by Tony Zeoli | Jan 24, 2019 | Updates
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.
Download our WP Engine Member Agency Partner Guide to managed WordPress Managed Hosting with WP Engine: WP-BRO-AgencyEnable-v07-DSW
by Tony Zeoli | May 25, 2016 | Updates
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.
by Tony Zeoli | Nov 7, 2014 | Updates
Digital Strategy Works, an Asheville web design and web development company building websites for our clients exclusively on the open source WordPress content management system, is pleased to announce the launch of legendary house music DJ, Tony Humphries website and social media strategy. We worked with Tony’s U.S. booking agent, Kelly Cooke of KC Management to plan, develop, and launch Tony’s new website located at the URL: https://tonyhumphries.com (screenshot below).
We also worked to developed a comprehensive SEO and Social Media strategy, which included installing and configuring All In One SEO Pro, the best WordPress SEO plugin. All In One now comes with a Social Meta panel that allows the site admin to manage what images or text Facebook’s Open Graph protocol pulls from the home page or any post or page. In addition to WordPress stats, we also connected Tony’s site to Google Analytics and linked the site map generated by All In One SEO to Google Webmaster Tools. Of course, we set up Tony on Google Business Apps with hosted “tonyhumphries.com” email
Given all the changes to Facebook over the years to move musicians and bands from personal profiles into Business Pages, Tony’s Facebook world was awash in duplicate personal profiles and managed business pages. We worked directly with our colleagues at Facebook Music to collapse Tony’s Facebook presence in one “verified” Musician/Band page: https://www.facebook.com/tonyhumphriesofficial. And, in doing so, we were able to merge Likes from various Pages into the primary page, while also collapsing two personal profiles into one, and moving Followers to Likes on the new primary Musician/Band page (screenshot below)
Tony Humphries Official Verified Facebook Page
Tony’s visibility on Twitter was low, so we worked to build Follows and bring that presence (@tonyhumphries) in line with his Facebook persona. We also learned that someone registered a Tony Humphries profile on MixCloud. We worked directly with MixCloud to ensure that Tony could control that profile. His new, official MixCloud profile is now: https://www.mixcloud.com/tonyhumphries.
Tony Humphries Mixcloud Profile Page
To ensure that domain squatters wouldn’t sit on his domain in the UK and Italy, we registered domains in those territories and additional domains here in the USA, then redirected all to his primary website address.
Powered by WordPress, the most open source content management system, the website is connected to WordPress.com through JetPack, which includes options for social sharing and other important tools . We selected WP Engine, one of the top WordPress managed hosting services, to host the website and take advantage of native caching, as well as benefit from their complete staging and production management system and daily snapshot backups.
In addition, we submitted a Wikipedia entry on Tony’s behalf currently being as a draft. For those interested in contributing to Tony’s Wikiepedia entry, please follow this link.
We are proud to have worked on this project with Tony and Kelly, as music and DJ culture has been a focus of DSW founder, Tony Zeoli’s life for over three decades. To assist a legend work out his online presence has been a gift and we are grateful. We hope the new TonyHumphries.com continues to educate new DJs and dance music performers worldwide on the power and gospel of house music through the eyes and ears of Tony Humphries.
Are you a DJ, musician, or band looking to build a WordPress website? Do you have a need to develop a sound social media strategy? If so, Digital Strategy Works can help. Contact us today for a free, 1-hour consultation over the phone or by Google Hangout or Skype.
by Tony Zeoli | May 28, 2014 | Updates
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.
OneBeat requested a grid like layout that relies on images, titles and categories to lead all posts. Generally, these types of themes hide the title behind a rollover in the center of the image over a transparent graphic. However, the task was to build the layout and functionality, so that the post title fit into respective blocks on the page. To do so required the addition of a two tiered titling system, because it’s difficult to limit WordPress (or the web producer publishing the content) from displaying multiple categories on any given post.
We wrote a text entry field for the post title on its single post page and gave the post author the ability to write a secondary title for the homepage or category landing page. A social media bar is present across the top of the site to link site visitors to the company’s social profiles. We also provided the ability to limit the post category on the homepage to a single category, as WordPress usually prints all selected categories resulting in multiple categories stacked in a very small post box. It was a complex mission that we solved with a solution to tag a post with one of multiple categories, making the selected category primary.
As you can see, the posts fall into a layout that mimics a wall of bricks, each with a different width. We employed masonry.js, a popular javascript library to accomplish this layout and it generally works nicely with some minor caveats, which will be resolved in the next version.
Home Page – OneBeat.tv with grid layout
On the post page, the requirement was to have the lead be either an image, a video, a gallery or…nothing at all. We built a tool to allow the post author to insert a media type above the post at a fixed width. However, this image could not be “Featured” in the sense that WordPress takes a featured image from the Featured widget in the post admin and displays that image in the home page box, a category landing page or other areas. OneBeat wanted to be able to have 2 featured images – one for the post and one for everywhere else. And, the featured area needed to be a fixed size, so that the post author did not publish something out of scale with the rest of the site. Consistency of brand and message is critical for a blog or website, so that the reader always knows what layout to expect. The decision to make this area fixed width and height would keep a site wide consistency that is required in professional publishing.
In addition, we pulled in the OneBeat Twitter feed, set up a MailChimp email harvesting tool in the sidebar and gave them the ability to customize the sidebar with recent, relevant posts.
OneBeat.TV post page
by Tony Zeoli | Jan 15, 2014 | Tutorials, Updates
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. Many of these companies have partnered with each other on API integrations, so the tools sync with one another to share information.
- Basecamp for project management,
- JIRA for agile/scrum product development and project management of complex applications,
- Harvest for time tracking and invoicing,
- Xero for accounting,
- CollabSpot for CRM integration from Gmail with Highrise a CRM tool that also syncs with Basecamp,
- BugDigger for bug tracking,
- Google Apps for our company email, file management and shared document repo
- Github for version control
- Adobe EchoSign for sending documents for signatures from our clients
While all these services are great, we’ve been struggling with contracts and agreements. How to manage them, track changes and ultimately send them out for signature. I was looking at contractual.ly for organizing my DSW agreements and sending them out for signature.
Contractual.ly Home Page
DSW partner and CTO, Michael McNeill, pointed out that I could integrate Adobe EchoSign with Google Docs installed through the Google Apps Marketplace, which could possible save us money. Contractual.ly pricing is $10 a month for one user and $30 a month for two users. It climbs quickly to $100 a month for 5 or more users. I don’t understand how you go from $10 for one user to $30 for two users, but let’s shelve that for now and get back to the task at hand.
EchoSign does have a freemium tier, which I’ve been using. You can sign up for free and send up to 5 documents out for signature per month. Using the freemium tier of EchoSign is certainly inexpensive. At this point, we’re not sending over 5 docs a month for signature, but soon we will be and that may end up costing us more and here is why.
EchoSign’s Pro plan is advertised at $14.95 per month if you pay up front for the year and $19.95 monthly – and, only for one user. At that level, you can store up to 500 documents. The next tier for 2 or more users starts at $29.95 per month on a monthly billing cycle or $19.95 per month if you pay the year up front. Without knowing how much we’re going to use the service, we’re opting for the freemium plan and could go to the $29.95 a month in a few months, if it makes sense.
At this price point, contractual.ly is competitive. With contractual.ly, you can pay $49 per year upfront for a single user or $30 a month for 2 users. I think I saw a coupon code out there for $5 off per month, as well. The difference between EchoSign and contractual.ly is that with EchoSign, you’re only sending out for signature and storing your docs in the cloud. With contractual.ly, you’re both storing your docs and are able to collaborate with your employees and partners or customers in the system. However, I’m not sure yet if by users they mean both your company and your clients, which would then increase the cost to $100 a month for 5 users if you had to include some of your clients as users, so they too can access the admin. That could get expensive down the road if you were paying for more users per month, but have already completed agreements and there’s no reason to keep those users in your system. I have to further investigate to see who is a “user.” For now, let’s look at the challenges of using Google Docs and EchoSign together.
The issue with Google Docs or any Word formatted agreement, is that when you do a search and replace inside the agreement, you’re bound to replace text that you didn’t want to replace. You then have to scan the document to make sure that the text is correct. Each time you change your template, you have to worry about what you may have changed inadvertently and with agreements, its very important to ensure their accuracy, as changing the spelling of one word inadvertently could nullify a clause in the agreement.
With contractual.ly, you insert fields and once you publish the document, you can then change the text in only those fields you’ve identified. The system allows you to place the same field multiple times throughout, that way when you enter your text, it writes once and reads everywhere.
Templating w/ Contractual.ly
Yes, I’m aware that there are probably macros for Word that can be used to change the text in certain locations of the document, but I don’t believe that translates to Google Docs. I checked and found only an update for macros in Google Spreadsheets. We’ll still have to use Search and Replace in Word to change, for example, the name of the client throughout the document.
Google Docs Revision History
My partner also thought that using Google Docs would be good for collaboration – making changes and that sort of thing. The issue here is that when you share documents outside of your Google Apps account, there are times when clients cannot get into Gmail or they refuse to use Gmail or Google for privacy reasons. I’ve encountered the first scenario, where someone could not open the Google Docs link. I have also encountered the second. Not everyone want to use Google and some may not even have a Gmail account to store the document to their own Google Drive. That has been a minor problem so far, but could become more complex over time.
The questions is, is Google Docs the right tool for contract management and collaboration? Well, we’ll find out when I have to update an agreement and then resend the new version via EchoSign. In some ways, transparency may be lost or mistakes may be made, because someone may update the doc and not rename it as a new version in Google Drive. Yes, you can do a revision, but that doesn’t mean the title of the doc changes. I believe you have to do that yourself.
I found an issue with installing Adobe EchoSign’s Google App from the Google Apps Marketplace. When you attempt to install the app through your Google Docs account by CNTRL-Click the document name and then select Open With, then select Connect More Apps, it is not available in the Marketplace manager.
Connect More Apps from Gmail
The Marketplace manager will open. Do a quick search for Adobe or EchoSign and see the result shown below.
EchoSign search returns null
I found a workaround by clicking the new Gmail Apps tool that was recently added to the header of your Google products. It is the grid icon between my name (+Anthony) and the bell icon (as shown below).
Google Apps Tool
As you can see, EchoSign is already installed. But to actually find it, you have to click on More from Apps Marketplace, where you can search for it and then click, “Add It Now” as shown below.
EchoSign for Google Apps
Once the App is installed, you will be shown a notification that the installation is ready (not shown here), but to complete the connection, you will have to sign into your EchoSign account. If you don’t have one, then the link provided in the notification will take you to the Adobe EchoSign signup page.
As you have seen from the prior images, EchoSign app was added to my Google Apps manager, but there’s not much you can do with it here after installation. What EchoSign really does is sync with Google Docs. It then can show you what documents are ready in your Google Docs to attach and send for electronic signature.
EchoSign Google Drive Viewer
I did notice another cool feature of Adobe EchoSign: the ability to send docs for signature from Evernote, DropBox and Box.com. You can find those services by clicking on the “More” link to the right of the word, “Google Drive.” I haven’t used it yet, but it’s there if you need it. The issue here is always going to be, can you do document collaboration and management with the connecting services and do it well? Maybe these services will provide tools for document management as Google does with it’s Google Drive and Google Docs.
Other services view in Adobe EchoSign
So, is it worth $10 a month for one user at contractual.ly and pointing my clients there to review, comment on and sign docs? I think the field generator is excellent and will prevent a lot of mistakes. It would work much better than Find and Replace in Google Docs or Word, and it saves time and effort in setting up a macro, which doesn’t look as easy as they make it out to be. For now, we’ll try out the EchoSign plus Google Docs integration and see how it works for DSW and our clients. If we have too many formatting issues or clients have trouble accessing the Google Docs link, I’m going to head back over to contractual.ly and try it out.
Here’s a video explaining the Adobe EchoSign experience – although without the link to Google Docs.
by Tony Zeoli | Nov 17, 2013 | Updates
Yes, we’ve finally updated our website! Ta da!
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.
Nope, it’s not done yet, but we’ve been telling folks about DSW for the past few days and needed to get up this work in progress. Check back as we add more projects to our portfolio and post information and resources to this blog.
