244 - 'R' is for Resources

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Hello, It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WP.  Today is for R for Resources…  

Preamble

We asked the WP Builds Facebook group members to tell us about their WP website making resources and we were overwhelmed.

Thanks to  the people who contributed (Davinder Singh Kainth, Peter Ingersoll, Jane Brennecker, Brenda Malone, Dave Cocking, Todd E. Jones and Diane Kimantas). Lee Jackson does not get a mention for offering to tickle us!

Instead of trying to talk about all the things they offered we are going to make that the basis of a new series.

Here, we will talk more generally about how much has changed in terms of online resources. A boiled down version on what we will cover later. Perhaps talk of the pros and cons and what is still missing. We could throw in a few standout resources along the way.

These show notes are better read in combination with listening to the podcast, they might be too pithy just to read alone…

Insane amounts of free stuff…

Graphics, image editing and inspiration.

So many ways to get CC zero photographs (best known Unsplash).

Increasingly more font icon options (best known Font Awesome).

Online editors using free image, fonts and Icons (Best know Canva).

Inspirations –  Dribbble, Themeforest, Template Monster and the libraries of every Page Builder, and soon Gutenberg.

Tools for color pallets and font choices/pairing

Tools to optimize images

Standout one for David and Peter Ingersol is https://www.photopea.com/, and for Brenda Malone it’s https://10015.io/, which is an insane amount of free tools!

https://milanote.com/ was suggested by Jane Brennecker. It’s like Evernote for creatives – organization for projects.

The the are the copy writing frameworks which Todd E. Jones mentions – https://www.copyflight.com/

Openverse:
https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/

Figma:
https://www.figma.com/

Whimsical:
https://whimsical.com/

Code Generators and working examples 

Code pen and W3schools
https://generatewp.com/ for WordPress related tasks – again, really useful.

Templates for everything (copy, social media images, landing pages).

WP tools for build efficiency

The repo is full of tiny plugins, and Davinder Singh Kainth recommends looking there:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/edit-author-slug/ is suggested by Brandon Allen. This lets you go from wpbuilds.com/author/nathanwrigley to wpbuilds.com/journalist/nathanwrigley, which is handy!

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-css/ this is from Tom Usborne of GeneratePress/blocks fame. It’s good if you’re working with the block editor. It adds a CSS metabox – although not updated recently, but likely it’s not in need of an update.

Page Builders – of course!

Free ways to spin up WordPress installs.

Ways to navigate WordPress and store assets.

Tools for migrating site and managing them

Uptime monitoring (lots of ways to do this)

Migrate Guru et al. for moving a site from A to B server.

David likes https://skipdns.link/, which was suggested by Diane Kimantas too.

Support

There’s a Facebook group for everything now, and you can meet in person through meetups and other online events. Perhaps we’ll soon return to in person events?
https://learn.wordpress.org/

Is there a problem with free resources?

Generic visuals, possible legal issues.

Overwhelm – where would you go on day one of using WordPress?

There’s still something in the “learn one tool well” approach to website development. I’m sure bricklayers don’t spend so much time on checking out trowel updates!

The death of skills.

Adding too much just because you can!

Is anything still missing ?

Easy ways to improve website performance. We as WordPress users have to load more resources than we need to, and it is not easy to remove them.

Dynamic content is still hard to understand – custom post types and fields etc.

David finds vector / svgs images a challenge. He says that it’s his brain!

There is not a way to take the assets online and match them to a brand identity, i.e. being able to say we are going for a rustic country feel and all the subtle colours, images and fonts magically appear. So someone, please will you build this!

If you’ve got any thoughts on things that we got wrong / didn’t include or perhaps you’ve got a rival resource you prefer, please add a comment below, or in the WP Builds Facebook group.