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WordCamp Montreal 2013

I Will Be at WordCamp Montréal 2013

By on May 18, 2013 in pixelyzed News, WordPress

WordCamp Montréal 2013 is com­ing in late June and, as is becom­ing a tra­di­tion for me, I will be attend­ing this great event for the 4th time! It seems that the more expe­ri­ence I get with WordPress, the more I get out of WordCamp. There’s always an great ros­ter of pre­sen­ters every year and I always meet inter­est­ing people.

I was nowhere ready for it this year but I’m start­ing to think about pre­sent­ing at WordCamp even­tu­ally. I’ve been work­ing with WordPress almost exclu­sively for well over 3 years now and my expe­ri­ence with mul­ti­site used for mul­ti­lin­gual sites could cer­tainly help oth­ers. I know it’s a topic that will be touched upon this year but it’s a real­ity for almost every web site for me. We’ll see!

The talks sched­ule looks like the best I’ve seen so far this year so if you are near or in Montréal dur­ing the last week­end in June (29, 30), don’t miss it! As I’ve said before, the Montréal WordPress com­mu­nity is truly awesome!

See you there!

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The State of my 2013 WordPress Toolset — Themes

By on May 16, 2013 in Builder Theme, Canvas Theme, Theme Frameworks, WordPress

When I wrote the 2012 ver­sion of this post last year, I did not expect it to become the most com­mented post on this blog ever. It made me real­ize that there is a real hunger for infor­ma­tion about pre­mium WordPress themes and frame­works out there, a need for opin­ions from peo­ple work­ing with some of these prod­ucts every day and who are not afraid to speak their mind. I like to think I do that here.

I also try to make a dis­tinc­tion between what frame­works would work well for pro­fes­sional WordPress design­ers and devel­op­ers ver­sus casual users. The for­mer is what inter­ests me and most reviews out there are tar­geted at the lat­ter. Also, you often get a review from some­one who tin­kered with a frame­work on a test site for a few min­utes or hours. I work with the themes I men­tion here all the time. Testing a theme frame­work for a cou­ple hours will not give you a per­spec­tive on things like:

  • How well do upgrades and updates work? Do updates typ­i­cally break client sites lay­outs? Do you need to tweak your child themes every time you upgrade the par­ent theme?
  • How does the frame­work per­form on a real live site with real traf­fic? Is the site slower or faster with this frame­work com­pared to others?
  • How does the devel­oper han­dle sup­port? How fast, how help­ful are they. This is key when your client work depends on a prod­uct like a theme so heavily.
  • Etc…

This post is also a kind of intro to other posts I’ll write in the com­ing weeks and months where I explain in more detail the rea­sons I’d choose a WordPress theme frame­work over oth­ers and I’ll finally write some real in-​depth theme frame­work reviews based on these cri­te­ria. That is already started.

But for now, here’s the state of my 2013 WordPress themes toolset…

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Learning from the Past and Looking Forward to 2013

By on January 2, 2013 in Buisness, Freelancing, Personal

I have done a few end of year /​start of new year posts in the past but this one will not be a look back at the past year. 2012 has been a great year for me and my busi­ness, a year of growth and the pain that often comes with it. But I pre­fer to look for­ward and dis­till those lessons into areas of focus for the new year so I can improve where I can and do bet­ter in 2013.

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The State of My 2012 WordPress Toolset — Themes

By on May 17, 2012 in Builder Theme, Headway Theme, Thesis Theme, WordPress

The last few months have been my busiest since I started free­lanc­ing full time in August 2008 and I’ve also had to tackle some of my most com­plex WordPress projects. This means I had to re-​evaluate parts of my WordPress toolset to be able to sat­isfy some of my increas­ingly demand­ing clients’ require­ments and was forced to make some impor­tant changes to it.

I also learned a lot about WordPress as a devel­op­ment plat­form in the last two years and, after work­ing with ColdFusion for a long time, I’m start­ing to get far more com­fort­able with PHP now. This enabled me to appre­ci­ate how pow­er­ful, ele­gant and flex­i­ble the WordPress plat­form really is and how much eas­ier it makes things when you use the tools and APIs it pro­vides cor­rectly. This new under­stand­ing forced me to look at some of the tools I was using with new eyes and rethink some of the early deci­sions I made when I first started to work with WordPress. This includes rethink­ing Headway, the theme frame­work I’d been using as I was start­ing to have issues with it and the theme is the most impor­tant com­po­nent of a WordPress site besides WordPress itself.

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Get Headway Before November 25

By on November 18, 2011 in Headway Theme, WordPress

Many of you know that, since I’ve started work­ing with WordPress, the only theme I’ve used on any client project is Headway. Headway is not “just” a theme like the mul­ti­tude of pre­made themes (free or paid) you can down­load and slap on a site with a few tweaks. Headway is a theme frame­work. It enables me to inte­grate any design I cre­ate or is given to me into a site. It affords me total flex­i­bil­ity as well as reli­able tools I can count on project after project. To me, it’s not just a WordPress theme or a frame­work but a com­plete Web Site Design and Development System. Continue Reading →

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