Blog

Bates College wins eduStyle Judged & People’s Choice “best site” award

Last summer, we had the privilege of collaborating with the brilliant designers at Tellart and the IT team at Bates College to rebuild the college’s website on WordPress. Our mission was to build a durable, modular framework that would balance the consistency and unique features envisioned by Tellart with some department personalization and a clean administrative experience consistent with the needs of each departments (apparently, Food Services didn’t understand why there were sports scores; food fights are not scored). We were proud to hand off just that framework to the talented developers at Bates who ran with it.

Today, I learned that the project won both the “Judged” and “People’s Choice” category for “Best Overall Website”  – the top category – in the 2012 eduStyle Awards. Bates was also nominated for “Best Home Page” – the second highest honor – which it won the “People’s Choice” award for. The awards, in their 5th year, celebrate the best work in college and university websites.

Read More on Bates College wins eduStyle Judged & People’s Choice “best site” award

Tammy Hart joins 10up

“Howdy ya’ll!” I’m the new girl that hails from the South by way of Alabama and Oklahoma. Don’t let my country girl roots give you the wrong idea; I’m a geeky introvert that spends most of my time wrangling code and producing original user interface designs from the comfort of my air conditioned office space. When I’m not hunkered over my keyboard working on my latest project, I can be found playing wife to my husband of 11 years and mom to our three daughters.

I’ve been in the business of creating websites for over 7 years, much of that time spent working for myself and honing my craft. My years as a freelancer have fostered an appreciation for both creative design and solid coding. I am passionate about pixel perfection and love to see a project from blank canvas to final launch.

WordPress is my favorite playground. I’ve designed custom themes and plugins for clients, and released free themes and plugins for the WordPress community. I’ve  spoken at over a dozen events, most of which were WordCamps, and have taught classes on blogging and building websites with WordPress.

 

Read More on Tammy Hart joins 10up

Interview on CodePoet.com

Rebecca Collins, an editor over at the recently refreshed CodePoet.com, has published an interview with me that explores 10up and our WordPress-focused web development business. Rebecca asked some great questions, and really challenged me to expand on topics I may have otherwise breezed over. In addition to articulating our focus on building really rich administrative experiences and supporting high scale sites, we really dived into what communication looks at a distributed company and how we respond to work opportunities that, on the surface, might initially seem like a poor fit. At 10up, we pride ourselves on transparency and sharing, and this very intimate look at our operational philosophies is no exception.

Sponsoring WordCamp Boston 2012

WordCamp Boston has a very special place in my heart, as I helped organize the first camp back in 2010, and then made it the first event that 10up would sponsor back in 2011. We’re excited to be repeating our Silver Sponsorship in 2012. You can expect to see 3-4 members of team 10up at the event, and, hopefully, at least a few of us speaking. With a first class organizing team behind the event, one of the biggest meet ups in the country behind it, and a good old New England passion, you can expect this WordCamp to be every bit as amazing as the prior two!

Jake, Helen take WordCamp Philly 2011

Had a great time with Helen at WordCamp Philly. In case you missed it, Helen was one of four panelists speaking to WordPress in higher education during lunch, where she discussed her experience rolling out the Eastman School of Music’s website in WordPress. Helen was the only panelist from a consulting shop. I shared my Editing the Visual Editor talk in the developer track. The presentation was updated to incorporate a new tip and feature some of the relevant new tools WordPress 3.3 – and the new wp_editor function – put at our finger tips. Both of us also participated in the core development session on Sunday, and submitted core patches.

Wrapping up WordCamp Boston 2011

WordCamp Boston 2011 was every bit as informative, fun, and inspiring as we expected.

Like most great WordCamps, Boston wasn’t just a venue for some great sessions; it was an opportunity to chat it up with a diverse crowd that ranged from lead WordPress contributors to new users just discovering the ways they can use the booming content management system. On Saturday morning – the first day of the event – I finally found the time and inspiration to send in a short sponsorship blog post. Recalling memories of WordCamp Boston 2010, I was excited for the event, and it didn’t disappoint.

Read More on Wrapping up WordCamp Boston 2011

New Smashing Magazine Power Tips for WordPress

My latest WordPress-focused article for the web’s leading online / digital media publication, Smashing Magazine, was published last Tuesday. New WordPress Power Tips For Template Developers And Consultants features a few tips exposed in my Custom WordPress Admin theme and talk, and adds a handful of new tips like:

  • Creating pagination links using WordPress’s built in paginate_links function
  • Adding body classes based on your own conditions
  • Redirecting failed logins
  • Adding warning messages to specific admin screens

My favorite tip is the leading one: applying WordPress’s highly underutilized, built in pagination function. I frequently see even high end, WordPress.com VIP themes relying on plug-ins like WP-PageNavi to do what WordPress can actually handle pretty well natively. The paginate_links function is a flexible little gem that should be used far more often than it is.

In the 5 days since the article was published, it was tweeted over 1,100 times and like on Facebook nearly 200 times. This website also saw a surge of traffic, which it handled gracefully thanks to some smart object caching and a highly reliable, distributed host.

Check out the article over at Smashing Magazine.

WordPress Providence Meetup Kicks Off

Inspired by a few WordCamps that built themselves up from local WordPress meet ups, I finally got a few locals together at the beginning of April (Ken DeBlois of Brown and Suzanne McDonald, a freelance writer) to help organize a Providence Meetup. A couple of planning meetings, a new website, a Twitter account, and some local marketing later, we had our first meet up on April 26th.

I’ll be blogging over at the WordPress Providence website, so I won’t say too much about it in this forum, but the headline is that I was thrilled by the turn out and energy at our first event. We had about 30 attendees, a lot of buzz during the hour of networking, a nice and short presentation by DandyID (a local firm with a popular plug-in), and a great after-presentation brainstorming / discussion session.

Read More on WordPress Providence Meetup Kicks Off

Interviewed on Episode 81 of WordPress Weekly

Last night I recorded the WordPress Weekly podcast with Jeff Chandler of WordPress Tavern. We chatted for about 90 minutes, and then want on to chat more during an after show chat that continued for over an hour. The podcast was published today, you can listen to it or get instructions for downloading it here. Here’s the iTunes link.

Topics included:

  • General WordPress consulting services
  • WordPress value perception as compared to other major CMS platforms
  • Exciting developer features coming in WordPress 2.9 (RC1 out today!)
  • What the near future holds for WordPress, with the MU merge and growth of BuddyPress, bbPress, et al
  • My latest Smashing Magazine article
  • WordCamp Boston (which I’m helping organize)

I really enjoyed participating in the podcast, and hope to participate again in the near future.