There’s lots of different factors which can effect how quickly your WordPress website loads, including the theme you’re using, the plugins, where and how well you’re hosted and how well your images are optimised (there’s more, but that’s a good starter!). The tricky bit is working out which are causing your site to load slowly, and then knowing what to do to fix it. That’s what the new service, WPfaster is all about. Take a look here to find out how to speed up your WordPress website.

I regularly use various caching plugins when developing on clients websites, and i’ve found it a bit of a pain when making edits to the css when they don’t immediately show up on browser refresh, for whatever reason.

For that reason I have a couple of bits of code I use to ensure that the css is ‘fresh’ each time, both of which work by appending a random id to the end of the css uri.

hence http://…/yourthemefolder/style.css

becomes

http://…/yourthemefolder/style.css?id=345 or whatever random number is selected.

There’s two types of code… one when the stylesheet is regularly accessible in the header for you to edit, simply append the following to the css url:

?id=<?php echo rand(1,1000); ?>

which when implemented would look like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>?id=<?php echo rand(1,1000); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

and the other is when, as with a lot of more recent themes, you need to use a filter to access the stylesheet uri (you need to stick this in your theme’s functions.php file if you’re not sure what to do with it!):

add_filter('stylesheet_uri','wpi_stylesheet_uri',10,2);

function wpi_stylesheet_uri($stylesheet_uri, $stylesheet_dir_uri){
	$random = rand(1,1000);
    return $stylesheet_uri.'?id='.$random;
}

Hope this helps someone out there!

Just started working on a new project for AMH Air Conditioning Installations. The project is to build them a new WordPress website / theme, and then do some advanced SEO for them, right from helping to select the keywords and domain name through to creating unique content for their website / blog on a regular basis. AMH have been doing Air Conditioning Installations for some time, but have yet to manage to rank highly for relevant search terms and so they decided it was time to do something about it. Watch this space for results!

I’ve been working on the launch of the 2010 Review website for a couple of months now and am very excited to see it go live.

It’s a WordPress website with a twist: UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the client, wanted forum functionality on the site so that people could engage in discussions in a more structured manner than traditional blog comments permitted. After a bit of research into the best solution I hit on Buddypress, the plugin which turns WordPress into a private social network. One of the many social modules available within Buddypress is forums, so I used that.

Actually integrating Buddypress into your theme can be done using another plugin, but instead I opted to code the theme as a child theme of Buddymatic which is a port of the excellent Thematic theme framework.

In addition to the forums, the site has some additional custom php coding, for example we’re created a special ‘library’ page which features thumbnails of all posts with a specific tag which is updated on the fly.

I’d built the WordPress website, was ready for launch, and re-pointed the domain only to find.. shock, horror, every single image on the site was broken. Without going into the ins and outs of why the Windows hosting solution had cocked things up, I needed a solution and quick.

10 minutes of searching found me the Search Regex plugin and it is a thing of beautiful simplicity, allowing you to carry out ‘find and replace’ commands across your entire WordPress content.

So within 30 seconds of install I’d been able to update all of the image paths on every post and page, and my site was fixed. Bingo bango.

Here’s my latest free WordPress theme release: Pressy, a social bookmarking theme for people who spot and share great finds online. It’s a child theme for Thematic, so is lightweight, flexible and SEO friendly out of the box.

Full details, demo and download here, chuck any feedback, comments or questions in the comments below. Me hopey you likey!