Jon Brown

A new and improved support experience

Posted on October 18, 2019

Forums used to be a big deal

Long ago most themes were supported via forums. Theme frameworks like StudioPress and Thesis used to have extremely active forums of which we were a part. Like so many of our freelance and agency customers we learned a lot from those forum communities, and running our forums has always been part of how we’ve given back to that very same community of learning and sharing that permeates the broader WordPress Community.  

The way people request and digest information online is different these days, and it is much more transactional than lesson-based. In short, folks just want answers to their questions, not lessons. 

As a result of the shift in the way information is being consumed, we will be discontinuing forum-based support and shifting resources to provide the best possible experience for email-only support.

Self-service documentation  

As we’ve evaluated our end-to-end support experience, we’ve found opportunities to make or self-service theme and plugin documentation a bit better as well. As a result, we’ll be focusing on updating documentation to better address the theme setup process and make your life easier in the process. 

We’re also taking this opportunity to move self-service support documentation to a more modern system which will make getting answers to your questions faster and easier. And of course, if you’re not able to find the information you’re looking for, the ‘create support ticket’ button will be nearby to get in touch via email!

Forum sunset plan

The forum content will stick around for the foreseeable future as the information contained in the forums is still an amazing resource to those that want to mine them. They will be branded “community support forums” going forward which means that we will continue to monitor them to make sure the lights stay on, but they’ll no longer be our “official support channel”. Oh, and one last note on privacy — forum posts will forever retain the same privacy restrictions they have now. The public can see that the forums exist and read the post titles, but the body content of forum posts will only be available to logged in users. We don’t want your old forum posts about a client’s website indexed by search engines any more than you do!

As always, please get in touch if you have questions!

Lazy Loading Goes Native in Chrome

Posted on September 30, 2019

Good web developers build great experiences for users. Incredible web developers build super quick, elegant experiences for users. Speed is extremely important in modern web development because a growing number of consumers use mobile phones to access the internet – that’s why a while ago Google announced mobile-first indexing of web pages (basing your search position partially on how performant your website is on a mobile phone).

Pro Tip: While creating a mobile-friendly website is an important principle of modern web design, it’s important to note that the mobile version of the site must be performant. We’ve seen many cases where sites lose search rank because mobile-first indexing reveals how poorly a site performs on a mobile device. Don’t assume that because desktop page load time is fast, that the mobile version of your website is fast too. 

While there have been a lot of improvements in browser standards over the years, a feature called “lazy loading” has always been a performance hack baked into site-side code that utilizes one of the many lazy load compatible CDNs, caching plugins, or libraries. Unfortunately, these solutions often require a paid subscription or JavaScript payload to be transferred client-side as a prerequisite for the performance enhancements that come with lazy loading images. Sounds complicated because it is. That is, until now (if you’re using Chrome). Starting with Chrome v76, the browser gets a new superpower – native lazy loading.

While the Chrome dev blog has a simple article on how to implement lazy loading, here are the top 3 things you should consider before getting started.

It’s only good for images for now

While Chrome developers have eluded to the fact that they might be adding other elements to  lazy load browser capabilities in the future, for right now the feature only works on images (image tags). That means that if you want to lazy load videos, CSS, or other types of content, you’ll need to use a traditional lazy load library.

You’ll still need a fallback for unsupported browsers

While native lazy loading is now supported by Google Chrome, there are plenty of other browsers that don’t yet support this standard. In-fact, the market share for Chrome worldwide is only 63.99%. That means that a little less than half of your users will experience diminished performance unless you opt to implement a lazy load library or plugin.

Effectiveness of implementation has had mixed reviews

In web development, installing a library or plugin is rarely the entirety of what needs to be done to implement a new feature. In the case of implementing native lazy loading in WordPress, there are a couple factors to consider including how your images are loaded (are they loaded with CSS as backgrounds to layers or as images within image tags) and conflicting plugins (a plugin that isn’t aware of Chrome’s new superpowers might continue to load libraries in order to lazy load the old way).

Overall it’s awesome to see lazy loading capabilities becoming standard within browsers (especially browsers sponsored by the same companies that use performance as a ranking criteria). In the future, we look forward to other browsers adopting the lazy load standard along with the inclusion of new elements.

CoBlocks, the Gutenberg page builder

Posted on August 16, 2019

We continue our Gutenberg block plugin review series with a dive into the features and benefits of CoBlocks. While most block plugins are billing themselves as first and foremost, block plugins, with a touch of page building capabilities, CoBlocks has gone all in as a self-proclaimed Gutenberg page builder. We spent some time playing with some of the latest CoBlocks features, and we’ll explore some of what we found in this article.

CoBlocks has powerful page building capabilities

The row is the one basic layout mechanism included with the CoBlocks system, and it’s powerful. Unlike some of the popular purpose-built page builders, the row block allows multiple levels of nesting; it’s also easy to adjust width, margin, padding, and colors of the [nested] rows. The block interface is super intuitive, and width adjustments can be made using drag-and-drop features that make this block feel very much like a visual builder. 

While CoBlocks is off to an excellent start as an in-editor page builder, there’s more work to be done to reach the level of capability of purpose-built builders which allow for conditional display and full-page layouts. Probably more a limitation of Gutenberg, the blocks interface gets a bit clunky attempting to drag elements from within the row block to other rows or new elements.

There are plenty of cool specialty blocks

From social blocks to restaurant / services menus, CoBlocks has created some pretty awesome blocks built with the same intuitive interface used within the row block. Our favorite specialty block is the Pricing Table which facilitates quick creation of simple, responsive pricing tables well suited for a services company. These specialty blocks compliment mobile responsive Genesis themes and help the creation of advanced layout objects that appear to have been built mobile-first. The masonry gallery is also particularly awesome providing a nice visual refresh of the old gallery system within WordPress.

Why should I trust this plugin?

It seems these days that the good Gutenberg block plugins are all being acquired by larger companies. In this case, acquisition seems to be wearing well on the CoBlocks plugin as it has maintained it’s stellar rating in the WordPress repository, and has the backing of one of the largest WordPress hosting companies in the world, GoDaddy.