Wow. 2013 has completely flown by. We did so much this year, but it feels like everything happened in the blink of an eye. For us, 2013 was a year of experimentation. Since we’re a relatively new company, we were basically trying anything that seemed like it had merit and then waiting to see what happened.

As you can probably guess, not everything we tried was a win. The important thing to remember when experimenting is that failing isn’t a bad thing. If you get discouraged every time something doesn’t work exactly the way you planned, you’re probably going to have a pretty rough time as an entrepreneur. If you want to succeed, you have to learn from failure.

Here’s a Quick Overview Of The Stuff We Did In 2013:

• We attended five WordCamps and sponsored three
• I gave a talk on why SEO Still Matters at WordCamp Austin
• We made a TON of new friends and business connections
• I started WordPress SEO Meetup groups in Tampa and Austin
• I handed over the reigns in Tampa and shut down the Austin meetup
• We added three members to the FAT Media team
• We launched a SaaS product for funeral homes called Funeral Forward
• We shut down Funeral Forward for a number of reasons (which I’ll detail bellow)
• We created a service to upgrade older Genesis sites called Genesis Update
• After a successful launch, interest died off and we shut down Genesis Update
• I was interviewed on the Matt Report
• We started a podcast called WP Bacon
• We converted the WP Bacon website into a WordPress information hub
• I appeared on the WP Watercooler a number of times
• We moved our lives and our business to Austin, TX
• I hosted the Dradcast
• We completed a bunch of client-driven development projects
• We stopped doing client-driven development projects in-house
• We created a forum for Web professionals to vent about clients
• We completed over 30 WordPress site audits
• We started working on a new service based around our site audits
• I submitted my first plugin to the WordPress.org repo
• I designed and coded a couple Genesis child themes but never released them
• I learned a crap-ton about PHP, how WordPress works, and coding in general
• Nickie started her own personal blog
• We Blamed Lema for pretty much everything that’s ever happened
• Lots of other things I’m probably forgetting at this point

Holy Freakin Crap That’s a Lot of Stuff!

Just listing all that stuff is kind of tiring. I’m surprised we got anything done at all with how many different directions we were headed in throughout the year. Some of the stuff we did was great, other things appear as though they were a bit of a waste of time on the surface.

I truly believe that the full merit of everything we did this year won’t really be understood for a while. It takes time to process why some things succeeded and why others failed. That process is what makes you a stronger, better entrepreneur.

In the hope of both expediting the learning process and letting other people learn from what we’ve accomplished this year, I’m going to go through a bit of the good and bad of 2013 right here and now. So, lets get to it!

The Good Stuff

We Made Sooooo Many New Friends

This is by far my favorite thing that came out of 2013. With all of our travelling, tweeting, and Skyping we have increased our circle of friends a ridiculous amount. The WordPress community has been so overwhelmingly open and friendly that I’m still blown away by it to this day. To everyone we met this year, thanks for kicking so much ass. You all know who you are.

Our Knowledge Leveled Up

One of the best byproducts of our experimentation in 2013 was a HUGE increase in both my own personal knowledge and also the knowledge of everyone who works with us. We have all learned a lot this year about a myriad of different subjects.

I’m a better developer than I was a year ago. I’m a better business owner than I was a year ago. I know a boatload more about SEO and marketing than I did a year ago. Hopefully I’m also a better friend than I was a year ago. I could probably write an entire book on all the things we learned this year. It’s been amazing. I’ll talk a little more about this in a bit.

We Made A Lot Of Money

It’s not my style to brag or go into specifics about revenue. I’m not saying we made a fortune or struck WordPress gold. We definitely did not. That said, we made a lot more in 2013 than I expected we would. If I had thought that moving from being a freelancer to a business owner, networking, blogging, and being more active on Twitter would have had this kind of impact… I would have done it years ago.

The money we made this year allowed us to pick up and move to a more expensive city and a nicer place. It allowed us to hire out more work. It allowed us to bring on regular team members. Best of all, it allowed us to travel all over the country to meet people we never otherwise would have been able to meet in person.

Overall, it’s been a kick ass year and we’ve been truly blessed in many ways. I’m excited to see what we can achieve moving forward into 2014. After all the lessons we’ve learned, the knowledge we’ve gained, and the network we’ve built… I can’t imagine us going anywhere but up from here.

The Not so Good Stuff

We Spent A Lot Of Money

Now… this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The old saying ‘you have to spend money to make money’ rings true to this day. If you  ever expect to get anywhere in business, you’re going to have to shell out some cash along the way. The reason this falls under the not so good section is because we didn’t do an effective job tracking our ROI.

I’m almost positive that we spent more money than we should have and in some cases we flat out wasted it. If there’s one thing that I learned from the money we spent this year it’s that we need to hold ourselves accountable for every dime that goes out. Spending money is fine, it just needs to be spent more wisely in 2014.

We Lacked Focus

An unfortunate byproduct of experimentation is a general lack of focus. This can be seen across the board in everything we did in 2013. We didn’t blog consistently, we didn’t target any one thing successfully, and we were really all over the place in everything that we did. I’ve spoken about this on a few podcasts already because it’s a subject which seems to come up pretty often.

I honestly believe that this is a problem faced by nearly everyone who does business online. Some people manage it better than others, but the issue remains. With such a vast expanse of opportunities at our fingertips, it’s extremely difficult to find and maintain focus. We started to get a handle on it towards the end of 2013, but we’re still not there yet.

We Had Too Many False Starts

This plays into the lack of focus and our experimental nature this year. We were trying so many things and going after so many opportunities that we launched things which never really took off. Were the ideas flawed? Maybe. Did we fail to test the market effectively before we jumped in? You bet. Funeral Forward in particular is a bit of a sore spot for me. We called in favors, spent lots of time and money, travelled cross-country to promote it, and in the end we never really got the service off the ground.

A number of factors played into our decision to stop, but the primary reason was because we weren’t passionate about it. The idea behind the service came from a need that I perceived after working for a number of funeral homes as a freelancer. I still believe that need exists, I just don’t think we’re the right people for the job. I’m hopeful that someone who is more entrenched in the industry will be able to create something similar to what I had planned. In fact, if anyone reading this has any ties to the funeral industry, please drop me a line. I’d love to discuss what we learned during our start-up attempt.

Another reason we decided to shutter Funeral Forward and some of our other projects is simply because we found other, more lucrative business endeavours which didn’t require as much effort. Through the process of doing our work, we found more opportunities to expand on things we were already doing and turn them into a lucrative system for getting shit done. Anything that falls outside of that system has been evaluated and most of it has been shut down.

Stuff We Learned

Quality Matters, But Only Within Reason

Honestly, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. The problem with this is there is no such thing as perfection. This issue crops up pretty often in my work. I always want to make things just-so and it’s simply not possible. I don’t always know enough code, or enough about marketing, or enough about whatever it is I’m working on to bring it up to my “standards”.  It’s also unreasonable to place these kinds of expectations on the rest of my team, although I think I’m better about that than if it’s something I’m working on myself.

Caring too much about quality does nothing but slow down your production and lower your output. At the end of the day, the only quality that matters is the quality that’s good enough to get the job done. Crafting the finest quality products and services sounds nice, but in reality it’s going to cost you time, money, and you’ll probably never reach your standards anyway.

I’m not advocating the production of garbage or saying that quality doesn’t matter. Quality is certainly important, you just need to keep it in perspective. If you’re delaying projects or not releasing things because they don’t measure up to your ultra-high standards. Stop. Right now. Get it out there and get feedback. Chances are it was good enough a long time ago.

A Good Idea Doesn’t = A Good Business Decision

We had lots of ideas in 2013. Towards the end of the year we started to realize that even though our ideas were great, not all of them were feasible. We didn’t have the manpower, resources, or in some case the passion to execute them. Just because an idea COULD work, doesn’t mean it will work for you and your business. When you come up with an idea, you shouldn’t run blindly into the execution of it. Stop and think. Don’t start buying domains, churning out code, or designing the next killer landing page until you’re sure it’s both a good idea and a good idea for YOU.

Test the market. Do research. Ask people outside your circle of friends and family. Get as much feedback as you possibly can about your ideas before you spend a bunch of time on them. Hell, once you’ve validated the idea in your own eyes it might even be a good idea to try crowdfunding it. If you can get a ton of other people to pay you to work on your idea, chances are it’s probably got some legs. Whatever you do, don’t spin your wheels and throw money at something because it sounded like a great idea in the shower one day. Trust me, it’s not worth it.

You Have to Blog. A Lot.

This is something we tell our marketing clients all the time, but it’s not something we’ve practiced ourselves. The truth is that I don’t find it easy to write about myself or what we’re working on. I’ve had to force myself to stop what I’m doing and write about it sometimes. There are some subjects which I’ve been even more hesitant to write about, particularly with regard to SEO. I have my reasons for this, but none of them matter.

I give my friend Chris Lema a lot of crap for blogging daily, but the truth is that he’s right. Blogging all the time is a key component to success on the web. Google loves fresh content because your audience loves fresh content. Keeping your name in front of people and establishing yourself as an industry expert is extremely important and blogging regularly is the most effective method for doing exactly that. I doubt that I’ll ever become a daily blogger, but becoming a consistent blogger is something that I know I have to do.

So… What’s Next?

The answer to this might surprise you. In fact, it’s a decision that I’ve only come to recently. As many of you already know, we’ve struggled with a branding issue since we started FAT Media. There’s another Fat Media in the UK as well as some others spread around the world. Our branding has been inconsistent and it’s been an ongoing issue for us since we appeared on the scene.

I’ve come up with a few different ways to fix this, and I’ve even spoken with branding expert Chris Ford about what we should do. After thinking it over for quite a long time, the choice which makes the most sense to me at this point is to simply stop using the FAT Media brand.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I know,  I know… you love us and you can’t possibly imagine a world without FAT Media…. but don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. We’ve got a shiny new service which embodies everything we’ve been doing lately much more effectively than that FAT Media brand. It’s called Audit WP and it’s pretty awesome if I do say so myself.

In a nutshell, we perform hands-on, manual website reviews and deliver our reports using a customized version of WordPress. Each audit is completely unique and tailored to the site in question. We cover all the bases from technical on-site and off-site SEO to conversion optimization, code problems, and just about anything else you could think of with regard to a website.

It seemed fitting to announce this from the FAT Media domain, but in time this post along with all of our other content will be migrated to either WP Bacon or Audit WP. Don’t worry, all the links will still work. We know a thing or two about 301 redirects.

There’s Still Room for Bacon

WP Bacon is one of the things I’ve enjoyed working on the most this past year. Doing the podcast and writing the posts for WP Bacon is a ridiculous amount of fun and I can’t wait to see how we can grow the site in 2014. We’ve already started generating some affiliate revenue and we’re in discussions with some of our favorite WordPress companies about an ongoing sponsorship for the podcast.

We all really love working on WP Bacon, so don’t expect to see it going away any time soon. I mean c’mon, it’s bacon. Who would ever get rid of that?

We’re Committed to Consistency

I think the thing that hurt us most this past year was a lack of consistency across the board. We missed deadlines, we had inconsistent results with our various start-up attempts, and we just failed to stay the course on a lot of things. This can’t happen in 2014. In order to make sure we don’t fall into the same traps we did in 2013, we’ve scaled WAY back on the amount of side projects, ideas, and other things which seemed like they might be worth testing in 2013.

As you probably noticed in our list at the beginning of this post, we’ve shut down quite a bit. I haven’t done any of this lightly or without a ton of thought on the implications of starting and stopping, but the reality is that in order for us to do what we’re best at and live up to the potential I know we have, we need to focus and maintain consistency.

We need to blog consistently. We need to stay consistent in our subject matter. We need to be more consistent in our personal habits. Are you getting the picture here?

I’m Not Really Big on Setting Actual Goals, But Here’s What You Can Expect From Us In 2014:

• Level-headed, data-driven decision making
• Blogging on a regular schedule
• Podcasting on a regular schedule
• Strict adherence to relevant subjects on our two distinct blogs
• More Twitter ridiculousness (Don’t expect this to change any time soon)
• A stronger focus on our health and our personal lives
• The general badassery you already know and love us for

Well, that pretty much wraps her all up. I don’t really know if this post will come as a surprise or not. None of these decisions were made lightly and all were motivated strictly by what’s best for us and our business. It’s not really dramatic or anything, but hey… we’ll leave that kind of stuff to our friend John Saddington.

I’d like to wish everyone in the WordPress community and everyone who has read our blog this past year the most amazing luck in everything you do next year. I hope our mistakes and our successes help you in some way. Here’s to another kick ass year!

The post Saying Goodbye to an Experimental 2013 and Embracing Consistency appeared first on FAT Media.

First of all, you’re going to need an account that’s been on Google+ for awhile. If you’re just creating your account today, this guide probably isn’t going to work right away. You should still follow it though as there are lots of other reasons why setting up your Google+ authorship is beneficial.

The Criteria for Getting a Google+ Vanity URL Are as Follows:

1. You must have a profile photo
2. You must have at least 10 followers
3. Your account must be at least 30 days old
4. Your account must be linked to a website (This is key)

You’re also going to need to be using the self-hosted version of WordPress to follow this guide. Technically, you could apply the concepts in this post to any website, but you’ll have to add the rel=author tag differently. In any event, let’s dive in.

The first thing you’re going to need to do is install WordPress SEO by Yoast. The process for doing this is pretty simple. Just navigate to the Add New plugin page and search for “WordPress SEO.” It will probably be the first one that comes up. Once you’ve done that, head over to your user profile page and add your Google+ profile URL in the correct field.

Setting up Your Google Authorship is Pretty Easy So far, Right?

This is one of the main reasons we use WordPress and why we recommend that everyone use Yoast’s plugin. It just doesn’t get much easier than this. Next, head over to the WordPress SEO Social settings tab and choose your profile as the one to display on the home page of your site.

Obviously, this is assuming that you are the primary owner/author of the site. If you’re not, you’ll want to stop here and start over on a website that you own and control. You need to establish that you’re the author of the website, so it’s important that you actually are the primary author.

If you’re running a business website or you’re an established brand of some kind, you’ll probably also want to add the rel=publisher tag to the home page. In this field, you need to add the URL to your Google+ business page. This is also how you’ll get an email about a vanity URL for your business, in case you’re wondering.

Time to Make Sure Your rel=author tag is Displaying Correctly!

Alright, for this step, you need to check the code on the front page of your site. View the source of your site’s home page and look near the top of the code. If you see the rel=author tag present (and the rel=publisher if you set it up) then you’re all set.

You’ve now established authorship on your website. Make sure you clear your WordPress page cache so that visitors (and crawlers) will see the latest version of your site.

So… I get my Google Plus Vanity URL Now, Right? Not Exactly!

In order for you to establish a direct link between your site and your Google+ profile, you’re going to need to do one more thing. Log into your Google+ profile and navigate to the about section. This is where you’ll add your website as a site where you’re a contributor. This sounds complicated, but it’s not. Just scroll down to the links section and edit it.

Now You Should see a Popup Where You Can Edit Your Google+ Profile Links

Inside that popup, there’s a section called “Contributor to”. This is the section where you want to add your website’s URL. Add a new link and copy and paste the URL for your website. Make sure you give it a meaningful title, IE the name of your website or your company, and save your link. That’s it! You’re all done.

Congratulations, You Should be Joining the Rest of the Cool Kids With Google+ Vanity URLs Soon!

Everything should be ready to rock now, but it’s really easy to screw something up along the way. Trust me. Use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure everything is working correctly. If everything is working, you’ll see a nice green notification letting you know how much ass you kick.

If something is red and you see an error, back track through this post and make sure you didn’t skip a step somewhere. Make sure you’ve cleared your cache!!

Now… We Wait.

You probably won’t get your Google+ Vanity URL notification email immediately, but it shouldn’t take too long assuming you meet the criteria I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Just kick back, relax and keep an eye on the email inbox associated with your Google+ profile. You should be joining the ranks of the Google+ elite within a day or two.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends and come follow us on Google+ for even more useful information. If you have any questions or comments, or need help getting any of this to work, please let us know in the comments.

The post How to Get a Google+ Vanity URL appeared first on FAT Media.

There are plenty of things that make SearchWP the best WordPress search plugin you’ll find. For starters, it’s ridiculously easy to set up. Just install it and your WordPress search is instantly improved. Plus, there’s been a meticulous attention to detail on the UI. If you want to configure it, you can also have extremely granular control over your site’s search results. What more could you ask for in a search plugin?! Well… it get’s better.

If you ask me, one of the coolest things about SearchWP is that it lets you create as many custom, or “supplemental” as Jonathan calls them, search engines for your site as you want. With these custom search engines, you can allow your users to search through only certain types of content or only particular sections of your site. For example, you could set up a search engine that only searches and displays custom field data for pages or one that only searches through dates of a custom post type. The possibilities are literally endless.

There are some great code examples for setting up a supplemental search engine on the SearchWP site, but because we build almost everything using the Genesis Framework, I needed to figure out how to build a template that would work in Genesis. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you exactly what you need to do to create your own custom search engine and then template out both the custom search form for users to submit queries and the custom loop you’ll need to return the results that you want to display.

Alright, let’s get started!

First you’re going to need to create your supplemental search engine. To do this, simply open up the SearchWP settings page and click the “Add New Supplemental Engine” button. You should see a screen that looks something like this:

In order to keep things well-organized, you’ll want to give your new search engine a meaningful name. In this example, we’re going to set up a search engine that only searches through the images on your site, so we’ll call it “Image Search” and use all the default settings.

Once you get this set up, just save your settings. You’ll notice that there’s a smaller version of your search engine’s name next to the main title once you save it. Make a note of this because you’re going to need it when setting up your custom search engine template. For this tutorial, the supplemental search engine is called image_search. Now let’s build our new custom WordPress image search engine!

Here’s the Entire WordPress Custom Image Search Template You’ll Need

You can literally copy and paste this into a new file in your Genesis child theme. Once you do that, all you need to do is create a new page and set it as the page template. This template leaves the default Genesis loop in tact, so you can also add content to the page like you normally would.

In case you’re not following this tutorial exactly, I’ve highlighted the line in the template where you would need to change your custom search engine if you’ve named it something other than image_search.
View this code snippet on GitHub.

That’s really everything you need to do in order to create a custom image search using SearchWP and the Genesis Framework. There are tons of other applications for a template like this and I’d love to see more Genesis sites running their own custom search engines.

One issue that I’m aware of with this template is that it doesn’t take pagination into account. I’d love to see someone modify it to include paginated results! If you have any ideas for different types of custom search engines, let me know in the comments and please fork the code over on GitHub. Happy searching everyone!

The post Use SearchWP & Genesis to Create a WordPress Image Search Engine appeared first on FAT Media.

Let’s break down the reasons why doing WordPress SEO without a plugin is a really lousy idea.

Code in Themes is No More Efficient than Code in Plugins

If you think that moving away from an SEO plugin is somehow going to improve your site performance, you’re wrong. Unless you’re using an SEO plugin that is poorly coded or loaded with bloated features, switching to a method that runs inside your theme’s functions.php file is not going to help anything.

Our friend Austin Gunter wrote a great post about plugins and site speed. In his post, he dispels some of the myths that have been floating around the WordPress community for years. Basically, the quality of the code is what matters. Where the code lives or how much of it exists are not the problems. If you’re worried about performance, make sure you’re using a high-quality SEO plugin.

If You Switch Themes, You’ll Lose Your SEO Settings

One of the primary reasons that SEO plugins exist is because SEO is not something that should be directly tied to the theme you’re using at the moment. Your WordPress theme should handle only the most basic functionality related to displaying your content. Themes are not meant to be applications and they’re not meant to do tons of complex stuff. That’s what plugins are for.

Most websites switch their themes fairly regularly. Design trends change, company goals change… lots of things change. If you load up your theme with a ton of custom functionality such as SEO or custom post types, it’s going to be that much more difficult (and expensive) to switch themes. Do you really want to create more work for yourself and waste money? No, I didn’t think so.

The Non-Plugin Solutions All Really Suck

So if you somehow get past the first two issues and decide you don’t really care about them, there’s still one big problem. All of the WordPress SEO without a plugin solutions being passed around right now are useless. This one in particular is completely ridiculous. Let’s go through the code and see what each bit actually does…

Meta Keywords? Are you F#)%ing Kidding Me?

That’s right. The first part of this non-plugin SEO solution is for adding meta keywords to your website. Awesome! Apparently we’ve gotten in a time machine and headed back to the year 2002. I wonder why nobody bothered to tell me. Not only that, if you don’t manually set your own batch of keywords, it’s going to pull every tag and category on your site and blast them into the meta keywords tag. Kick ass.

Oh Joy! Auto-Generated Page Descriptions!

So as we continue through this awesome code snippet, we find that now our site will be automatically generating descriptions for every piece of content on the site. In fact, all of your archive pages will be displaying duplicate descriptions pulled from your global site description in the WP Admin settings. If you know anything about SEO, you know that the meta description is one of the most important parts of your content. You need to hand craft these things to catch the attention of people in the SERPs.

Blasting out auto-generated descriptions with no ability to override them isn’t going to do anything for you. In fact, it’ll probably wind up hurting you. If you’re not going to bother writing unique descriptions, you may as well let Google generate them for you. I can guarantee you they’ve put more thought into it than this.

NoIndex All The Things! #Winning

This just keeps getting better. Choosing which content to noindex is a very delicate process and needs to be handled by someone who understands the site content, architecture, and audience. This is not something you want to just set and forget. I should also point out that this script has again completely ignored custom post types. If you use this, don’t be shocked if large segments of your site start to fall out of the index…

Oh Fantastic. Now We’re Automating Page Titles?

I’m seriously glad we’re at the end of this script because I don’t think I can take much more of this. First of all, WordPress will already generate readable page titles out of the box and slapping things like “Tag Archive” into them isn’t going to help you rank. Second of all, if you think that site-wide automated page titles and SEO belong in the same sentence, I think you need to read this. There’s a reason Yoast’s plugin puts so much emphasis on the page title. It’s pretty damn important.

All the options and features in the most popular SEO plugins aren’t there by happenstance or for shits and giggles. They exist because they need to be there in order for you to rank your content. Applying the same options to every page title on your site is even more insane than automating your meta descriptions. Not only do you need to write titles that grab attention in the SERPs, you need to make sure you’ve got your keyword phrase added correctly too.

Well, I hope that I’ve convinced you to stick with one of the popular SEO plugins instead of trying to implement a WordPress SEO without a plugin solution. I realize this post has been kind of harsh and I honestly hope that the original author isn’t too offended by it, but I think it was warranted.

If people start switching over to solutions like this it could hurt their business. Real people could lose real money and I think that’s worth getting a little upset about. If you agree or disagree with anything I’ve said, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. I promise the next post will be less ranty.

The post WordPress SEO Without a Plugin? appeared first on FAT Media.

While I like Sridhar’s idea, I think his implementation could be improved a bit. Rather than hard coding an image directly into the theme, why not let the user upload any image they like by using the same custom background function that backstretch is using? It’s pretty simple to set up, you’ll just need to create a new function to display the image instead of loading it into backstretch.

Delete all the Backstretch!

First remove all the backstretch code from front-page.php. The code you want to remove should look something like this:

Add Some Responsive Image Awesomeness

Once you’ve got all that ripped out, you’re going to want to add some new code to display your custom responsive image in Minimum Pro‘s banner section of the home page. To make things a little easier to read, I’ve included the entire modified front-page.php. If you like, you can overwrite your entire front-page.php file with this.

Make it Pretty

Alright! Now you should have an image displaying on the home page where you used to have a backstretch element. You’ll probably notice that the styling is a little messed up at this point, so you’ll have to add a couple simple CSS rules to get everything displaying properly.

That’s really all there is to it! Now you’ve got a flexible image that you can easily switch out whenever you like using WP Admin. No more backstretch and no hard-coded images. What more could you ask for?

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. We’re also looking for new topics to post about, so if you have any ideas feel free to send us a message and maybe I’ll write a tutorial about it.

The post How to Add a Responsive Image in Minimum Pro Instead of Backstretch appeared first on FAT Media.

Unfortunately, the way their responsive menus work can be a little clunky on smartphones. They tend to push the content down in the viewport and dominate way too much screen real estate for my taste. The menu items also tend to be a bit difficult to mash with my fat fingers. In an effort to create a more user-friendly (and fat finger-friendly) mobile responsive menu, I decided to add a small amount of jQuery and clean things up a bit for smartphone visitors.

It should be noted that this tutorial assumes you are using the Genesis Primary Nav menu. If you are using the Secondary Nav or a nav in the header widget area, a few things will need to be changed in order for it to work correctly. This tutorial also assumes that your Genesis child theme is already using responsive design. If it isn’t, you’re going to need to go through some additional steps before using this tutorial.

If you don’t already have one, create a folder called lib

Inside that folder, create another folder called js

Inside your js directory, create a new file called general.js and paste the following code into it:

Keep in mind that the .nav-primary selector will probably need to be changed to whatever class or ID your navigation is using. Once you’re finished with that, you’re going to need to load your new JavaScript file. Let’s do this the WordPress way by creating a new php file inside the lib directory.

We’ll call your new file theme-js.php and paste the following code into it:

This file is also where you would load any additional JavaScript files your theme needs. If you need to load more JavaScript files, simply add them using the same method I’ve used for general.js. You should also try to use WordPress conditional tags whenever possible to prevent your scripts from loading when they aren’t necessary. Speed matters!

Once you’ve saved your theme-js.php file, you’re only a few steps away from creating your awesome Genesis mobile responsive menu! Next, we’re going to add a bit of code to your theme’s functions.php file.

When you add the following code, make sure you place the require_once( CHILD_DIR . '/lib/theme-js.php' ); line somewhere under the require_once( TEMPLATEPATH . '/lib/init.php' ); line at the top of your functions.php file. The rest of the code can be added farther down in functions.php

Here’s the code you’ll need to add to your functions.php file:

I’ve added the code for the menu toggle to the genesis_header_right hook which will place it in the header widget area above my menu. If your menu is in another location, you’ll probably want to move the toggle to a different hook. I recommend using the genesis visual hook guide to help you choose the best location.

Now, the rest is mostly up to you. There are some essential CSS rules that you’ll need to declare in order for this to work correctly. Add the following to your style.css stylesheet:

Update: Genesis 2.0 Has Made some Changes.

If you’re using 2.0, Use These Styles:

If you’re using Genesis 1.x, Use These Styles:

At this point, you’re basically done, but you’ll still need to style your new menu to fit your theme. My advice is to choose your breakpoints wisely and remember to scale around your content rather than cater to particular device widths. Popular device resolutions will constantly change, so try to focus on making your content usable and aesthetically pleasing at any screen size.

There are a few things about this method that bug me, particularly the fact that you have to use an !important declaration. If anyone has a better method for creating a menu using responsive design in Genesis, please let me know! If you have any questions, leave a comment or send me a message through our contact form.

The post Creating a Mobile Menu Using Responsive Design in Genesis appeared first on FAT Media.

So… what do the two have to do with each other? Well, not a whole lot, except we’ve got three free tickets to WordCamp San Francisco and we’re in need of some earth-shattering questions to ask John. We really want to get his views about how Ghost will impact the WordPress ecosystem and I think asking the WordPress community is the best way to do that. Soooo… being the pragmatist that I am, I figured why not kill two birds with one stone? Here’s the deal:

How to Get Two Free WordCamp San Francisco 2013 Tickets

Getting your two free WordCamp San Francisco tickets is pretty easy. All you have to do is fill out this form with a question for John. Keep in mind that we’re looking for the best of the best here. Make sure your question is insightful, far-reaching, and hard-hitting. We won’t be pulling any punches, that’s for sure! We’ll review all the submissions and whoever writes our favorite question wins the tickets. Simple, right?

We’ll be announcing the winner of the free WCSF tickets live on the air on July 23rd at 10am EST. Don’t forget to watch so you can find out if you’re the lucky person who gets to head to WordCamp for free. Please let us know if you don’t need both tickets and we’ll give the second one to the runner up.

Entries are closed. Thanks Everyone!

The post Free WordCamp San Francisco 2013 Tickets + Bacon appeared first on FAT Media.

What I am talking about is how to look stupid in a way that most of us can only dream of. I’m talking about spamming a group of influential WordPress community members for no good reason and expecting something good to come of it. Yes, I’m serious. No, I’m not making this up. Let me give you some context…

A while back, my good friend Carrie Dils wrote a post about an unfortunate situation with her local WordPress meetup group. She was trying to get more involved and managed to get one of the organizers to invite her to speak. Awesome, right?!

Apparently not. The main organizer of the group didn’t seem to like the idea of Carrie speaking, so she uninvited her. On the one hand, she’s the organizer and it’s her prerogative to do that. On the other, the WordPress community has always been focused on sharing, teaching, and helping people. I guess she didn’t get the memo.

The whole situation seemed insane to me, so I left a comment on the post and had a conversation with Carrie about it on Skype. After hearing more about it, I was really glad that our Tampa Bay WordPress Meetup has an outstanding organizer named Alison Foxall. Unlike the organizer of the Dallas Fort Worth group, she goes out of her way to be inclusive and make sure everyones voices are heard. Alison is a badass and she’s also an amazing WordPress designer. We’re lucky to have her.

After talking to Carrie, I figured everything that needed to be said had been said and that was pretty much the end of it. Boy was I was wrong. Earlier tonight, I, and everyone else who left a comment on Carrie’s post, received one of the strangest emails I’ve ever read. Here it is, in its entirety:

How to Look Stupid via E-Mail Spam

Hi! You commented on Carrie Dils post at http://www.carriedils.com/wordpress-community-is-not-your-competition.

I am the person being slandered in the post; thought you might like to hear my ‘side’. I sincerely doubt that Carrie will ever publish this comment I made to her post. And, although we are in the same city – Carrie has never contacted me directly.

I have been a tireless worker for WordPress and WP community since 2008. The DFW WordPress Midcities Group that I organize is the *only* WP Meetup in this area sponsored by the WordPress Foundation.

“Hi Carrie! Just found your well-written rant about me. Congrats on good use of the ancient stratagem of presenting yourself as a ‘victim’ in order to garner PR.

Fact: You were never un-invited you to speak.
Fact: Because – You were never invited to speak.

Rudy vastly over-stepped his bounds by inviting you (or anyone else) to speak; he had no authority to invite anyone to do anything. I asked Rudy to act as moderator or speaker for the Meetup and he accepted. He had no authority to invite 3rd parties; and did not ask for permission to do so.

You want to talk Truth? Contact me. But my guess is: Your victim position is working well for you; and uncovering the truth of the matter is not on your radar. And, you seem to be having so much fun gossiping about me Kind of hate to interrupt that….

Dorian”

Wait… What?! I was blown away when I read it. Aside from the fact that this happened more than six months ago, who does things like this? On what planet is sending an email to everyone who commented on a blog post and ranting like a crazy person a good idea? Would you hire someone who does things like that? I wouldn’t…

When I read Dorian’s email, I didn’t think “Hey, I’m glad she reached out and told me her side of the story”. I thought “Wow, what a complete jackass. Who is this lunatic?” If you ever find yourself in a situation similar to Dorian, do yourself a favor and don’t flip out. You won’t clear your name, you’ll only make yourself look stupid. Really stupid.

So, How Do You Avoid Looking Stupid?

I considered putting an educational spin on this post and using it as a tool for people who want to avoid looking stupid when faced with negativity online, but I’m just so flabbergasted that I don’t even know what to suggest as an alternative. Maybe someone else will have some ideas. Let me know in the comments if you would have handled the situation differently. Maybe together we can help people avoid making themselves look stupid, although I’m pretty sure it’s too late for Dorian Karthauser.

An Important Side Note:

The Dorian in question is NOT Dorian Speed. Normally this wouldn’t be worth pointing out, but Dorian is a pretty uncommon name and I wouldn’t want anyone to confuse the two. Dorian Speed is also based out of Texas and she’s nothing like the leader of the DFW Group. Just figured I’d make that crystal clear.

The post How to Look Stupid on the Internet appeared first on FAT Media.

If you’re familiar with CSS, creating a fixed header, which is also known as a sticky header, is pretty straightforward. Because we build almost everything with the Genesis Framework, my code will be geared towards that, but it could be easily modified to work with any WordPress theme.

The first thing you need to do to create a fixed header is assign a fixed position to your header element. If you’re using Genesis 2.0, the code to do this should be almost identical to what I’m publishing.

If you’re using an older version of Genesis or another WordPress theme, this code will need to be modified slightly. For instance, on an older version of Genesis you would target #header rather than .site-header. In other themes your header’s selector could be just about anything, but searching through the code to find it shouldn’t take too long.

Get Your Fixed Header Positioned Correctly:

Once you’ve done that, you should have a functional sticky header in your WordPress theme. Unfortunately, everything will still look a bit screwed up at this point. In order to make sure your theme’s fixed header looks good and functions correctly, you need to figure out how tall your header is in pixels.

In Genesis, most of the newer child themes have a header with a fluid height. This makes it much easier to adapt your CSS as the viewport scales down. You technically could assign a fixed height to your header, but then you’ll probably have to modify it via media queries in order for the mobile version of your site to function correctly.

This isn’t usually necessary and doesn’t follow the Mobile First methodology. Your best bet is to let the header inherit its height from the elements inside it. These include the logo and in our case the primary site navigation.

The bad news is that in order to figure out your header’s height using this method, you’re going to need to do a little math. Horrible, I know. Before you start crying, chill. It’s pretty easy.

For our site, the tallest element in the header is the logo, which has a max-height of 81px. The height for the logo was calculated by figuring out the height of the individual navigation items including top and bottom padding. You’ll likely need to take a similar approach on your site, depending on how your header is structured.

If you’re afraid of math, you could also do this visually by playing with the padding on your site’s body (lawl) until it matches the header element’s height and everything looks correct. In any event, once you’ve figured out the height of your WordPress theme’s sticky header, you’ll need to…

Add the Correct Padding to the Body for your Fixed Header

If you’re rocking Genesis 2.0 you should be pretty much all set at this point. If not, you might have some issues with clearing your floats. If your site looks screwed up or you need to assign overflow:hidden to your header, you probably need to add some float clearing.

I feel like a broken record, but the latest version of Genesis really does kick ass. They’ve added the following CSS after the standard reset to make clearing floats the old fashioned way obsolete.

Shiny New Float Clearing Awesomeness

You could modify your theme to follow a similar approach, or you could bite the bullet and make the move to the Genesis Framework. It’ll make your life easier, I promise.

Shameless Plug for Our New Service:

If you’re running an older version of Genesis and would like to add HTML5 support, mobile responsiveness, and other badassery, give us a shout at Genesis Update. We’ll be happy to get you all fixed up with Genesis 2.0. Just sayin.

Well, that about wraps this post up I think. If you have any trouble implementing your fixed header or if you have suggestions for improving ours, please let us know in the comments!

The post How to Create a Fixed Header in WordPress appeared first on FAT Media.

If you’ve ever wanted to reverse the post order on your Genesis powered website, there are a number of ways you could do it. My friend Jonathan Perez posted a method which I don’t recommend for a number of reasons.

The simplest way to reverse the post order on the Genesis Framework, or any WordPress-powered website for that matter, is to use a helpful function called pre_get_posts. The ubiquitous Bill Erickson has a detailed post about how you can use pre_get_posts to do all kinds of neat stuff besides changing the post order.

If all you’d like to do is reverse the posts for post archives on your Genesis website, you can paste this directly into your functions.php file:

Reverse the Post Order on All Standard Genesis Post Archives:

You could easily modify this code to reverse the post order in other situations. For example, you could reverse the post order for only custom post type archives, or only a particular category archive.

Hold Up, What About The Blog Page Template?!

If you use the Genesis blog page template on your site, you’ll need to add an extra bit of code to functions.php to reverse the post order. According to Bill, it’s probably not such a good idea to use it anyway.

@realFATmedia @tnorthcutt @SureFireWebServ It's a mistake left in genesis for legacy reasons. Always use settings > reading

— Bill Erickson (@BillErickson) July 6, 2013

If you’re dead set on using the Genesis blog page template for some reason, here’s how I would reverse the post order:

Reverse the Post Order on the Genesis Blog Page Template:

In my opinion, using pre_get_posts is a much more efficient and modular approach than the one published by Jonathan. If you disagree or have a better way to accomplish this, let me know in the comments and I’ll update my code!

The post Reverse the Post Order on the Genesis Framework appeared first on FAT Media.