Noel Tock - WordPress & Web Design

Book update: Customizing WordPress Admin

Noel — Mon, 27 May 2013 07:49:54 +0000

If you came here for pictures, there aren’t many yet :) However, I’ll be sending out updates and a launch deal for those that sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of the post. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a lot of fun putting together a book on customizing the WordPress [...]

Joining Human Made

Noel — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:23:03 +0000

Over the past four years I’ve had plenty of fun with client work, open source projects and a fair amount of selling digital goods. At some point during that period I also quit my day job, which freed up a ton of time and further created opportunities. I thoroughly enjoy what I do now, which [...]

WordSesh Notes: WordPress as SaaS

Noel — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:35:21 +0000

Thanks to all that participated and joined the WordSesh event. It was a blast, especially since there were around 250-300 people watching live. Here’s our session WordPress as SaaS (Software as a Service), lead by Joe and myself: Here are all the links for our talk: SaaS Products happytables Clickbank Powered Dashboard We talked briefly [...]

Quick Hits: WordPress and Universal Analytics

Noel — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:13:24 +0000

Universal Analytics is an upgrade to the Google Analytics we’ve all been using for years, a welcome one at that. You can read more about it here and the KissMetrics blog also has a good write-up here. The gist is, we have more flexibility, in particular for pushing custom data (we had a limit of [...]

The Long Game

Noel — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:05:00 +0000

I was sitting in the Barcelona airport after a week-long offsite with Clickbank, the company we partnered with to deliver Clickbank Powered (the equivalent of mixing Squarespace, AWeber and E-Junkie into one). While sitting in the food court and waiting for our respective flights, Eric (Director of Marketing at Clickbank) and I were chatting about [...]

Rethinking our Onboarding Checklist

Noel — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:20:23 +0000

When we first launched happytables, one of the things we did well was create a series of tasks for the user to complete, commonly known as the checklist. This is what it looked like: It was linear and long, thus easy to read yet hard to add anything else on that page. With happytables 2.0, [...]

Landing Page Redesign Thoughts

Noel — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:43:33 +0000

During our retreat out in Lanzarote (pic & pic), we were able to hammer out the new happytables beta. In the process, I quickly threw together a new landing page. It certainly wasn’t complete, but in the interest of shipping, I spent some of the early hours working on it. I finally had a chance [...]

Rethinking WordPress Admin

Noel — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:33:51 +0000

After having tackled customizing wp-admin with happytables, I’ve once again had the opportunity to go through the motions with an exciting project in a new vertical. The good news is that it’s completely doable: The bad; it’s time consuming, hacky and leaves a bad taste in your mouth (similar to doing responsive web design in a rush). [...]

Adaptive Content Images within WordPress

Noel — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:43:35 +0000

There are plenty of adaptive image solutions out there, but I needed one that understood the relevance of the content area, automatically created re-sized images for various breakpoints and minimized the download impact for end-users. Remember, images that are part of your theme should be solved through the theme files, my goal was to tackle any [...]

WordPress.com Verticals and the Future

Noel — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:28:37 +0000

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a number of WordPress.com initiatives trying to touch on niche business segments. As happytables is fairly known within the community, some chatter came up when the most recent vertical relating to restaurants was released. I’d like to take this opportunity to clear some things up as well as [...]