Here are a few WordPress highlights from my Twitter surfing over the past week. FYI: I used the Dashter Premium WordPress Plugin to help me curate the tweets and add my commentary as I stumble on them. The people mentioned in the post are being alerted automatically, using the Dashter twitter queuing system.
Responsive Design Themes are beginning to show up in larger numbers.
Ahmed Esam – @drtemon
Good Minimal A Responsive WordPress Theme. #wordpress http://t.co/tj017Vr9
As responsive design continues to move into the mainstream, we’re going to be seeing a lot of themes pop up with responsive design characteristics built in. The Good Minimal theme’s menu breaks down at one point in the page width adjustments, but it’s a good example of what’s to come in this area. What are your favorite themes that have responsive design built in?
Dre Armeda on WordPress Security
bkmacdaddy designs – @bkmacdaddy
#WordPress End-User Security by Dre Armeda – http://t.co/iOvaLm0g
Dre Armeda is our favorite WordPress security expert. If you’ve never seen one of his security presentations, here’s a chance to see him in action online. Even if you have seen his presentation before, chances are you’re not doing everything he suggests, so watch it again. 
WordPress 3.3 is on its way
beAutomated – @beAutomated
As of today, we are a steamroller paving the way to WordPress 3.3 launch http://t.co/m9qixnCw #web #cms #WordPress
Yes, WordPress 3.3 is on the way. For those of us lucky enough to have been given indepth tours and insight into coming features, the update is eagerly awaited. This is a great post by Jane Wells, and she rightly comments, “For the people working on the release, most of whom run trunk on their own sites for at least a month or two (if not longer) before each launch, it’s easy to forget that features we had done months ago — flyout menus, drag and drop uploading — are still being hoarded by us (and more recently by the lucky recipients of a merge onto wordpress.com) and are not available on the sites of regular users.” This kind of sentiment is what makes the WordPress community and platform so great. We at Zeek are proud to be a part of it.
And some thoughts from Mashable on important 3.3 features:
dean guadagni – @deansguide
Do you use #wordpress for your business? http://t.co/1mrtmIUZ v. 3.3′s 11 most important features
Resist the urge to take shortcuts
Todd Carpenter – @tcar
How ghetto is it to use an HTML table to format a WordPress Page? #idontwanttowriteacutompagetemplate cc @housechick @zengy @ReggieRPR
The answer, and I know that Mr. Carpenter knows this, is yes, and it’s also just a bad practice. “The problem with using HTML tables,” according to Steve Zehngut, “is that page sizes are much larger, the tables often take longer to load and by using tables, you’re not really future proofing your site. In addition divs are simply more SEO friendly.”
And A New Feature in Jetpack 1.2 – Email Subscriptions
How to use Email Subscriptions in Jetpack 1.2 http://t.co/qqMB8es3 #WordPress #Automattic #Jetpact #Email #Subscriptions
According to Automattic, “All features in Jetpack 1.2 are on by default. So subscriptions, like all other features in Jetpack, requires no magic to activate. Visitors to your blog can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they have already commented on.”
Where will the email subscription links appears on your blog? ”Two places. One is on by default, the other you have to activate manually. By default, you will see two new checkboxes on every blog post, at the bottom of the comments form. To add the Subscriptions Widget to your sidebar, go to your Dashboard. Then click on Widgets. You will see a widget called ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’. Click on it, and drag it to the sidebar on the right.”
There’s More To A Creative Website Than Pretty Graphics
In large-scale projects, the most creative part of the work is not the graphics, it’s the architecture.
The most creative aspects of site design are often unable to be seen in the browser.
Creative design is subjective. Whether a site can handle a traffic spike created by a link from a highly influential website, like The Drudge Report is not. The design of the hosting services, the architecture of the content management system, and the way different pieces of software work together to insure that a site stays up and working can and should be as as creative as the visual design.
One of the mistakes we see a lot of clients make is basing the decision about what company should build their site on the look of the visuals in a portfolio. If impressive visual design is not backed up by equally impressive programming skills and system knowledge, your project may look good and not function in a way that supports your business objectives.
Design plays an important role in whether a site will be used properly by those who visit it, this is a fact. Great visual design makes a site simple to navigate and leads the visitor to the pages you want them to spend time on. But it is just one of the factors you should be considering when choosing your site developer.
Here are some other factors you should consider.
Feel free to add to our list in your comments.
Tags: creativity, design, developer, open source, platforms, web
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