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Laurel Fulford
Another task in a long list of many
Websites are important to me. Not only because they’re how I make a living — though that’s a major factor! But they’re also an invaluable tool for me when I’m faced with tackling the unknown. Two years ago now, I bought my first house. Home ownership forced me to navigate information and services that were…
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Laurel Fulford
Unexpected uses
One of the first themes I launched on WordPress.com was Toujours. It was designed as a wedding theme, and included features like a Guestbook template, a slideshow, and special styles to highlight the three most recent posts. Like with all of our themes, the demo was built to look realistic, and match the kind of…
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Laurel Fulford
Gutenberg, Longreads, and Climate Change in Cities
Like my fellow designers at Automattic, this quarter I spent some time trying to recreate a Longreads story using Gutenberg, the new block-based editor for WordPress. I’ve already had some experience with Gutenberg, but primarily on the theming end of things. I haven’t used it to set up “real” content yet — all the Gutenberg…
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Laurel Fulford
I still don’t really know how to get website traffic
Despite having three whole months, I managed to put off finalizing this quarter’s blog post until the last minute. The topic? Pick a colleague’s post, and explain why you chose that one. Outline a plan for the post to get 1,000+ views. Imagine that you have a US $20 budget to work with. I’m far…
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Laurel Fulford
Styling Radcliffe 2
Yesterday, the theme team launched our first collaborative theme, Radcliffe 2. This theme was a refresh of an existing theme by Anders Norén. Ola Bodera wrote a great summary of our typical theme refresh process. (Though it may change down the road, right now this blog is using that theme!) In Radcliffe 2, we introduced…
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Laurel Fulford
Many Hands
The theme team at Automattic handles much more than just building themes, and we work collaboratively on many projects. However, when creating themes for WordPress.com — designing and developing new themes, or converting an existing GPL theme — we tend to work alone. Occasionally one person will design a theme and another will build it,…
People Making Paper Flowers Craft Art Work Handicraft -
Laurel Fulford
Balancing Options vs. Overload
On WordPress.com, one thing we’ve been focusing on is making themes that just work. It’s a bit of a balancing act; it’s very tempting to allow customers to control every aspect of their theme, because it seems like the simplest way to give them what they want. That idea may sound great to customers, but…
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Laurel Fulford
Consistency isn’t just good for users; it’s good for us, too
As a Theme Wrangler, I’m a member of the team here at Automattic that builds, maintains and reviews the themes on WordPress.com. Right now we have over 380 themes available for folks to pick from.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
You can search for an article, designer, event…
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