Insights by Justin Downey

September 2016

Living Comps

Some web design agencies really love wireframes, but clients don’t really know what they’re approving. Forget wireframes. Let’s get to the good stuff.

13,285 Views

September 2016

Finding the The Capo d’astro Bar

Had lunch with very interesting people yesterday. As per usual, the question of how I ended up working at a digital agency rather than going into the oil business like the rest of my family came up. I responded that, while the rest of my family sees the art in their science, I see the …

7,308 Views

August 2016

Improvements in WordPress v4.6

Version 4.6 of WordPress, named “Pepper” in honor of jazz baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.6 help users focus on the important things while feeling more at home.

1,643 Views

May 2016

WordPress v4.5.2

WordPress v4.5.2 was just released and includes some great new and updated features. Here’s a little background on this latest release of the WordPress core. About WordPress v4.5 Here’s a little video by the WordPress team, if you’re into that sort of thing. As with all major WordPress updates, there are numerous bug fixes and …

1,258 Views

April 2016

Lessons on UI Design from the Failures of Windows 8

You can learn about User Interface (UI) design, particularly for web applications, looking at the design failures of desktop and mobile operating systems–chiefly, the resounding failure of Windows 8.

3,904 Views

March 2016

Introducing Bootplate

We’re proud to announce the release of a super fast, mobile-first, Bootstrap v4 theme framework we’ve designed for building awesome and responsive WordPress websites. We think of it more as a theme framework than a lowly starter theme, but read on and decide for yourself. Preview Bootplate We combined a working theme preview with a …

2,124 Views

February 2016

JDM Custom CTA Plugin

There are many cases when theme developers may want the ability to add a call-to-action (or CTA) button to their theme that’s easily editable from the WordPress backend. Originally created for a client, this reusable plugin does just that. LATEST VERSION: Download the latest version GitHub. The plugin does NOT enqueue any resources or make …

2,033 Views

February 2016

5 Web Design Myths

Everybody’s a web designer these days. Darn few spend the time it takes to really understand the subtleties of web design and, instead, rely on commonly-held beliefs. Unfortunately, many of these beliefs are just plain wrong. Let’s look at just 5 of our favorite website design myths. A quick Google search for “Web Design Myths” …

1,601 Views

December 2015

JDM Frontend Admin Buttons

The WordPress admin bar gets in the way of basic frontend management of your WordPress site–especially if you have a fixed main navigation. JDM Frontend Admin Buttons (or “JDM FAB,” for short) is a simple and VERY light-weight WordPress plugin. The plugin removes the default WordPress admin bar and adds floating buttons that are …

2,470 Views

September 2015

Map Domains to Single WordPress Site

We had a client recently needing their separate, single-install of WordPress to have two domains mapped to it. After more Googling than we care to admit, we discovered the following relatively simple solution. First off, if you’re using WordPress Multisite, you don’t need to bother with this idea. This is simply for single-site installs of …

2,564 Views

June 2015

WordPress Easy Link to PDF

Linking to pages or posts in WordPress is easy but, linking to an uploaded PDF is cumbersome. Here’s a little script that allows you to link to uploaded PDFs (or other media) in the exact same way you would “link to existing content.” The “traditional” route for linking to an uploaded PDF is confusing, especially …

3,467 Views

April 2015

Don’t Sweat the Domain Name

The days of keyword-stuffed domain names like “DallasSEOAgency.com” are coming to an end. Just last week, Google announced another update to their mobile search engine results page — no more domain names. On the heals of their last mobile SERP update, the “Mobile-Friendly” label, adding structured data names rather than using the URL structure is …

2,119 Views