The Blog
Screencast Weekly: What’s New in Headway 3.1.2
This first thing you will probably realize is I’ve renamed Screencast Tuesday to Screencast Weekly. If you’ve been noticing lately these posts have been coming out Tuesday or Wednesday. So rather than call these screencasts ‘Screencast Tuesday,’ I figured it would be better to call them ‘Screencast Weekly’ instead. 
So in the first ‘Screencast Weekly’ we’re taking at look at what’s new in Headway 3.1.2! It’s not being released today, so don’t go getting your hopes up of jumping into your WordPress Dashboard and updating just yet! It will be out later this week! In this screencast I’m going to show you a few new features, some notable bug fixes, and a neat addition to our Responsive Grid, FitVid.js. It provides a way of resizing the video automatically depending on the resolution.
The screencast runs just about 9 minutes. Enjoy!
Screencast Tuesday: Using W3 Total Cache Part 2 – Implementing a CDN
This week we are continuing our quest to get a super fast website with looking at implementing a CDN with W3 Total Cache. If you haven’t watched last week’s Screencast Tuesday, we went over the other settings and options W3TC has, to get it working with Headway.
I personally like using Amazon’s CloudFront and S3 services for serving up my CDN, but if you prefer a different option, I’d recommend MaxCDN. It’s one of the more popular CDN solutions in the WordPress community, so there shouldn’t be a problem with it.
Today’s screencast runs just about 16 minutes.
Hope you guys enjoy as we wrap up our caching series. Do you a series you’d like me to cover? Maybe just something more in depth? Let me know in the comments below!
Screencast Tuesday: Using W3 Total Cache Part 1
It’s Tuesday, so today we are going to look at part 2 of the caching series. This one is all about W3 Total Cache. We are going to skip a somewhat small portion of W3TC (CDN) for our part 3 of the series.
I was feeling better this week, or at least enough to record the screencast this week. It’s a little longer, but if you’ve ever taken a look at W3 Total Cache, it’s a pretty big plugin. So today’s screencast is about double (26 minutes) the usual length. I do apologize about that, but I wanted to make sure I covered all the settings I’ve found valuable and use on my personal site.
In case you missed the previous video in this series, it’s all about CloudFlare.
Why Headway rocks as a website development platform!
I’ve been in the Headway camp for about a year and a half now and haven’t looked back. Do you know why? It’s because the framework is a great option for business websites even if the site doesn’t include a blog!
Headway, unlike any other theme or framework I’ve worked with, allows the website developer to determine which pages deserve their own layout and which pages make sense to follow a standard. That is to say, without touching a single line of php, an unlimited number of page layouts can be created.
WordPress is known as a great content management system to website designers, developers and hosting providers. It is known as a blogging platform outside the field. Content management is simply a way of organizing your resources for quick retrieval and display. The organization is into posts with hierarchical categories and tags, pages with subpages and unlimited numbers of additional custom content buckets.
It only makes sense that businesses with multiple layers of content should take advantage of the great system within WordPress – even if they aren’t planning on blogging!
That’s right, I said it, blogging not required when using WordPress! But I say that only because I’m so confident that Headway is the best solution for making a WordPress install look and act like a complete and complex website without giving any hint of a blogging past. In my opinion other free and premium themes realize this, but none execute the polished look the way that Headway has.
Headway was built to give everyone the ability to put exactly what they want where they want it and maintain it in the way that is best suited for them. The flexibility of using blocks to define layouts is great – but what is amazing is that each block can house different elements, be it page/post content, widgets, custom code, php or shortcodes and even specialty blocks to display tabbed content and galleries!
As a developer, I love being able to mix and match the blocks on the site to maintain the look while giving my clients the tools to update their content as needed. With the right blocks in place, a website can be updated with relative ease – be it text, images or links. I like to tell my clients that as long as they can edit a document or spreadsheet, they can keep their website fresh, fun and up-to-date.
The content block is far and away the feature which makes this framework so robust. As the name implies, the content block displays content – but it can display more than just the content for the page on which it’s placed. Using content blocks, along with the equally cool Tabs+ and Excerpts+ blocks, take the WordPress page hierarchy as inspiration but let the website designer display the content in a way that suits the site. All while maximizing the effectiveness of the WordPress content management system for content maintenance.
There are many reasons that Headway & WordPress are great for traditional websites, I could probably write an entire book on the topic. But suffice it to say, imagine any website and with the right blocks, you can build it with Headway!
Jaime Slutzky is a mom, fitness instructor and website developer in the Seattle-area. Her development studio, Fit with Flair, specializes in websites for Fitness Professionals. She also operates a small website design boutique, Simply Jaime, supporting other small businesses with website and email marketing solutions.
Connect on Twitter @ssJaime and @FitwithFlair
Connect on Facebook @Simply Jaime and @FitwithFlair.
Screencast Tuesday: Using CloudFlare with WordPress to Speed up Load Times
Speed is all the rage these days….Speed as in websites!! Everyone wants a fast loading site. They want their visitors to get the content as fast as possible. And no matter what type of hosting account you have, there’s always ways you can do to improve the speed of your site. And today’s screencast is going to just that.
CloudFlare, is a free (and paid!) service that can significantly speed up your website. It’s actually very easy to setup, and with a few of my tricks, you should be up and running in no time. Anyways, take 10 minutes (really 10:32) and see what my secrets are!
And if you are already using CloudFlare, if you have some setting combinations that you’ve tried, we’d love to hear them!! Leave them in the comments below!
