Development workflow Practical
Turning taste arguments into rule checks
"It feels a bit cramped" can be neither argued with nor fixed. Spacing off the scale, colour off the palette, contrast below threshold, missing states — four rules…
Technote
WordPress guides for Designers
For designers who own the look and the experience: how theme choice, webfonts and image handling decide whether the design survives contact with the browser.
71 articles· Designers
Themes & plugins Practical
Decide the editable regions before you design them
A design the CMS cannot express stays up for negotiation long after it ships. Deciding what editors may change, first, removes the negotiation entirely.
Development workflow Practical
Do not swap everything at once
A full swap makes every problem appear at the same moment — which means none of them can be attributed. So you switch one template at a time.
SEO Practical
What breaks first when forty cards land on the page
A mockup with six cards usually works. At forty, aspect ratio breaks first, and then three cards of one visual family start reading as a single block.
SEO Practical
The zero-result screen is where people leave
An empty screen has to say why it is empty and what to do next. And where a filter can return nothing, show the counts so the dead…
Development workflow Practical
Design with real content, not filler
Filler text of uniform length hides every layout problem you have. Real sentences vary wildly, and that variance is exactly where a layout falls apart.
Development workflow Practical
Review on staging, not in screenshots
A screenshot is one moment under ideal conditions. States, edge cases and real content only surface on staging — and staging has conditions of its own.
Themes & plugins Advanced
Interactions without JavaScript, and the rule that makes them safe
details, :target, :focus-within, :has() and scroll timelines cover a surprising amount of interaction. One rule keeps them safe: the default state must be the finished state.
Themes & plugins Practical
Icon fonts, SVG sprites or inline SVG?
All three draw the same picture on screen. What differs is how many colours you can use, what assistive technology hears, and how many icons actually ship to…
Themes & plugins Practical
Dark mode should be a decision, not a default
Dark mode is not one feature; it doubles the surface you must maintain and verify. Some sites have a clear reason for it, and some do not.
Development workflow Practical
Undrawn states are where the build diverges from the design
A composition that shows only the happy path defines half the screen. The other half — empty, error, overlong title — gets improvised during the build, and the…
SEO Practical
Keeping your URLs is a design decision
Redraw the information architecture and addresses change. If they must, the 301 map ships with the change — it is a deliverable, not an afterthought.