Creating the perfect color palette is so much more than throwing your favorite color in a logo. You’re creating a flow that will set the tone for your entire brand. Whether you like it or not, your color palette sends a message that will tell your viewers to do either one of two things: stay or go. Your job is to know your message and portray it in a way that leaves people wanting more.

First Impressions

A first impression can make or break a person’s entire perception of your brand. Within just a few seconds, you need to create an emotion that compels people enough to make them want to find out what you’re all about. What does this have to do with your color palette? More than you would think! Research shows us that 60% of people will decide whether or not they’re attracted to a message based entirely on color. That’s significant! Have you ever been to a website and found yourself instantly turned off by the colors that were just thrown everywhere? Nothing seemed to match and on every page, the colors were creating a different theme. Or maybe the colors were just too bright or too dull. Not only is this not appealing to the eye, but it also makes for an extremely ineffective experience for viewers. People like order and class, not mismatched chaos.

Create a Message

By this point you should already know this, but colors create a powerful message, whether you intend them to or not. Red, for instance, is a deeply emotional color. Being the color of fire and blood, it often stimulates feelings of passion, love, and power. It also is used to signify danger or a warning. Blue, the color of the sky and the sea, is often associated with loyalty, peace, and stability. Yellow is an attention grabber, like the sun. It is commonly known to trigger excitement, positivity, and warmth. These are just a few examples, but you get the point. My question for you is this – what’s your message? Don’t overthink it. Sit back and let your colors do the talking.

Guidelines

Truthfully, there are no rules when it comes to creating your palette. This is your brand and you have full freedom to do what you want. What we would like to give you is a guideline. Step number one: Keep it simple. As a general rule, you should aim to have three core colors, or color categories, in your palette. I recommend starting with your accent color and working down from there.

Accent

Your accent color should be the color that defines you most, even though it will be used the least on your actual site. This is the attention-grabber that highlights the important things. Your calls to action and your powerful one-liners. This is the color you should really put the most time into as it truly will set the rhythm for your brand.

Once you have determined your accent color, you should create 2-3 shades of that same color for hover effects.

Base

Next is your base color. This will make up most of your palette and, in most cases, should be white or a light pastel. Your base color is the color that people will notice the least, but it should actually make up about 90% of your palette. For variabilities sake, it’s always good to have a base color and a secondary base color.

Contrast

To complete your palette, you need a contrast color. The aim of this color is to complement your base color. In general, your contrast color should be dark and strong. This color will be dispersed throughout your site filling areas such as the header and footer backgrounds.

Once again, you want to make sure you’ve got some variation. It’s a good idea to create several lighter versions of your contrast color.

Readability & Inspiration

Another key factor that is not always taken into account when establishing a color palette is readability. Lucky for you, the web is full of tools to help you create the perfect contrast with your colors. A free resource that we recommend is called WebAIM.

Still feeling stuck? Check out Hue for some sweet color inspiration. Canva also has a great selection of color palettes that are sure to motivate and get you headed in the right direction. Bonus – both options are free! If you’re looking for some real-life website inspiration, check out pages.xyz to see how others are using color on their sites.

The post Creating the Perfect Color Palette for Your Brand appeared first on Kadence Themes.

Why Multilingual?

Translating your site into multiple languages can be an incredible asset in growing your business. Not only does it allow you to reach people that you couldn’t have otherwise reached, but it also adds a sense of culture and professionalism to your brand.

Maybe you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “I don’t need a multilingual site. All my customers speak English.” Sure, you might be right, but have you ever thought about why all your customers speak English? Let’s flip this for a moment. Have you ever opened a website and all the text was in Mandarin? Because you don’t speak Mandarin, you left the site without looking further into the product that actually intrigued you.

Having a multilingual site says to the viewer, “Hey, we’re the real deal! We believe in our product so much so that we are willing to cross cultures and borders for you to experience what we have.”

Weglot and why you Need it

One of the biggest things that holds people back from going multilingual is that no one wants to put in the work. Good news! We found a plugin that does all the work for you! It’s called Weglot and it’s rad!

With a lot of other multi-lingual plugins, a lot of work is required to manually translate each page or post and managing those translations can be taxing. Plus if you don’t want to manually translate you have to work with plugin extensions to automate the translation process. Weglot, however, does it all! It doesn’t just translate your site, but it also outputs it into whatever languages you want (with over 60 languages to choose from!).

Weglot is a powerful plugin that perfectly integrates into your website. And it only takes about 4 minutes to set it up! We mean it, 4 minutes! Plus, we’ve gone ahead and made this process even easier for you by creating a step-by-step tutorial. Cheers!

Lastly, Weglot can greatly improve your SEO. Separate pages will be created for each language that is added, each properly indexed by Google. This means more search clicks and international visitors!

Pro-tip

A hold-up that many people experience when creating multilingual is that if you don’t speak multiple languages it can be difficult to truly verify that all the content on your site makes sense. Weglot is excellent in that is has an extremely dependable translation process and it also allows for easy manual translations. If you, however, don’t know the language you’re translating to and you want to be sure all the lingo is correct, you can refer to a Weglot expert for checks and edits.

The post Multilingual in 4 Minutes appeared first on Kadence Themes.

This month I got in touch with Clayton Chase of Kaolin Creative to ask him some WordPress related questions. I got inspired to reach out after seeing some of the great designs Clayton has been creating using Kadence Blocks. Below is our brief written interview.

What do you do? Tell us about yourself and your involvement with WordPress?

I am a web designer and front end developer that specializes in WordPress websites. I’ve been working with WordPress for about eight years. I’m not a PHP developer but focus on creating stable, light, powerful websites on WordPress.

What is a mistake you commonly see others making in your field?

The most common mistake I see is building WordPress on bad themes and plugins or way too many plugins. Also, bad hosting is pretty common.

What tool or resource was a game changer for you once you found it?

Kadence Blocks & GeneratePress – both have been instrumental in building beautiful yet stable WordPress websites and give me a lot of flexibility.

What has been one of the hardest challenges in your career? Perhaps reoccurring, perhaps a one-time event.

Probably the greatest challenge is helping customers understand the value of a stable WordPress website and what goes into it.

If you could give any advice to others starting out doing what you do what would you tell them?

Exceed your customer’s expectations every time and you will always have referrals and repeat clients, be honest, and educate yourself on your craft.

Be sure to check out kaolincreative.com and some of the amazing work he’s done.

The post Interview with Clayton of Kaolin Creative appeared first on Kadence WP.

We recently released our Advanced Gallery Block as part of our Kadence Blocks plugin. It comes loaded with some really fantastic features that I’m so excited to get into users hands. More than that, this new block comes with some big improvements over the core gallery block that I want to mention as well. So let’s dive into the reasons why Kadence Blocks free plugin has the best gallery block for WordPress.

Performance Driven Gallery

Thumbnail Size Selection

A big issue in the core Gutenberg gallery is the image file that is used. By default, the full-size image is output for a gallery, that makes for huge files being delivered when only small thumbnails are needed which is bad for performance and load time. With the Kadence Blocks Advanced Gallery Block, you can choose which thumbnail size you want to use as the base size and it will still output all the necessary code for larger screen resolutions.

Lightbox Size Selection

Similarly, if you choose to turn on the lightbox you can define the image size that it links to, allowing you to link to a large, but not full, image size.

Designed for Lazy Load

Each image container is sized for the image before the image is loaded in the browser. This is done with a little CSS to create a box of padding based on the ratio of the image. It’s really great because it means your page doesn’t jump and jerk around while the images are loaded, and instead, the loading is very smooth. This is great for lazy loading gallery images, making your site fast and the load viewing beautiful.

Only the Needed JavaScript is Loaded

Kadence Advanced Gallery Block currently allows for 5 different layouts, ranging from masonry to slider. But only the javascript that is needed to power your gallery will load on a given page. For example, if you only ever use a masonry gallery then the javascript that powers the slider will never load on your site.

A Gallery with Advanced Features

Five Gallery Types in One

The Kadence Advanced Gallery Block includes five different gallery types you are sure to love. You can easily click through each type by clicking on the different icons below Gallery Type in the sidebar options area. Below are some image previews. You can click on each to see a live example.

Masonry Gallery

The Masonry Layout outputs images in the ratio they were uploaded while providing a beautiful grid for the images to fit together without gaps.

Grid Gallery

The Grid Gallery is designed to force all your images into a specific ratio then align them together nicely. You can choose the ratio, columns, and gutter for the grid style you want.

Carousel Gallery

The Carousel Layout outputs images in columns in a carousel format that can auto slide through to show an array of images. Similar to the grid, all the images output in a specific ratio that can be selected in the settings.

Fluid Image Width Carousel Gallery

The Fluid Carousel Layout is designed to have variable widths for each image, allowing you to show the images in varied ratios while having a carousel play through your images.

Slider Gallery

The Slider Layout is simply a basic slider with a clean way to output your images in any ratio you choose.

Four Caption Location Styles

Within the gallery settings, you can choose four different options for how you want captions to show, or you can choose to hide them altogether. Show captions on hover at the bottom of the image, always at bottom of the image, below the image, or on hover covering the image.

Caption Font and Background Options

Kadence Blocks Gallery caption settings include options for caption font size, color, font-family, and more. Plus it has background options, allowing you to choose the colors and style to match your design.

Built-in Lightbox

Within the gallery settings, you can choose to enable a link for your images. One of these link options allows you to enable a link to the media file, then once selected, you can choose to enable a lightbox for the gallery right within the block settings.

Custom Image Links

With this block, you can set custom image links for your images. This is a great way to use the gallery for more than just image galleries and incorporate it as part of your sites navigation.

Define Thumbnail Ratios

When setting up your gallery you can define the image ratio you want your grid to use. This applies to the grid, carousel, and slider gallery types. For example, the image below is a six-column gallery using a 2:3 image ratio.

Image Filter Effects

A fun option that can add some character to your galleries, or make the images feel connected, is to enable the gallery filter options. There are currently seven built-in filter effects you can choose from which include Grayscale, Sepia, Saturation, Vintage, Earlybird, Toasted and Mayfair.

Gutter and Border-Radius Control

Kadence Blocks Gallery Block adds control for gutter size and border-radius, which can really add a nice touch to your galleries. This even allows you to make circular galleries.

We’re excited about more features to come. Check out the free plugin and let us know what features you would like to see added to the Kadence Advanced Gallery Block!

The post Best WordPress Gallery Block appeared first on Kadence WP.

I’m excited to announce Kadence Themes is becoming Kadence WP! This has been a long time coming, and we are almost ready to pull the trigger

Why?

Practically, we are doing a lot more than themes in the WordPress space, and changing from Kadence Themes to Kadence WP helps better reflect who we are. We are still developing and refactoring our themes and plan to do so for a long time. This change does not affect that. The move is to communicate better that we offer more than themes and plan to expand our WordPress influence outside of just themes.

For all our existing customers, nothing changes for you but the URL where you reach us.

When?

Soon! We don’t have an exact date but expect it anytime. And note that you will be redirected when we change the site domain to kadencewp.com.

The post We are Changing our Name! appeared first on Kadence WP.

In this video, I highlight some features that come with Kadence Blocks a blocks plugin for the new WordPress editor. See features like the row layout, custom color palette, and block defaults. It follows the creation of a custom WordPress Page.

The post Video – Building with Kadence Blocks appeared first on Kadence WP.

If you are setting out to create a WooCommerce online store, one of the first things you need to decide is how to collect payment for your products. If you want to process credit card transactions, then you need a payment gateway. A payment gateway is a service provider that can process credit card payments on your behalf. The payment gateway collects payment information and processes the transaction with the banks involved. There are hundreds of options to choose from and choosing which is best for you can be overwhelming. To help decide which is best, I have outlined several key questions that I believe you should consider.

Questions to help you choose the best payment gateway:

After considering the above criteria, there are two payment gateways that we feel stand above the rest, Braintree Payments and Stripe. I recommend Braintree over Stripe, but they are both clear winners.

Braintree Payments

Braintree is a PayPal company and is a world-leading payment gateway option. Their account registration is not quite as smooth Stripe and requires manual approval and credit checks. They have been aggressively improving their WooCommerce plugin, making it all the more appealing to the everyday online shop owner. Another key that makes them a great option is their advanced fraud tools which are easy to add with their plugin. Plus the integration with PayPal payments is very nice and user-friendly.

Pros:

Braintree WooCommerce Extension:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/woo-payment-gateway/

Stripe Payments

Stripe, like Braintree, is one of the world-leading payment gateway options. They have a smooth account registration, low fees, and best of all, a great free plugin extension. The plugin extension is managed by WooCommerce and has become very reliable over the last couple of years.

Pros:

Cons:

Stripe WooCommerce Extension:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-gateway-stripe/

The post The Best Payment Gateways for WooCommerce appeared first on Kadence WP.

Intro to Crowdfunding

If you’re looking to engage your customers and increase brand exposure, crowdfunding is the way to go. It is an excellent way to gain recognition, feedback, and funding for a project, event, or product. And if done well, crowdfunding can be the key that helps you create strong, lasting connections with your target audience! With crowdfunding you’re inviting people to do so much more than just like a photo or share a post; crowdfunding invites your audience to engage by giving! And let’s be real, people are much more likely to engage long-term if they’ve got resources invested. So let’s dive a bit deeper into how this works…

Thinking Outside the Box

When most people think crowdfunding, they typically think small startup seeking funds or non-profit fundraising. Typically there’s a cool prototype released to get people excited, then a sweet (and totally moving) promo video. And lastly, there’s the call to action (AKA, give us all your money). This system is great and it totally works! However, if your understanding of crowdfunding is limited to this, you’re seriously missing out! No matter the size of your brand, crowdfunding can be an excellent tool for promoting anything from an innovative concept, to an up and coming product. It allows you to approach a cause, create a mission, and set a goal. By putting on a crowdfunding campaign you won’t just be receiving funding, but you will be gaining feedback and insight from a large-scale audience. Talk about a win-win!

Get Your Audience Involved

Crowdfunding is a great way to get the people involved! When people get to fund a new idea, it helps them feel less like a customer and more like a stakeholder. And who doesn’t like holding the stakes?? The trick is to invite your audience to invest in your idea. Investing is so much more than just giving money and walking away. They get benefited too! Getting your target audience to interact can be such a huge asset in growing your brand. I’m not just talking funds here, I’m taking real engagement from a real audience. And with audience engagement comes audience relationships, which then leads to sweet connections and long-lasting customers.

Crowdfunding Works

Let’s look at an example of a time that crowdfunding actually worked (and I mean, really worked). Any gamers out there? If so, you may have heard of Star Citizen. This is a video game that has been almost entirely financed through crowdfunding. The creator, Chris Roberts, drew in his funds by enticing his audience with an exclusive preview of his video game that was still in the early stages of development. All you had to do was make a donation and you were given access to experience a taste of this up-and-coming video game before the rest of the world. Sounds intriguing, right? Turns out, lots of people found this intriguing. Since 2013, Star Citizen has acquired over 181 million dollars in funds. Every dollar brought in has been from normal people like us, not high-end investors. All of it done through crowdfunding.

Define Your Mission

Whether you’re creating a new video game, or you’re digging a well Africa, the same three questions remain: 

• What’s your mission?
• What’s your cause?
• How much money do you need?

When creating your crowdfunding campaign it is important to have a clearly articulated mission as well as a solid, well-stated goal. This way people know exactly what they’re giving to, and a general idea of how much they should give.

The Practicals

What does this all look like practically? It’s easy! To create a crowdfunding campaign for your online shop, we recommend using a plugin like this one: WP Crowdfunding. You know the drill, install and activate the plugin, then you should see a Crowdfunding tab in your WP Dashboard. There you can set your general and Woocommerce settings, as well as your style and social share settings.

Next, navigate to your campaign product edit page. In the Product Data tab, set the Product data to Crowdfunding, then adjust your settings as desired.

That’s it! The next step is to spread the word. We’re talking social media, emails, live events, all of it! Set a goal and go achieve it. Happy Crowdfunding!

The post Keys to Successful Crowdfunding appeared first on Kadence WP.

One of the top requests for our Kadence WooCommerce email designer is to add a way to make WooCommerce emails responsive/fluid for better mobile support. If you’ve not had to create email templates before this may sound easy. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it might seem. But I’m excited to announce that with our update to version 1.3.0 this is now an option along with several other great features!

Mobile Responsive Transactional Emails

Woo Standard – iPhone

Responsive – iPhone

Email Clients Rendering Inconsistencies

Emails are not read and processed by a traditional browser. Instead, it’s the email inbox that defines how emails are rendered and appear to you. These inboxes (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) all use different systems to render emails and they are nothing like how a browser works. For example, Outlook uses the Microsoft Word engine to render emails. This means many of the normal CSS options that define styling for HTML don’t work for an email. To give an example, Outlook 2019 HTML rendering ignores the border-radius property entirely.

This means each styling decision and method to create a fluid/responsive layout required a lot of examination followed by a lot of testing. To implement this update, I used the services of Email on Acid, which allowed me to get previews of how these emails appear in a huge range of email clients. You can see the results of this testing below.

Emails with Order Tables for Mobile

The next hurdle was to determine how to make the data tables gracefully shrink without content becoming a jumbled mess.

In the end, I decided to make all the tables two columns and move the extra columns into one of the two remaining columns. For the order table, this meant moving the quantity amount below the product title.

With the WooCommerce digital product downloads table, the expiration is now inside and below the download link.

For WooCommerce Subscriptions email table, this meant moving from a four-column row into two-column rows.

Minor Structural Changes for WooCommerce Emails

To accommodate billing and shipping addresses I moved those into two rows instead of a column section.

One final structural change required that I move the order notes out of the table and into a section below the order table. To me, this seems like something core should already be doing anyway since it doesn’t look good as part of the order table. So I also added this as an option for standard emails as well.

New WooCommerce Email Features

To support WooCommerce 3.7, we’ve included an additional content section into the emails which allows you to add custom HTML to the bottom of each WooCommerce email.

You can know “zebra” style your email data tables by applying a different background to every other line.

We’ve added a new button styling section which allows you to better style links that are part of the WooCommerce email templates.

Free Responsive Template

Download a FREE importable email design using the template design featured in the images of this post.

Email Address*

I accept the privacy policy

Your e-mail address is used to send you the template download link and is auto subscribed to our newsletter and information about the activities of Kadence WP. You can always use the unsubscribe link included in our emails.

The post Responsive WooCommerce Emails appeared first on Kadence WP.

The new WordPress editor, otherwise known as Gutenberg, is constantly evolving and making improvements on itself. Here we would love to highlight some upcoming changes that we personally find pretty rad!

Moveability & Motion

Previously, whenever you moved a block above or below another block it would jump, making it difficult to know what went where. Now, however, a new animation has been added. Instead of the block jumping when being reordered, it slides, making it easier when moving blocks around to see what is going where.

Nesting Capabilities

Nesting capabilities have been added to some of the core Gutenberg blocks. This includes cover, media, and text blocks. Where before you were very limited in the blocks that could be added to, say, the cover block, now you have the freedom to nest any block.

Link Target to Button Block

With Gutenberg 6.2 you have the ability to have your button links open in a new tab when clicked.

These are just several of the improvements that come with the release of Gutenberg 6.2. These features will soon be added to the WordPress core, but you can download the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin to start using these new features now!

The post What’s New in Gutenberg appeared first on Kadence WP.

Customers are often way more interested in what others have to say about your products than what you have to say. Spend hours writing the perfect product descriptions, and still, many of your potential customers will scroll right by looking for product reviews.

Better Reviews = Better Conversion Rate

Product reviews are one of the most powerful ways to give your potential customers the confidence needed to purchase. Unfortunately, it’s one of the weaker parts of the WooCommerce Plugin. For example, by default, reviews are ordered oldest first. This is because they are no more than comments on your products. And as such, all you get is a rating and comment box. When I am reading reviews, I tend to look for a summation before I commit to reading a whole comment. Often, that single line summation suffices as all I need to know to make a purchasing decision.

It’s also worth noting that many of us look at a 4.5-star rating and want to know the breakdown. Was that from 45 five star ratings but then 5 one-star reviews? Because in a case like that I want to know why some people were so disappointed. WooCommerce doesn’t show a break down like this though. Just an overall product rating and then scrolling through comments oldest to newest with individual ratings.

That’s why we created our Advanced Reviews module in Kadence Woo Extras. Better reviews equal a better conversion rate, and it doesn’t just hinge on getting customers to write good reviews. A better system for collecting and showing reviews makes a huge difference.

Order by Most Helpful

With Advanced Reviews module in Kadence Woo Extras, you can enable voting on reviews based on if the reader thought it was helpful. Then you can order the reviews based on those votes. This is awesome because it gives your potential customers confidence in that they don’t need to read all the reviews to make sure they are not missing some critical piece of information. What’s great with this is that fallback for reviews that don’t have votes is ordered from newest to oldest which is how we expect to see reviews.

Feature Specific Reviews

Beyond just ordering by votes, you can feature specific reviews that you feel your potential customers should read. It’s an awesome way to get your better reviews in the eyes of your viewers.

Provide a Review Overview

A great way to give your potential customers a birds-eye view of your reviews is with an overview that shows how many people have reviewed a specific star.

Adding a Review Title

The simplest way to get review summaries is to have your reviewers do it themselves. By adding a title field to the review, you automatically collect useful summaries that future customers will be able to scan and decide to purchase quickly.

The post Improve your Conversion Rate with Better WooCommerce Reviews appeared first on Kadence WP.

Getting Noticed

Have you ever pushed out an idea, but the audience recognition just wasn’t there? Sometimes even the best ideas need a little extra boost to get them up and running. This is where crowdfunding comes into play.  In our previous post on crowdfunding, we talked briefly about audience engagement, but in this post, we want to really talk about it. Without the people crowdfunding just doesn’t work. We need them! The goal should be so much bigger than gaining new followers and building brand awareness. If you want to really boost momentum you need to stir up passion and truly engage with your potential backers. There are several ways to do this, social media being a core resource. But we want to talk about another outlet that often gets undermined…

Email Marketing

We spend so much time posting the perfect photo on Instagram or tweeting just the right amount of times that we often forget all about our other tools in the box. For example, email marketing. Did you know that email marketing is 34% more effective than other forms of outreach when it comes to crowdfunding? Email is generally seen as a more “serious” form of social media. People tend to engage longer with an email than with a status or a tweet, which allows you to engage directly with your target audience and state your claim.  Of course, email marketing depends on whether or not you have emailers to market to. This is why it is so important to build relationship with your customers early on and create an email list. If you can get people excited about your campaign anyone who’s anyone will want to jump on board!

Content Strategy

Articulate your email in a  professional manner that causes people to stop and listen (or in this case, read). Be sure to include a specific call to action that will lead readers directly to your campaign page. The most important bit when it comes to content is creating an effective subject line that will make people actually want to open the email. Most people get tons of emails every day and if something doesn’t seem familiar or of interest, it often gets put into spam (c’mon, we know you do it too). The best kind of subject line is one that cuts directly to the point but also gives a little hint at the storyline. Let your subject create a sense of urgency, making people feel the need to see what your email is all about.

Follow up

Email marketing isn’t a one and done strategy. You should send a series of emails leading up to your campaign launch. And by series, I’m talking 2 or 3, not 5 or 10. Don’t get spammy. Then once your launch has happened, continue with the momentum and send follow up emails! For those who contributed, don’t forget to thank them and tell them about ideas coming up in the future. For those who did not contribute, send an email a week after the event and give them one final offer to do so. But let’s not make anyone feel guilty here if they were unable to pitch in. Include all the different ways that they can help move your campaign forward. It can be as simple as spreading the word to their friends! Lastly, don’t forget to include what’s in it for them. If they share your campaign or contribute in any way, what will they receive in return? Free stickers? Free coupons? People love free and there’s no shame in catering to the wants of the people! So get out there! Create a campaign, spark some passion and start emailing! 

The post Using Crowdfunding to Engage With Your Audience appeared first on Kadence WP.

Calvin Koepke is a Senior Frontend Engineer at 10up, working on enterprise-level WordPress websites and integrations. He’s been a good friend of mine for many years and has tons of experience with WordPress, website development and design. He’s worked for himself doing freelancing as well as different high-end agencies like 10up. His wealth of knowledge and experience is sure to inspire. Below is a brief written interview with Calvin.

What do you do? Tell us about yourself and your involvement with WordPress.

I’m a full-stack software engineer. While the title is a bit controversial (for good reason), I think it’s best explained that I’m comfortable across the backend and frontend of the stack. I’ve specialized in WordPress for nearly a decade, but like to experiment with non-WordPress technologies as well like React, Laravel, and the plethora of Static Site Generators out there

On a personal level, I live in Boise, Idaho with my wife and 3 boys (and counting). We love the outdoors, house projects, and snuggling on Saturday mornings.

What sparked your initial passion for web development? What are your favorite and least favorite parts of developing websites?

Initially, it was customizing my personal blog. I used to write a lot (and still do at times), and would spend hours trying to make my site unique. Back then, I was a graphic and UI designer, but I was frustrated at my inability to make designs interactive. I soon transitioned to coding and designing, and have since focused mainly on development.

My favorite thing about web development is how “magical” it all feels. There’s nothing quite like seeing something you designed and developed come to life. The thing I absolutely hate about web development is also how “magical” it feels. The modern web has become so abstracted that I think a lot of developers (myself included) just kind of coast along until they get stuck, at which point we just give up, or try something else.

You’ve worked for agencies and for yourself. What are the pros and cons you’ve found with each?

The benefit of working for an agency is the insane amount of extra headspace you enjoy at the end of the day. After you’ve put in your hours, you can unplug and enjoy your other hobbies and relationships.

When you’re working for yourself, it’s extremely difficult to achieve this freedom. You’ll often hear people say that the only road to freedom is entrepreneurship. I agree with this, but without broader context it can be dangerous. Through experience I’ve learned that both employees and entrepreneurs enjoy freedom; it’s just that employees obtain it immediately, and entrepreneurs only obtain it after the initial investment of making their company successful.

The main benefit of working for yourself, in my opinion, is that the opportunity for achieving equity (as opposed to renting out your time), is substantially more likely, and therefore can have greater monetary reward. I say “can” because you’re not guaranteed to build a successful company, and because in the long run you may actually have more debt.

What is the best piece of advice you can give to someone thinking of switching to freelance?

Don’t skimp on a plan. I dove into freelance prematurely with no plan and no savings, partially out of necessity, and partially because I wanted to try. For starters, freelancing takes time to build a referral network. The first several months are going to be a lot of outreach and low-ratio closures (the amount of outreach that turns into a paying client).

For that reason, a supplemental savings cannot be understated. It will save a lot of sleepless nights. If you want to take off, financially speaking, you need a long enough runway. So build that before you jump in the cockpit.

What are some of your favorite tools to work with within WordPress development and why?

Without a doubt, PHPStorm and xDebug have saved my life more often than any other tool out there. The main reason being that you can debug your code within your IDE line-by-line as it executes. More than that, having an IDE that can index WordPress will allow for much greater control and autocompletion, especially when it comes to filter and hook referencing.

Next on the list is Composer. Being able to manage plugins, themes, and packages through a package manager completely changed how I think about code. By necessity of using the packages, you being to think in terms of modularity and reusability; both essential to quality programming.

Beyond that, I prefer Webpack over Gulp and the terminal over a GUI for compiling and handing asset management.

In your opinion, what should all WordPress developers be learning about right now and why?

Non-WordPress libraries and tools. As WordPress grows up and becomes more integrated with frameworks like React and even GraphQL, I imagine the ability to build interactive sites and applications without the WordPress platform will be a likely next-step. Even if this doesn’t happen, though, being able to work in any language (rather than a framework), is going to be a successful long-term strategy.

For that reason, learn more about APIs, DevOps, and pure languages like JavaScript and PHP. Knowing these will allow you to move between fads and trends at a much faster pace, and give you an advantage.

What is the best book, article, or resource you’ve discovered in the last year?

If you want to learn how JavaScript works (and this is especially relevant in WordPress right now), then read Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke. I haven’t found a better book on the foundational principles of the language. It’s super easy to follow, has interactive exercises, and is totally free!

Big thanks to Calvin for taking the time to answer my questions! You can follow him on his Personal Website / Twitter / Instagram / Dribbble

New Admin Email Verification

WordPress 5.3 introduces a new administration email verification screen. Currently, you can set the admin email address from Settings >> General. Though that will remain the same, there will be a new verification screen set to pup-up every six months after an admin has logged in. The purpose of this new screen is to verify that the admin email has not changed. This will ensure that emails sent from WordPress are going where they need to go. Examples of these emails include comment approval, new user registration notifications, maintenance messages, etc.

New Admin Stying for Buttons, Forms, and Inputs

WordPress 5.3 is bringing with it several new admin styling changes. Most of these changes are small, and many users may not even notice. One of these changes is the color contrast as shown here:

Another change being added is more detail and definition to the buttons, as you can see here:

These subtle changes are only changes within the CSS. There is no change within the HTML markup. The goal is to bring clarity and a deeper sense of coherency to the admin UI. You can learn more about these WP admin style changes here.

Improvement of Large Image Handling

When WordPress users are uploading photos, many are not taking into account the sizes of their photos. This can increase load times and require more from hosting companies. WordPress 5.3 has the functionality to detect when large images are uploaded and automatically generate a web-optimized maximum size. This will allow all larger images to display crisp and clear, without taking up as much space and potentially breaking the site.

New Default Theme – Twenty Twenty

The new Twenty Twenty theme will become the default theme with the release of WordPress 5.3. Its design is simple and clean and it is heavily focused on the WordPress block editor. Twenty Twenty is minimal by design with the intention of giving freedom to the site builders to create fully customized layouts throughout their entire site.

Contact forms are a big deal! That’s why we created the Form Block as a part of Kadence Blocks. It allows you to create and style contact and marketing forms the way that you want them. With built-in Google ReCaptcha support, the ability to add unlimited fields, and endless style settings, this block will quickly become a  must-have for all your sites.

One feature we wanted to highlight is the ability to have a dynamic subject field. This will allow you to add a subject id that will output the subject in the emails that are sent to you when someone submits a form. Let us walk you through it…

1. Add a From Block to your page and customize as desired.

2. Create a new field, label it “Subject” then set the field type to “Select”.

3. Add your subject options (whatever you want).

4. Next, open the Email Settings tab and there you can set the Email Subject. For the dynamic subject field to show, paste {field_4} into the Email Subject tab. *Note, the number is determined by how many fields you have added to your contact form. In this example, Subject is the fourth field in the form (after Name, Last Name, and Email).

That’s it! You will now be able to better sort through your emails to see who is asking what. Cheers!

40% Off New Sales and Early Renewals

This Thanksgiving we want to say “Thank You” by offering 40% off all new sales and early subscription renewals (learn how to renew early here). Sale lasts until Monday, December 2nd. The discount is applied at checkout.

It’s been an amazing year for the Kadence Team filled with so many wonderful memories. There is so much joy to reflect on, and this week we are especially grateful for you, our amazing Kadence customers!

We wish you the best holiday season full of fun times with people you love.

Cheers!

In this video, I highlight some features that come with Kadence Blocks a blocks plugin for the new WordPress editor. See features like the row layout, custom color palette, and block defaults. It follows the creation of a custom WordPress Page.

WordPress core does a great job at creating outlets for your blog posts, pages, products, attachments and the like. However, these outlets are quite broad and hence can be very limiting when it comes to creating effective posts that are specific to your needs. Thankfully, we’re not confined to default post types. With the use of plugins and custom add-ons, we are given the ability to create unique and intricate posts, displaying exactly what you want, how you want it. Before I tell you how, let’s cover the basics…

What is a Custom Post Type?

When people think about post types, they usually think blog posts. You know, a post with a title, text, and maybe some images. Typically you can create categories for these posts and organize them however desired. A custom post type takes this idea and expounds on it. With custom post types you can create anything from portfolios to testimonials to courses to, well, you get the point! Essentially, a custom post type is a default post type broadened, allowing you to come in and create a structure of your choice.

Creating Custom Post Types

Now that we know what custom post types are, let’s learn how to create them! There are several custom post type plugins out there, but for this post, we’re going to learn through Custom Post Type UI.

• First things first, download the plugin and install it in your WordPress site.
• From your WP admin panel navigate to CPT UI > Add/Edit Post Types.
• Next, set the basic settings.

Once added, you should see your new custom post type in your WP admin panel. At any point, you can go in and edit your custom post type, adjusting the additional labels and settings.

Displaying Your Custom Post Type

You can display your custom post type using the Post Grid/Carousel Block or the Portfolio Grid/Carousel Block within Kadence Blocks Pro. You can find out more these blocks here.

Fullscreen Mode Enabled by Default

Currently, upon opening the WordPress editor, you are given a view with the admin panel on the left, Document and Block Settings on the right, and the content area in the middle. There has always been the option to open the “More tools & options” tab to switch to Fullscreen mode. Now, with WordPress 5.4, fullscreen mode will be the default mode, allowing you to enter into a more distraction-free workspace.

Before:

WordPress 5.4:

The option to disable this mode and work within the standard editor mode will still be available.

New Social Icons Block

WordPress 5.4 is pushing a new Social Icons block into the Gutenberg editor. You will have the ability to add clickable icons for as many as 40 different social networks.

The Social Icons block also adds the ability to adjust the styling of your icons. Choose between default, logos only, and pill shape.

New Buttons Block

A new button block is also being added as part of WordPress 5.4. This block allows you to group buttons together. For times that you need more than one button within a single area, there’s now a solution within WordPress core.

The Button block comes with styling options that allow you to adjust the colors and style of your buttons and even add background gradients!

New Color Options

WordPress color options will officially be expanded with the release of 5.4. You are no longer limited to simple background colors. As seen with the new Button block, gradient background color support has been added. This is also true of the Cover block, Groups block, and Columns block.

Release Date & Final Thoughts

WordPress 5.4 is scheduled to be released on March 31st. There are many other bug fixes and small features being added to this new update. If you haven’t dived into Gutenberg yet, now’s the time! WordPress has truly upped their game in making Gutenberg more user-friendly than ever. They’ve even added a welcome modal which gives basic information regarding the block editor and provides a link to their documentation. Plus there are tons of tools (such as Kadence Blocks) to not only help get you oriented, but also to launch you on your way to building your dream site!

Why KadenceWP Uses & Recommends Rank Math

When it comes to creating an effective website, a reliable SEO plugin is a must. But with so many options, how do you know which is the best to use? We’ll help you! At KadenceWP we use Rank Math and in this post, we’ll tell you some of the features we think are really great! We’ll cover the ins and outs of how Rank Math works and then discuss how to integrate and configure it into your site.

Great Reviews and a Large User Base

One of the things you should always look at when deciding on a plugin that will be an integral part of our site is the plugin’s reviews, their user base, and overall information about the company behind the plugin. Rank Math shines in this because they have a more than 400,000 active installs and a 5-star rating.

Features You’ll Love

Rank Math shines above the rest because it’s got all the built-in features you need to have effective SEO on your site without needing to pay for addons. The whole framework is free and more feature-rich than any other SEO plugin. Some of our favorite features include…

Fast & Lightweight

We’re pretty serious when it comes to code quality. We have no intention of running a plugin that slows everything down. High performance is key. Thankfully, the developers over at Rank Math have worked hard to ensure that sites using rank math will continue performing well, loading fast, and using resources efficiently.

An Integration With Elementor That Simplifies Your Workflow

If you’re an Elementor fan, you’re going to love this! Rank Math is the only SEO plugin to tightly integrate with the Elementor page builder. With a flexible and easy-to-use user interface that blends incredibly well into Elementor’s user interface. 

No more jumping between two tabs to change SEO settings and update your page content. You can control everything from your meta title and description all the way to your post or page’s canonical tags all without ever leaving the Elementor page builder visual editor. 

Build in Redirections

A feature most people need for their WordPress site is redirections. This allows you to change URLs on your site and then redirect the old URLs to the new URLs. This is really important for your users as well as SEO because it keeps Google informed about your content. Usually, you have to go and download a different plugin for this but Rank Math has it built-in making it so you have one less plugin to manage on your website.

Easily Configure Structured Data For Your Posts, Pages & Products

Rank Math also makes it extremely easy to configure your posts, pages and custom post types for all of the following Rich Snippet types:

• Article Rich Snippets
• Book Rich Snippets
• Course Rich Snippets
• Event Rich Snippets
• Job Posting Rich Snippets
• Local Business Rich Snippets
• Music Rich Snippets
• Person Rich Snippets
• Product Rich Snippets
• Recipe Rich Snippets
• Restaurant Rich Snippets
• Review Rich Snippets
• Service Rich Snippets
• Software/App Rich Snippets
• Video Rich Snippets

You’d think we’re at the point where there’s no more confusion surrounding how effective & important structured data really is. Well, that’s surprisingly not the case – there are still some people in the SEO community that doubt its importance. 

The screenshot above, showing data from the Google Search Console, is what happened as a result of the accidental removal of recipe structured data and then what happened as soon as it was reimplemented. So sure, the few doubters that remain can continue arguing it doesn’t affect the ability to rank but the absence of structured data and lack of rich results clearly leads to less visually appealing search results for your website and therefore a lower click-through rate. 

Gutenberg Blocks for How To & FAQPage Schema

Rank Math also adds a Gutenberg block for How-To and FAQ page schema. Just drop in a Gutenberg block and let Rank Math do all the hard stuff!

This currently supports How To & FAQ Page Schema with full support for all of the fields that you can configure when implementing the structured data types on your website…

Support That’s There If You Need Them

Rank Math has an active support team who are ready to help at any time. With open-source software, things can go wrong – whether it’s your fault or it actually has something to do with your custom hosting configuration and combination of plugins, rest assured they’ll be ready to handle it and get to the bottom of it with you.

Quick & Easy Migration From Other SEO Plugins

If you’ve been running an online business or website for your brick and mortar store for a while, you’ll likely already have an SEO plugin installed. Migrating to Rank Math honestly couldn’t be easier so there’s nothing keeping you from making the switch. Check out Rank Math’s easy-to-use, one-click Yoast migration wizard.

Simply leave the old SEO plugin you have active, install and activate the Rank Math WordPress plugin, use Rank Math’s one-click migration, and setup wizard to start the migration process and you’re off to the races!