Last week, some of the most progressive marketers and innovative thinkers using WordPress came together at the 2018 WP Engine Summit. Attendees left exhilarated and inspired to push their brands and agencies forward faster. The theme of this year’s Summit was Breakthrough. Insight into the Internet’s most forward-thinking trends like AI, voice technology, AMP, and PWA energized attendees with the knowledge and inspiration to fuel their professional breakthroughs. Additionally, Becky Hammon, Assistant Coach to the San Antonio Spurs, delivered a keynote speech to help ignite personal breakthroughs.
To conclude the Summit, we heard from WP Engine leaders who offered a look into the WP Engine roadmap. This included a look...
WP Engine is the WordPress Digital Experience Platform that gives companies of all sizes the agility, performance, intelligence, and integrations they need to drive their business forward faster. WP Engine’s combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts are trusted
The process of disabling the 5.0 editor should not be a hassle. In the coming days, we will be rolling out an admin notice that will display on the Dashboard page* of your site(s). This notice will have information about adopting the new editor and will provide buttons to install/activate the
What is a child theme? A child theme works in combination with the parent theme. With regards to Genesis, child themes serve as a sort of skin that can change the way a theme looks, while relying on the functionality of its parent theme (in this case, Genesis). Child themes offer users the added
RW Q&A: Monisha Perkash, founder of Lumo Bodytech
Perkash came up with the idea for Lumo seeing her co-founder and CTO, Andrew Chang, suffering from debilitating back pain. Perkash is married to a spine and sports physician, so she could understand how important posture really was. Perkash advised Andrew to attend a posture class and as a result
What the Rise of Blockchain can Teach the Regulatory Environment
They’ll continue to grow and embrace new technologies. Just think about how they’ve gone from physical trading floors to automated trading of dematerialized, ledger-based securities in a few short years. It’s logical to assume that blockchain-based solutions — such as having investors’
Stop Focusing on Cryptocurrencies Problems. Consider its Future.
Unfortunately, would-be entrepreneurs like to throw a crypto component atop haphazard tech architecture to generate buzz. Make sure crypto will add value to your business processes. Exercise caution around proponents, and ask to see demonstrated cases. At the very least, a crypto partner or
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Unless you have an unlimited clothes budget, it’s unrealistic (and wasteful) to wear a new outfit for every single occasion, yet social media pressures us into it. Rent a Runway solves this tension elegantly by recycling (expensive) clothes across a large set of women. It’s an example of the
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
Centered Logos Hurt Website Navigation
It appears that other factors (such as the contrast, padding, and legibility of the brand name) affect brand recall more than the position in the center of the page versus the top left corner. For example, the Nolitan hotel websites had a background image behind the logo, which may have
‘Our Users Are Everyone’: Designing Mass-Market Products for Large User Audiences
A natural approach for describing a large group of people is to turn to demographic facts such as age, gender, occupation, and income. When recruiting participants for user research, it’s definitely good to have some demographic diversity. But these facts don’t usually describe what you should
Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks
Notice that this quality of good links is last in the list. Concision is important, but it must be balanced with the other priorities (specific, sincere, substantial) in link-label writing. There is no maximum word count for links. They can be as long as they need to be to achieve those other three
Generic Commands
Currently, the only generic Web commands that truly work are those in browsers rather than on individual sites. Examples include Back, Forward, and Print. In the latter case, it would be much more useful if the generic Print button subsumed a page's Printer-friendly version feature; clicking Print
The Need for Speed
The figure shows the distribution of the speeds with which users have connected to the Internet according to the last six Georgia Tech Web user surveys. Two things are clear from the figure: users are replacing slow modems (14.4) with fast modems (28.8 or 33.6), but the proportion of users who
Web Research: Believe the Data
Web users often turn away rather than having to register. Quite simply, it's not worth peoples' time to answer all your questions. Even if we get a Web-wide standard for one-click registration, users will resent being asked to register. Every click is a burden for busy Web users, but more
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
Alternative Payment Methods Enable International Purchases
In some cases, the payment method can offer a competitive advantage. For instance, the password manager 1Password only offered credit cards as a payment method, while a competitor, Dashlane, accepted PayPal in addition to credit cards. In both cases, the sites were available in 10 or more
Text Scanning Patterns: Eyetracking Evidence
Right-to-left languages such as Arabic favor a reversed F-pattern, like the one seen in this study participant’s gaze plot, as he was scanning a page on an Arabic website. (Each blue dot signifies a fixation. The lines between the dots represent saccades in which the user is moving the eyes and
None of the users in our study were overly concerned about privacy (perhaps partially due to the innocuous nature of the sites we tested), although several assumed that “other people” might be worried. For these participants, having their site usage tracked was accepted as the status quo, and
Why Zen Mode Isn’t the Answer to Everything
For tasks like document-authoring or intensive reading, which require a significant level of cognitive function, it seems like minimizing visual distractions would be an obvious way to decrease the cognitive load and interaction cost. Less visual clutter means fewer elements competing for users’
Design Charrettes & Team Sketching: ½ Inspiration, ½ Buy-In
You can successfully conduct and use information gleaned in design charrettes at any time during a project cycle. Of course, set realistic goals for the session based on what can be done now. For example, don’t set a grand goal when your website is almost complete. Conversely, set sights high
Discovering the threats below the surface on the Dark Web
The Dark Web is inherently scary for those who are unfamiliar with it, which to be frank, is most of us. Even asking most regular internet users to define what the Dark Web is could be quite a stretch. Most will probably rattle off something about open-air drug markets, illicit pornography, and
We get Smarter with the Internet of Things (IoT) and so do Cities
The higher the availability of data, the more informed the decisions of the smart city capabilities. In order for the smart traffic system to work to greatest efficiency, it needs to collect data from all traffic lights in the city. The smart city information will then be able to make an
3 High-Tech Ways Companies Are Fighting Cybercrime Right Now
The cost of cybercrime is slated to reach an astounding $6 trillion globally by 2021, according to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures. It seems that cybercrime’s sophistication and scope tend to grow right along with the technologies that enable it. Two such technologies are cryptocurrencies
Small Business Marketing Strategies that Will Work for You
Ignite your social media accounts and websites with the right content. Be careful in using search engine optimization content. Make sure you equip your content with right trending keywords. Format your blogs with title tags, meta tags, description, and headings like the H1, H2. Populate your
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
7 Business Killers — Thoughts Startups Ought to Consider
Criticism is a natural part of the business. If no one is criticizing your business, then you are not doing the business correctly. As a business start-up, much of what ultimately happens is out of your direct control. However, look around and see if you can see what others don’t and anticipate
You Have a Great Tech Idea. Now What?
After you have sufficient information to feel confident in the feasibility of your idea, you can start creating a business plan. Your business plan will cover several areas, including the unique value proposition of your business, your vision and mission, your market analysis, your competitive
A Look Back at the 2018 WP Engine Summit | Usability Insights From Sun Microsystem's 1997 Web Design
Usability Insights From Sun Microsystem's 1997 Web Design
Homogeneous sites can use simpler navigation that emphasizes one or two organizing principles for very large collections of pages. For example, news sites can use a time line to hide most older stories unless the user explicitly requests them. Also, by encoding richer attributes in XML
Anchors OK? Re-Assessing In-Page Links
By contrast, an accordion-based table of contents has the advantage of being more visible to users than some tables of content implemented with in-page links. If in-page links only appear at the top of a page, users must return to the top of the page to navigate to another section. (This is not the
Video Usability
When you embed content that is hosted by another site or service, aim to control what, if anything, the site feeds to users at the end of your video content. Make sure that users are not presented with inappropriate videos or with a list of your competitors’ videos at the end of your video.
