Track your WordPress Site Visits with Google Analytics

By Jackie Dana

Whether you’re a small business or a blogger, once you build a website you’ll want to know how much traffic you’re getting. This can help you better plan your marketing strategy, determine which of your web copy and call to action items are most successful, or convince companies to advertise on your site.

Even if you don’t know how you might use this data in the future, it’s a good idea to start tracking your site visits immediately upon building a website, or as soon as you can afterwards. That way you can start monitoring changes over time and see how much your site traffic grows along with your business.

Although there are lots of services that will allow you to track some of your site data, we at DevPress think the best, and most comprehensive, solution for the average website will be Google Analytics, a free data collection tool from Google. It can be modified to track pretty much any activity on a site, including page clicks, button clicks, and time spent on a page, and the great thing is, once you’ve set it up, it’s completely invisible to your visitors. Continue reading →

Luminate: A Bright New Theme

By Jackie Dana

We’re super happy to announce that we’ve added a new design. Luminate officially joins the DevPress theme family!

Luminate is designed with small business in mind. It features a page showcase layout where you can easily highlight services on the home page with eye-catching images and text. You can also display important information like a phone number, hours, or location in the top bar of every page.

screenshot Continue reading →

Thoughts on Theme Options

By Devin Price

One of the most difficult decisions I face when building a new theme is which customization options to include.

It’s an incredibly difficult feature to balance. Customization options can make it possible for a single theme to be used for a greater variety of websites (which is good from a sales perspective), but it can also make a theme more complex to set up and customize.

Many of the best-selling commercial WordPress themes are ones that allow non-developers a huge amount of customization choices. Avada, Canvas, Divi, Make, Total and X Theme all have hundreds of settings. The big website platforms like Squarespace and Wix also provide a huge amount of design control.

Options Are Both Popular and Complex

I understand why customization is important. One of the main purposes of a website is to express a brand or identity. Customization of fonts and colors can be hugely important. When I helped my wife set up her first WordPress site years ago, I installed Canvas by WooThemes because I knew she’d want something that could be altered to fit her specific design aesthetic (and I didn’t have time at the time to customize it for her).

But even with a thousand options, there’s no way that everything can be customized. And adding many options has a downside: it increases the complexity of the user interface and code. Continue reading →

Zelda Released, Zenith Retired

By Devin Price

Zenith was the best selling theme on DevPress, so it may seem like an odd move to retire it. However, we’re introducing a new theme today called Zelda designed to take its place.

zelda

Everyone who has an active license for Zenith now has access to Zelda if you’d like to switch. You can also choose to stay with Zenith if you’re happy with it (DevPress will continue support for a year and release updates as needed). Continue reading →

Introducing Summit

By Devin Price

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Summit is a simple one-column WordPress theme, perfect for blogging and small business. It features large header images and a number of customizable display options. Social icons can be added to the header. A customizable widget area is available in the footer. Summit is also responsive and looks great on desktop and mobile devices. I encourage you to check out the demo to see how it looks. Continue reading →

DevPress Announcement

By Tung Do

Around four years ago, DevPress.com started with four founders. Due to a case of too many Chiefs and not enough Indians, the team didn’t mesh well and the site never got traction. For a short time, DevPress was dying and members were left hanging so I offered to take over. On my own with DevPress, I found some success here and there. There were high times (like DevPress’s partnership with AlienWP.com), but also low times. Through thick and thin I stuck by until recently I had to let go.

Last weekend, I held an auction to sell DevPress due to my wife’s mounting medical bills and lack of time to manage DevPress properly for the last few months. After posting the auction online, I reached out to a few individuals in the WordPress community to seek help finding a buyer. Within 24 hours, someone made a bid to end the auction.

I jumped at accepting the bid because I instantly recognized who it was from and is familiar with his work. More bids and offers came in as news of the auction started spreading, but I honored the first accepted bid because I felt it would be the perfect fit for DevPress going forward. Continue reading →