Yoast says sliders and background videos should be banned

Our customers know that we at Lewis Studios and Trail Websites do not recommend the use of sliders or background videos. Rather than write a long post explaining why we advise against these conversion-killing gimmicks, we offer links to Yoast’s posts: Sliders suck and should be banned from your website Video backgrounds suck, ban them … Read more

Using has_term to check if a WordPress post is in a category

Sometimes the documentation lets us down. In WordPress, has_term($term, $taxonomy, $id) is used to check if a post has a term. The documentation says the taxonomy field is optional. It is not. To check if a post is in a specific category, you need to use “category” as the taxonomy name. In a loop, you … Read more

Mautic Marketing Automation

Mautic’s open source marketing automation has all the functions you need for drip marketing, content marketing and scoring web visitors from anonymous to converted. It is available in two flavors: do-it-yourself and hosted. For many, the price for the hosted and managed version is well worth it. Mautic takes care of updates, keeps things working … Read more

Introducing Page Progress Tracker

Do you have a member site built on WordPress that offers courses or other content that your users need to track their progress through? We built a Page Progress Tracker plugin that we are now testing with a few selected customers. Here’s an introductory video tour: Highlights: Put a shortcode on pages where users need … Read more

Customizing WordPress

We’ve been building websites for clients that need customized functionality. WordPress is still our go-to foundation but we’ve found that adding a little admin capability and some front end user experience enhancement through customization makes for great solutions. If you want to build your own customized WordPress sites, we recommend Toolset Components quite useful. If … Read more