look more like a website than a blog. While theme frameworks make it easy for theme developers to create custom themes, they are inherently complex themselves. The developers of these frameworks are providing a toolset for general theme development and they must be able to push new versions with bug fixes, security patches, or new features requested by users. Disconnecting a framework from its developer prevents the developer from providing these important updates.
At Digital Strategy Works, we keep finding very capable theme developers taking default WordPress themes that ship with WordPress (or other popular theme frameworks) and hacking them to create new custom themes. We have a huge problem with this. When a developer takes a pre-built theme framework (ex. WordPress 2016 that ships with WordPress as its default theme), hack it, and rename it, they disconnect the theme from being updated by the original theme author. In this case, WordPress themselves! We need to maintain that connection to the theme developer who will push new releases, because themes must maintain their connection to their originator to take those updates.
You may be asking the question, “well, if theme developers aren’t supposed to hack and rename theme frameworks, then how can they do theme development?
The answer is, child themes!
What is a child theme? It is a theme that is the child of a parent. In web development, we use parent/child relationships to define when something is primary and when something else is directly related to primary. Want to know more about parent/child relationships in web development? Here is a good review of parent/child relationships in CSS on the Lorelle.WordPress.com blog.
If the parent theme framework contains all the pre-set rules, you can create a child theme of the parent theme with it’s own set of rules that override the parents without actually changing any code in the parent theme, which is the master framework. For example, if a font color for a hyperlink in your parent theme is defined as blue in the parent’s CSS style sheet. You can create a new CSS style sheet in the child theme and define the link color as red. You never touched the original CSS file and that rule for the link color, but your child theme’s CSS file rule will override the parent theme rule and make the color of the link red, instead of blue.
Another function of child themes is the ability to add a functions.php file inside your child theme, then add additional functionality to your parent theme, without overwriting its own functions.php file. A functions.php file contains some of the more complex rules around how your theme actually functions. If a developer writes functions into the functions.php file of the parent them, any new update from the original developer will wipe out that code. That’s why it’s important to add functions to the child theme functions.php file and not the parent’s functions.php file. Make sense?
We don’t want anyone touching the parent theme framework and all the underlying code. We want to create a child of the parent, which simply overrides CSS styles or adds additional function logic to the parent them without actually touching the parent theme files themselves.
Example: Name of the theme is the business name and shows an update available.
How do you know if your developer has hacked a theme framework and left you with a theme that cannot be updated? That’s difficult for the non-technical small business owner or a non-technical employee managing WordPress sites for a large business to know. However, you can login to your WordPress admin Dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Themes, and check the active theme. If the theme does not have a name or if the theme is the name of your business (like the example shown above, which is common practice), your theme may suffer from being disconnected to its original developer. Notice in the example that the image for the theme is not the actual image of the site itself. It’s still the image of the WordPress theme framework that was modified. If it were the child theme, then it might have the correct screenshot of the website homepage. If the theme was renamed as your business name or doesn’t have a name, but does show that it can be updated – DO NOT UPDATE! You will overwrite your theme files with the update and break your site.
Warning: Don’t try this unless you have daily backups and you’re working in your staging (alternative development environment)
To test the theory that your developer took a theme framework, hacked it, and renamed it without using a child theme, you need to push your live site into a staging environment and then update the active theme. You should always backup your files before you make any updates. Some hosting companies provide daily backups, while on others you must use a plugin for WordPress like Backup Buddy to backup your site to somewhere (like DropBox or Google Drive) other than where your WordPress files are hosted. I mean, why backup to the same folder on your host that WordPress is on? If you ever have an issue, not only is your site lost, but your backups are too!
If you have a website and your WordPress developer left you without the ability to update your theme, then contact us today. We can help convert what your original developer left you with into a child theme of a recent theme framework (we use the Make Theme Framework by Theme Foundry) and then you’ll be able to take theme updates without having to worry about breaking your site.
An accomplished tech house and house music DJ with a music industry and DJ culture career spanning over 30+ years, Tony Zeoli brings a unique blend of accessible underground dance music to a global audience through his Netmix Global House Sessions Podcast broadcast over Netmix.com, iTunes and MixCloud. Originally from Boston, Tony is a former Billboard Dance Chart Reporter who held residencies at The Loft, Roxy, Europa, Venus De Milo, M80, Cat Club, and other notable venues. Tony Z is also known as an influencer, innovator, and entrepreneur. He was a founding member of X-Mix, Inc DJ Remix and Management company, he inspired DJ and remix culture globally and subsequently went on to launch Netmix in 1995 – being the first to bring mix shows to the Internet.
Digital Strategy Works, an Asheville web design and web development company building websites for our clients exclusively on the WordPress content management system, is pleased to announce the launch of legendary house music DJ, Tony Humphries website and social media strategy.
Digital Strategy Works recently completed a fully responsive website for OneBeat.tv, a popular online EDM channel. The site renders in both web and mobile browsers, making it easily readable for site visitors. Learn more about how Digital Strategy Works employed a unique design for the OneBeat.tv beta website and responsive mobile experience.
Here at Digital Strategy Works, we are always trying out new services to improve our own processes. In order to manage our work, we use the following software as a service tools. We took a look at the integration of Google Docs and Adobe EchoSign for contract management and electronic signature delivery.
It's been a while. We've been working on so many projects as of late, that we let our own website lapse for a bit. Okay, so it wasn't rocket science. We grabbed a theme from Obox and customized it with our content, including our Services and Portfolio.
Wow, it’s been so long since the last time we posted! Well, what can we say? We’ve just been insanely busy.
The good news is that DSW is on the move. We’ve just engaged a new client to develop a WordPress multisite instance with three child themes and custom post types, that will help the client’s partners showcase their properties.
We’re also finishing up a long engagement, Neighborbee, which will launch shortly. Neighborbee is a community platform built on WordPress/Buddypress that helps to build community where it starts – in your neighborhood.
Tony Zeoli founded Digital Strategy Works to provide small and medium size businesses with end-to-end digital strategy consulting. With over 16+ year of experience working on digital media projects for start-ups, non-profits, institutions, and corporations, Zeoli brings a wealth of experience that cuts across the digital media spectrum.
Learn more about WordPress 3.0 though this video of Jane Wells, the community manager at Automattic, giving a presentation at WordCamp Denver 2010. Jane walks through new features of Wordpress, including the new default theme, "Twenty-Ten," and custom post types and custom post taxonomies. She also answers general questions about WordPress as an open-source project and what that means, and fields questions about plug-ins, caching, and what's next for WordPress.
When Ning.com announced they would be going to a premium model, this forced many Ning Network Owners to look for a low cost solution to run their blogs and social networks. BuddyPress, a fork of the popular Wordpress CMS, is becoming the defacto social networking software that people are turning to to migrate from Ning to BuddyPress. Digital Strategy Works is working with the both the Ning Exporter, provided by Ning to back-up all of your network content, as well as the Ning to BuddPress importer, developed by Boone Gorges, a Wordpress/BuddyPress developer in New York City. Read more about the issues related to these tools and how to overcome some of the limitations.
Tony Zeoli of Digital Strategy Works organized WordPress Westchester to bring WordPress training and support to those interested in the popular CMS to the north and East of New York City. Presentations are generally filmed live or filmed and then archived at https://www.livestream.com/wordpress. We can host your WordPress presentation on Livestream under the “livestream.com/wordpress” URL. Just shoot us an email at jm@digitalstrategyworks.com or az@digitalstrategyworks.com.
Tony Zeoli founded Digital Strategy Works to provide small and medium size businesses with end-to-end digital strategy consulting. With over 16+ year of experience working on digital media projects for start-ups, non-profits, institutions, and corporations, Zeoli brings a wealth of experience that cuts across the digital media spectrum.