Mike Lee, Author at Archives

Reusable base CSS styles for easy responsive site structure

Don’t want a bloated framework you have to learn/master just to be able to build a robust site structure that breaks down nicely into RWD (responsive web design)? We don’t either. For most projects we use a few simple reusable CSS classes to make RWD much easier. Frameworks like HTML5 boilerplate or Zurb’s foundation are…

How to remove WordPress’ Generator meta tag without a plugin

The “generator” meta tag can be removed with one simple line of PHP. Nice. We love WordPress. A lot. It’s amazing. But we won’t to blast out to the world our WordPress version number so that spam/malware bots will quickly find us. (They’ll still find us/you and our clients, but removing the generator tag can…

WordPress: How to enqueue jQuery from Google’s CDN without a plugin

Prefer to load jQuery from Google rather than enqueue it from WordPress’ Core? Yeah, we do too. There are many benefits to loading jQuery from Google’s CDN (Content Delivery Network): It’s likely a user previously visited a site that relied on the jQuery version your calling, which means they’ll have it cached already. If they…

Add custom CSS to WordPress Admin without a plugin

Do you want to style the WordPress Admin area without modifying WordPress core CSS files? So did we. Hacking WordPress core files is bad, because the hacks would be overwritten on the next WP update. (Son of a…!) But by placing this snippet in your theme’s functions.php file, these rules will stay intact on each…

Stop WordPress auto updates for plugins and core: no plugin needed

Just some simple code to prevent WordPress from notifying about updates for plugins or WordPress’ core. No plugin needed! We use this snippet on every site we build so that the client doesn’t auto update a plugin or the WordPress core without first testing. Updates are great, but if you don’t have a proper testing…

Flickr’s new (May 2013) user interface: “tight ass”?

Did ya see Flickr’s new UI? Some users rejoice, some blogs tout its updated design merits, and designer/developers like me run to see what they’ve done to bring it up to date. At first glance… It’s pretty. It’s full-screen, image-centric, responsive, and their catchy homepage incorporates some nice parallax movement (since I can never remember…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Dead

Ok, SEO is not completely dead. But it’s growing old, and it’s increasingly covered in cobwebs. Troves of snake-oil salesmen vying to sell you an SEO package would like you to believe otherwise. Here’s my take: I have sat in countless meetings with clients – prospective and current, large and small – to discuss Search…