Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
I feel like y’all out there are like: ya know what I could use this week? A scattered collection of interesting links with light commentary about what is interesting about them or how they connect with the modern web zeitgeist. No worries gang, I got ya.
I like Josh’s take on all this coding + AI stuff and the fear of lost jobs. It’s terrible timing for all this because fricking tons of people are losing tech jobs in layoffs right now. But that isn’t because AI is taking their jobs, it’s economic fears, correcting overhiring mistakes, and some greedy “ooo look we can do mass layoffs and not get much flack for it because everyone is doing it”. Anyway here are some quotes from Josh’s article:
… since the beginning, there’s been a concern that web developers would be made redundant by some new technology. In the 2000s, it was WordPress. In the 2010s, it was Webflow. In the early 2020s, it was “no code” tools.
[on GPT-4 building simple website from napkin drawing] … we haven’t needed web developers to build these sorts of pages in decades. There is an enormous difference between this HTML document and the sorts of code front-end developers write today.
Code snippets are all over the internet, and are often generic. By contrast, every codebase is unique. There are very few large open-source codebases. How’s the AI supposed to learn how to build big real-world projects?
I actually think that this could increase the total # of developer jobs.
Certain tasks might be delegated to an AI, but not many jobs.
Normally I skip or roll my eyes at people’s hot takes on AI stuff since there is just so much of it right now, but again I think Josh’s takes here are smart. It’s also in agreement with most other takes I’ve read on this. Generally, people are writing articles trying to address people’s fear, but the fear seems a little invented.
A little accessibility back and forth!
I suppose the powers that be should listen to web accessibility experts over me, but I’m more inclined to agree with Ben here. The cowpaths are there, pave them.
Another back-and-forth took place last month between Alex Russell’s The Market for Lemons and Laurie Voss’ The case for frameworks. As much as I prefer to rate these arguments on the written word entirely, the fact is I know that both of these people are Very Big Web Personalities that both very much like to argue. Laurie for the most part brings baby-bear porridge to the party and I like that, but I also don’t mind Alex bringing down the hammer and taking hard-line stances on web performance, mostly because not a ton of other people do that and the web could use the pushback.
A good amount of web platform arguments end up being about JavaScript frameworks and the whole idea of SPAs. Probably no question we overdid it as an industry on the SPA thing. One side plot here though is that this was all happening during a time when the web was perhaps a bit more threatened by “native” apps than it is now. Native apps have a certain feel to them that is a bit different than web apps generally, and no small part of that is how they tend to animate their state and page transitions moreso than web apps do. SPAs made that far more possible than we were able to do on standard new-page-loading web apps.
Transitioning interfaces and page transitions in non-SPAs isn’t just sitting around waiting to be solved though. I think of three things:
I mentioned the other week that Firefox fixed this old bug a bit related to drop caps, but really, or I guess in addition to that, the best thing that can happen to drop caps is the CSS initial-letter property. I should have linked up Stephanie Stimac’s article Greater styling control over type with `initial-letter` which digs into that and strongly makes the case.
Ethan Marcotte has a wonderful video showing how to do drop caps well, but it’s frustratingly complicated. Really looks like initial-letter is the answer to all this.
The post Chris’ Corner: A Little Back and Forth appeared first on CodePen Blog.
This tutorial explains how to make phone numbers clickable within Google Sheets, Slides and Google Docs. When someone clicks on the phone number link in your spreadsheet or this document, it will open the dialer on their mobile phone and initiate dialing of the specified phone number.
Let’s start with the basics.
If you click an email link on a webpage, it opens your default mail program. Similarly, you can make phone numbers on your website “callable” meaning when someone clicks on the phone number link, it will automatically launch the dialer on their mobile phone with the phone number filled in.
You can use the tel protocol to convert a plain text phone number on a web page into a clickable telephone link.
For instance, if you click this link on a mobile phone, it will open the phone dialer prefilled with the specified number. There’s no need to copy-paste numbers.
It is a bit tricky to type phone numbers inside Google Spreadsheets. Here’s why:
Phone numbers typically consist of digits preceded by the plus (+) symbol. However, a common issue is that when you include the plus sign in a cell, the spreadsheet assumes you are entering a math formula and attempts to calculate the value.
If you encounter this problem, there are two easy ways to resolve it.
Workaround A You can surround the phone number with double quotes (”) and precede it with an equal sign (=).
Workaround B You can add a single quote (’) before the phone number. This tells Google Sheets to treat the cell’s contents as text, preserving the formatting of the phone number.
Coming to the main problem, how do you make phone numbers inside a Google Sheet clickable?
The obvious choice would be to use the HYPERLINK formula with the tel protocol but it is not supported inside Google Sheets. So a formula like =HYPERLINK("tel:12345", "Call Me") would not work but there’s a simple workaround to this issue.
Append the phone number with the call.ctrlq.org domain name and it will automatically convert the phone number into a clickable link. For example, if you want to create a clickable phone link for the number +1 650-253-0000, you can use the following formula.
You can create a regular hyperlink in the cell pointing to a website which in turn redirects to the actual telephone link. To see this in action, add https://call.ctrlq.org/ before any phone number in the Google Sheet and it will turn into a callable phone link.
=HYPERLINK("https://call.ctrlq.org/+16502530000"; "Call Google Support")
In the above example, the phone numbers are listed in column B while the names are in column A. You can add the following formula in column C to have clickable phone links.
=HYPERLINK("https://call.ctrlq.org/"&B2; A2)You may open this Phone Number Google Sheet on your Android or iPhone and click on any of the phone links to see it in action. You can even publish the sheet as a web page and the numbers will be clickable on the web too.
You can also create clickable phone numbers in Google Docs and Google Slides. The process is similar to Google Sheets but we’ll use the Insert Link option instead of the HYPERLINK formula.
Write the phone number inside the document and select it. Then click on the Insert menu and select Link from the dropdown. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K to open the link dialog.
Enter the phone number preceded by the call.ctrlq.org domain name and click on the OK button. The phone number will be converted into a clickable link.
Also see: Add Images in Google Spreadsheets
The call.ctrlq.org service is a simple Node.js app running on Google Cloud Run that merely redirects to the tel protocol. Here’s the entire app code should you want to run it on your own server.
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
app.get('/:number', (req, res) => {
const { number } = req.params;
const phone = number.replace(/[^0-9]/g, '');
res.redirect(`tel:${phone}`);
});
app.listen(process.env.PORT, () => {
console.log(`App is running`);
});
You can’t simply build a WordPress website and think you’ll attract traffic and users without having a solid search engine optimization strategy. A key element of any successful search engine optimization strategy is performing regular SEO audits of your website. What is an SEO Audit? You may be wondering what an SEO audit is. In […]
The post How to Perform an SEO Audit for WordPress appeared first on WPExplorer.
A Trading system offers a sophisticated platform to trade securities. The financial institutions enable investors/traders to open, execute, close, and manage market positions in a secure way through their trading system. Most trading systems nowadays offer automated trading controls (algorithmic trades) that help investors in making the right investment strategy decisions quickly, considering all risk possibilities and yielding the best benefits. The trading system is expected to handle high trade volumes ensuring low latency throughput. Examples of the popular trading system include TradeStation, TD Ameritrade, etc.
With the emergence of FIX (Financial Information Exchange) protocol standardization and the exponential growth of high-speed electronic algorithmic trading systems, there is a strong focus on the technology stack adopted by the trading systems to meet the ever-changing needs of clients. The clients, in general, includes various market segments, including professional clients, institutional clients, and interbank clients. Even the trade execution venues face a similar technology challenge to perform quick order matching, notifying the trade-to-market data distributor in a few milliseconds. For example, NASDAQ offers a fully automated market.
Tailwind CSS has become a popular pick for software development teams to design responsive new-era web and mobile app designs effectively and speedily. Using this framework, developers can quickly design custom UIs by directly employing a set of pre-defined CSS classes in an HTML file. And utilizing Tailwind CSS for executing React Native projects is a preferred choice. React Native is one of the most sought-after cross-platform app development frameworks that use React and JavaScript. This article explores the reasons to use Tailwind CSS in React Native app development projects.
Tailwind CSS is a small-sized utility-first CSS framework that offers numerous classes. One can customize these classes to any extent. Tailwind CSS redefines the styling process of a software application due to its flexibility and high customization capability. It helps you to build complex designs while keeping the CSS code maintainable and easy to read.
What’s so special about G2.com‘s “Best Products” awards and why should you care that WPMU DEV is a consistent G2 leader and regular award winner? Read on to find out…
Web Hosting Ranked #1
WordPress Site Management Ranked #1
WordPress Site Management Ranked #1
Web Hosting Ranked #1
Managed Hosting Ranked #1
Managed Hosting Ranked #1
WordPress Site Management Ranked #1
Web Hosting Ranked #1
Web Hosting Ranked #1
WordPress Site Management Ranked #1Hosting
WordPress Site ManagementManaged HostingMarket Managed Hosting
Managed Hosting
Web Hosting
Web Hosting
Managed HostingWordPress Site Management 
Europe Web Hosting Managed HostingWeb HostingWeb Hosting
WordPress Site Management Web HostingManaged HostingEurope Managed Hosting Managed Hosting
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WordPress Site ManagementWeb HostingWPMU DEV has earned all of these awards by delivering products of genuine value to users.
The above awards cannot be bought, bribed, or dreamed up – they must be earned by delivering users products of genuine value, as voted by the G2.com user community. No fake reviews or made-up testimonials allowed!
(On that note, feel free to visit WPMU DEV’s G2 profile page whenever you like for hundreds of authentic user reviews and testimonials about our products.)
For a software company to win a G2 award is a big deal, as the award does not come from artificially generated means, such as bots or fake reviewers.
Most importantly, however, what all these awards mean is that the company is committed to delivering a product of genuine quality and value to users.
As the G2 reports below show, WPMU DEV is committed to providing the best WordPress site management software available…
We’re also continually improving our managed WordPress hosting service and climbing up the charts…
In fact, we’re currently one of the world’s top 10 choices of web hosting providers…
So, if you are evaluating using a new software product or service and don’t know where to start researching or who to trust for unbiased, honest, and trustworthy reviews, G2 is a great place to start.
G2.com is a software review company trusted and used by more than 60 million people each year (including employees at all Fortune 500 companies) to make technology-buying decisions based on authentic peer reviews.
Here is what just some of the hundreds of real WPMU DEV user reviews look like:
“The best thing is their HOSTING, PLUGINS and SUPPORT. It’s all the best! I love the HUB. I love the reports and the automation and the plugins and the support. It really just keeps on getting better and better all the time and I already thought it was great a few years ago when I joined.” Paul C. G2 Review
And…
“Their support is second to none. They’ve helped recover several sites despite not being the actual host. The suite of plugins that they provide is really an entire solution to manage your WordPress sites. SEO, Page Speed, Security, Managing Clients, Etc… 10/10” Frank W. G2 Review
And this one too…
“I like the wide variety of plugins and services available that has been growing throughout the years. I’ve been a customer for many many years now and I’m beyond happy, especially when I need support, customer support is always fantastic and quick to help!! Completely recommend this to any webmaster/website owner.” Vanessa S. G2 Review
You can check out hundreds more reviews from genuine users on WPMU DEV’s G2 profile.
Not on G2.
While on many sites and platforms it’s relatively easy to create dozens of fake accounts and employ bots to populate these accounts with fake reviews and testimonials, G2 has a rigorous vetting process to make sure that only authentic and genuine reviews from real users get posted on the site.
In fact, as WPMU DEV’s Head of Business Development Savo Vujovic states: “G2 eliminates fake reviews and testimonials by requiring users to fill out a huge form and then using a complex manual process of reviewing and moderating each submission before these are approved for display on their site. Users have to jump through many hoops and must really want to post a review or testimonial about a company, especially as many are doing this without receiving incentives or commissions.”
For example, according to G2’s criteria, you can see that the review shown below comes from:
In addition to organic (i.e. unsolicited) reviews, G2 does send out invitations (either from G2 or on behalf of the organization) to encourage genuine users to leave reviews, and it allows reviews to be incentivized by offering users something like a gift card as thanks for completing the review.
Looking at the review activity, you can see that out of a total of 470+ reviews submitted by users, over one-third of all WPMU DEV’s reviews were submitted by users without invitation, solicitation, or incentives to encourage these submissions.
To help you understand where user reviews published on G2 come from, here are their review sources explained:
What makes an unbiased review is being able to read what users love the most about the product… and any areas they feel the company is falling short of delivering on value, quality, or service.
G2’s review process encourages users to share anything they dislike…
G2’s complex approval process not only results in authentic, credible, and trustworthy product and company reviews and testimonials, but they also employ an advanced methodology and sophisticated software algorithms to collate, analyze, compute, and produce “best of” awards every quarter to companies based on criteria such as usability, ease of implementation, user adoption, user satisfaction, market presence, and more.
WPMU DEV has earned G2 awards in the following product categories:
And here’s what the awards mean (and how G2 awards them):
Additional awards:
G2 Awards are calculated based on where companies are positioned in a G2 Market Report.
For example, here is a screenshot of a G2 market index report for Managed Hosting, showing WPMU DEV as a leading hosting provider of managed hosting for small businesses:
For more information on the criteria used for inclusion and scoring of Market Reports, check out G2’s Research Scoring and Methodologies guide.
Here is the list of awards WPMU DEV received for the 2023 Winter quarter:
Here is the list of awards WPMU DEV received for the 2022 Fall quarter:
In a world where so much can be faked and skewed, companies that provide unbiased, honest, and trustworthy reviews like G2 can be a product user’s best friend.
So, if you are considering purchasing any software or technology solution, check out what real users are saying on G2 before you buy. It could save you a ton of money and hassle later and help to prevent buyer’s remorse.
And if you do decide to give WPMU DEV a try, make sure to leave your honest review ;)
GPT fascinates. I was keen to evaluate my fascination firsthand. This is an extension of some custom code I had written to convert natural language into a "meaningful" representation in a graph but with relatively simple text, which was about the use of natural plants for the treatment of common ailments. To set some context, I did my share of nltk/ NLP learning when I labored and converted the contents of a book to a graph took more than a few weekends and loads of stackoverflow/d3.js threads to fix my errors and clean up code.
With that experience, I set out this evening to 'test drive' the GPT engine. I took up two relatively simple use cases, with one being an attempt at summarizing the NIST 800 sp 53 control catalog in a simple graph, while the other was relatively more human imagination-driven, with me wanting to narrate a simple story of the "boy who cried wolf" using Neo4j.
Building REST-based services is pretty common when it comes to the backend world. When it comes to developing the service in a serverless world, it's a trend, but it comes with a lot of pain. For instance, we need to write a function in the language of our choice, then need to build a provisioning script like cloud formation or terraform to chain the set of services used for building the solution.
In this article, we will be building a REST-based service on AWS lambda, API gateway, and PostgreSQL database. The key part is that we will be developing it completely using a low code integration tooling and runtime framework, Kumologica.
One of the more notable aspects of ChatGPT is its engine, which not only powers the web-based chatbot but can also be integrated into your Java applications.
Whether you prefer reading or watching, let’s review how to start using the OpenAI GPT engine in your Java projects in a scalable way, by sending prompts to the engine only when necessary:
A few years ago, if you or your team decided to develop a mobile app for both iOS and Android, you would be required to maintain two codebases, one for each platform. This meant either learning or hiring developers well-versed in Swift and/or Objective-C(for iOS) and Kotlin and/or Java(for Android), the primary programming languages used to build native apps for these platforms. As you can imagine, this not only puts a strain on your resources and budget allocation but also involves longer development cycles and painstaking efforts to ensure consistency between both apps.
With the advent of cross-platform app development frameworks in the last few years, mobile app developers and companies are increasingly moving or at least considering using these technologies to build their mobile apps. The primary reason is that these frameworks enable developers to write code only once and build for both Android and iOS. Maintaining a single codebase significantly reduces your time-to-launch and ensures a high level of consistency between both apps. We will discuss in detail in a bit how this is made possible by React Native and Flutter, which are the two most popular cross-platform mobile app development frameworks at the moment. React Native is a Facebook(Now Meta) project and was released publicly about two years before Google released the initial version of Flutter in 2017. Before the emergence of these two frameworks, there were a few other options for developers, like Xamarin, Cordova, and Ionic, but they have since fallen out of favor because of many complexity and performance issues. There is a relatively recent effort by the JetBrains team(the company that built some of the popular IDEs) called Kotlin Multiplatform mobile. However, it is still in Beta and not as popular as React Native or Flutter.
How much does it cost to build a WordPress website? To help you make informed WordPress cost estimates, this in-depth guide breaks down all of the various factors that go into launching a WordPress site. By the time you finish reading, you'll know roughly how much it costs to build various types of WordPress websites - including professional sites, WooCoomerce online stores, and enterprise websites.
In my previous article, we discussed the binary search tree and its implementation in C#. We learned that this data structure allows for fast searching, insertion, and deletion of elements in logarithmic time. Still, if the tree is not balanced properly, its performance can suffer greatly. We also noted that there is a more advanced tree called AVL with self-balancing, which guarantees logarithmic time complexity for all operations, regardless of the incoming data.
In this article, we will continue our exploration of binary search trees by diving deeper into AVL Trees. We will discuss their structure, properties, and implementation details and compare them to other self-balancing trees. We will also provide examples of AVL Trees in action and demonstrate how they solve the problem of unbalanced trees. By the end of this article, you will have a solid understanding of AVL Trees and be equipped with the knowledge to use them effectively in your own code.
At the start of the Coronavirus pandemic, I led the redesign of a tablet app used by sales representatives of the world’s largest food & beverage company. Never having been a sales representative, nor having ever played one on TV, I was curious about their typical workday. Adapting the first rule of design — Know Thy User — our lockdown approach was to conduct video interviews. As soon as company restrictions allowed, I met two sales representatives at a local Walmart.
Masked and socially distant, I walked a mile in their shoes through the dairy, pet food, and freezer aisles. This single visit uncovered many insights that had not come up in the video interviews and online walkthroughs. I shared this with the team, spread across the world, and everyone could empathize with the sales representatives: juggling multiple devices and printouts, struggling to make technology work in extreme conditions like a low-lit walk-in freezer, and trying to work without hindering harried shoppers. The sales reps would repeat these tasks between twenty and thirty times a day, five days a week, which sounds about as fun as it is.
Our team used these insights to experiment with different concepts, refine them based on feedback from sales representatives, and launch a redesigned app that received glowing feedback from the representatives and praise from the company stakeholders.
Curiosity, empathy, and collaboration were some of the designer-like or designerly behaviors we used to transform the sales representatives’ experience. These behaviors are a few of the behaviors and skills that designers use throughout the design process. Design researcher and educator Nigel Cross first used the word designerly to refer to underlying patterns of how designers think and act.
Designers spend years learning technical design skills, and as they use those hard skills to do their jobs, their designs are impactful when they actively use these non-technical designerly skills and behaviors. Designerly skills and behaviors make us creative and innovative and distinguish us from machines and technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Yes, the same AI that you can’t avoid reading or hearing about on social media or in the news. Stories and posts about people being equally worried about layoffs and AI taking over their jobs, and some even suggesting that AI is why those jobs won’t come back. Creators and people traditionally considered creative, like artists, writers, and designers, seem especially concerned about AI making them redundant. Guesstimates of when AI will perform tasks better than humans just add to the frenzy.
The assumption that AI will replace people is based on the premise that both have the same qualities, abilities, and skills. But that’s just not true. Artificial intelligence is simply technology that is taught to mimic human intelligence to perform tasks. It is trained on large amounts of data — by some estimates, the equivalent of a quarter of the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library.
AI is better than humans in certain tasks that involve processing and analyzing large amounts of data quickly, accurately, rationally, and consistently. Artificial Intelligence may create, but it can’t be creative. It cannot match humans in areas that rely on skills and behaviors that are distinctly human, like intuition, emotional intelligence, cultural context, and changing situations.
Humans are conscious beings with a subconscious mind that can influence decisions and change those decisions based on experience, context, environment, wisdom, and understanding. This takes us years, decades, and even a lifetime to learn and apply, and it cannot be programmed in machines, no matter how sentient they may appear to be. Not for the foreseeable future.
Being designerly takes thinking, feeling, and acting like a designer. I’ve been thinking about and observing what it means to be designerly, and by using six such skills and behaviors, I will discuss how humans have an advantage over AI. I used the head, heart, and hands approach for transformative sustainability learning (Orr, Sipos, et al.) to organize these designerly skills related to thinking (head), feeling (heart), and doing (hands), and offer ways to practice them.
Using our head, heart, and hands together to make a transformative difference is what distinguishes us from AI and makes us human, creative, and innovative.
The skills, behaviors, and habits to help you think like a designer and create a designerly mindset include curiosity and observation.
Curiosity is the desire to know. It is a pleasure to ask, explore, experiment, discover, learn, and understand. We see this relentless curiosity in small children, who explore everything novel around them. As they grow up, that curiosity starts getting stifled in many, partly because they are taught to look for an answer instead of exploring questions.
This curiosity stifler of focusing on the answer is what AI is programmed to do. AI is also limited by its knowledge and understanding of the world, unable to explore beyond those boundaries. Also, without physical senses, AI cannot experience the world and be curious about things we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell around us.
This gives us a leg up on AI if we can overcome other curiosity-stiflers like self-consciousness, the shame of not knowing, and the fear of ridicule.
Let’s deconstruct curiosity to understand different types of curiosity we can nurture and build in ways AI cannot. In the 1950s, British-Canadian psychologist Daniel Berlyne presented a model distinguishing between two types of curiosity: perceptual, based on stimulation, and epistemic, driven by a genuine desire for knowledge. He also distinguished between two types of behaviors to address that curiosity: diversive exploration, motivated by a need for novel stimulation or a desire to explore, and specific exploration, motivated by curiosity and a search for new information.
This gives us four dimensions of curiosity, which have their time and place, but the quadrant we are discussing lies at the intersection of the desire to explore and the desire for knowledge. Diversive-Epistemic curiosity is where people use the desire to explore and apply it to learning new things. TED Talks are an example of knowledge exploration, where people can learn about just about any topic they care to explore.
You can cultivate curiosity by being intentional in developing the joy of exploration. Set some time aside every day to learn something new, and pick topics that interest you. Start small and gradually increase the time you spend learning something daily as well as for expanding the topics. I would suggest starting with just 10–20 minutes a day. That’s enough time to watch a TED talk, read a book summary, or start learning a new skill. Reading multiple book summaries on a topic is an easy way to identify the next book you should read cover to cover over a few days or weeks.
Curious exploration broadens the mind to new ideas, perspectives, and approaches, lays the foundation for the cross-pollination of ideas, and leads to creative and innovative solutions.
Advantage: People
While often used as synonyms, noticing is seeing something for the first time, while observing is paying close attention to something or someone. Being creative begins with noticing what others have overlooked, followed by closer, intentional observation when warranted.
In traditional ethnography, researchers observe people and cultures in an immersive manner. Design ethnography or digital ethnography is not as extreme; researchers and designers only spend days or weeks observing users, instead of years. The operative word is observing — watching and listening. The payoff is that ethnography can inform and improve design decisions. You don’t need to wait for your next project to observe people. Instead, make it an everyday habit, and you will not only hone your powers of observation, but it will also gradually become second nature.
AI cannot do this because it relies on the limited data it is trained with, unlike people who have an unlimited ability to notice and observe new things all the time. Even if it could overcome that hurdle, without emotions and context, AI would not be able to understand the feelings and emotions involved in the people or situation being observed. We can observe a situation and understand the context and meaning behind it as we process what we are noticing and observing.
We can build our power of observation by taking the time to pay attention to people and their behavior. You can do this anytime — while you are in a coffee shop or waiting in the grocery checkout line. Get your nose out of that glowing rectangle, remove your headphones, and look around. While you may end up seeing others captivated by their own glowing rectangles, start observing the details:
When you start paying attention, you will be surprised by things you may have seen but not noticed or observed in the past. And the more you practice, the more natural it will become. Noticing and observing the world around you in new and different ways provides inspiration and helps reveal issues and patterns, leading to better ideas and solutions.
Advantage: People
HeartThe skills, behaviors, and habits to help you feel like a designer and create a designerly attitude include empathy and advocacy.
My favorite definition of empathy is by Roman Krznaric in his book, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:
Empathy is the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understating to guide your actions.
— Roman Krznaric
There are three types of empathy, according to psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman:
The empathy that results in thinking, feeling, and doing are all important and have their place in our lives, but the empathy that results in doing, compassionate empathy, goes beyond understanding others and sharing their feelings by driving us to do what we can to help them. This helps us make a difference in people’s lives. I am talking about genuinely employing empathy, not doing it as lip service or checking a box off in the process.
Successful designers routinely use empathy in human-centered design. They start with an understanding of the people they are designing for by observing them and immersing themselves in their users’ environments. Designers then apply that deep understanding to design products and experiences that work for those users.
While AI can measure people’s emotions from their expressions and is being trained to mimic human emotions, AI machines and tools don’t have consciousness and cannot understand or experience emotions. AI also lacks personal, shared experiences that allow us to show empathy to varying degrees.
Even if you are not empathetic by nature, try building it over the coming days with one or more interactions with others:
Being empathetic takes practice for most of us. Be empathetic.
Advantage: People
User advocacy is at the heart of designerly skills and behaviors. The skills and behaviors of curiosity, observance, and empathy create a deep understanding of users and their needs, but that is only the beginning. User advocacy brings all of the above to life and turns that respect for the user into action to address their needs. It also shares that understanding with others involved so they, too, can identify with users.
Being a user advocate means representing the interests of users in an ocean of competing interests. A user advocate represents the user throughout the design process, giving the user a voice, bringing them to life, and making the impersonal user personal.
Without curiosity, observation, and empathy, AI is unable to use those skills and behaviors to be an advocate. AI also lacks the creativity to come up with solutions to address the needs of others. AI can be programmed to follow rules and guidelines to protect people, an increasingly important area of ethical AI. If you’ve been following the news, this has led to mixed results, sometimes going off the deep end in some instances. No points for guessing that AI cannot make ethical judgment calls on its own.
However, people can do that. And we can manifest it in design by doing what’s right for users. I previously wrote about principles for designers; two of them summarized below:
Remind yourself that you are not the user and use your knowledge of the user to represent the user when they are absent. Advocate for them.
Advantage: People
HandsThe skills, behaviors, and habits to help you act like a designer are brought to life through visual communication and collaboration.
Storytelling is an important skill that vividly paints a picture in people’s minds, driving them to action. It converts words to a visual that people will remember, but even then, different people may all visualize the same thing differently. This happens whether you’re listening to your favorite inspirational speaker or reading your favorite fiction author. No matter how painstakingly a speaker or author describes a character or a situation, chances are high that two people sitting right next to each other both have different images in their minds. However, when there is an accompanying image or visual, people are literally on the same page (or slide, graph), which slashes the risk of them imagining different things. That’s the power of thinking and communicating visually.
Not all designers are artistic, but you don’t have to be artistic to be a visual thinker or communicator. Even a rough sketch on a whiteboard or a notepad can often communicate information faster than the written or verbal form. The aim is to make ideas tangible quickly, to get to the right idea faster. User researchers and designers commonly use visualizations to help them make sense of data and come up with new ideas.
Without physical senses, AI cannot think or communicate visually. Without emotions, the ability to understand context, and creativity, AI cannot ‘read the room’ or come up with ideas outside its dataset and communicate outside its current language abilities, making visual communication impossible. However, people can use AI as a tool to communicate visually, especially with tools that convert text prompts to images.
Next time you describe something, instead of writing a page of instructions or talking it out, use a quick sketch. Describing a process? Boxes and arrows are very powerful. Talking about a screen or two? A rough layout, highlighting the important parts, along with an arrow showing how you get from one to another, is more powerful. Or a quick screen recording. Sketching not your thing? Use images. I’ve been known to use LEGO photography in my articles and presentations. You can also mock up something without advanced design tools. For instance, I had a non-designer boss who communicated visually using PowerPoint. And if you are in the mood to explore and experiment, try one of the many AI text-to-image generators.
Show. Don’t only tell.
Advantage: People
We can achieve much more, much faster, working together. It is uncommon for a single person to come up with the best solution by themselves. Gone are the days of the lone designer working on a solution by themselves. No single person or discipline has the answer to all problems, design or otherwise. It usually takes a team from different disciplines and backgrounds to solve big problems.
A multi-disciplinary team working together toward a common goal is an example of collaboration. This brings different perspectives into the creation process, from idea generation to providing feedback and validation during the creation process.
Collaboration relies on understanding and navigating social dynamics. While some people struggle with that, AI fails. Ditto for the ability to negotiate or compromise. Some people struggle with that too, but AI cannot unless specifically programmed to. Collaboration also requires the ability to adapt based on live inputs, feedback, or the situation, which traditional AI has limited capability to do beyond its training phase.
That said, AI can support collaboration if you think about people collaborating with AI tools. We’ve seen how AI tools can generate designs, logos, layouts, code, write content, do homework, and generate legal documents. But there are enough examples of it being plain wrong, which is why we should use them as assistants in our workflow.
AI tools can support the efforts of designers and researchers by reducing manual human effort (e.g., transcribing), making people more efficient and saving time (e.g., text-based video editing), providing machine learning-based insight (e.g., attention prediction), and augmenting human effort (e.g., AI evaluation). Just remember that AI is not perfect, and there are plenty of mistakes and errors, as shown below (I’m not India-based, did not write The UX Book, and never taught at the schools mentioned).
Next time you are working on a project, get others involved. These could be different departments, different specialties, different backgrounds, and, where appropriate, even customers — maybe even AI.
Advantage: People
ConclusionI’ll use an analogy from the restaurant industry of chefs and cooks to draw parallels between humans and AI. Chefs can cook meals by themselves, but they are more effective when they focus on the strategic work of planning the menu, overseeing the cooks who tactically follow recipes, sometimes improvising, and applying the finishing touches before the meal is served to customers. Robots have replaced parts of what cooks do and technology that may suggest recipes and meals, but it still needs the chef to make the final decisions.
Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we work and live, making us more efficient. As designers, we can use AI to support ideation, analyze data, generate variations, and predict behavior based on patterns. This will free us up to focus on more strategic aspects of design, using the designerly skills above which are impossible to duplicate, and for which people have the advantage over AI. We can use AI to make us more efficient and allow us to do what we do best — understand our users, stakeholders, and real-world constraints and then collaborate with others to design successful solutions. What we do won’t change as much as how we do it, with AI augmenting, instead of replacing us.
Advantage: People
AI cannot be trained to mimic these designerly skills the way we can practice and develop them because it is not conscious, cannot adapt, and does not have the experiences, emotions, or intuition that we have. AI can artificially mimic some but cannot match human abilities in these areas. Skills like curiosity, observation, empathy, advocacy, visual communication, and collaboration are key non-technical skills to help us use the head, heart, and hands together to be more designerly and thrive in a world of AI.
Do you want to learn how WordPress search works, and how you can make it better?
By understanding and improving the built-in WordPress search, you can help visitors find what they’re looking for. This can get you more conversions while keeping people on your site for longer.
In this article, we’ll look at how the default WordPress search works, and share tips on how to make it better.
WordPress comes with a search system that will look for content within your website.
How the search bar looks and where it appears will vary depending on your WordPress theme, but most themes show the search bar in the top right corner.
Note: If your theme doesn’t show the WordPress search bar by default, then skip ahead to our FAQs, where we’ll show you how to add it.
Visitors can type a search query into this field, and WordPress will search:
As you can see, it doesn’t search widgets, user comments, categories, tags, WooCommerce products, or PDF documents. It also doesn’t search image gallery titles, captions, or alt text, although you can search this content using a search engine plugin like SearchWP.
WordPress performs this search using the WP_Query class. It will start by displaying any posts that have the search term in the post title, arranged in reverse-chronological order, meaning that the newest entries will be displayed at the top of the results.
After that, it’ll show any posts that have the matching term in the post content.
For example, imagine you’ve just published a post about cats titled ‘My Favorite Pet’, and you also have an older post titled ‘Best Cat Photos.’ In this case, searching for ‘Cat’ will display the older ‘Best Cat Photos’ post first, since it has the search term in the title.
This may not a problem for WordPress blogs or websites that only have small amounts of content. However, this ordering logic will often show inaccurate or confusing results for bigger blogs, online stores, or business websites.
The built-in system is also missing some of the features that people expect from modern search engines. This includes autocomplete, live Ajax search, filtering, and spellcheck.
An advanced, fast, and accurate on-site search can help visitors find interesting and relevant content, which will keep them on your website for longer. This can increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate in WordPress.
Since visitors are spending more time on your site, this will send positive signals to the search engines. This can improve your WordPress SEO, which means search engines like Google will show your content to more people and drive more visitors to your website.
For more information, please see our guide on how to increase your blog traffic.
People who are using your site’s internal search are already highly engaged. They’re actively looking for specific content, which may mean they’re ready to take actions such as buying a product, signing up to your WordPress membership site, or booking an appointment.
If these people can’t find what they’re looking for, they may give up and go to a different website. This means you’re losing out on visitors who were ready to convert.
A search results page is also an example of personalized content since you’re showing the visitor results that match their unique search query. By providing personalized content that’s accurate and helpful, you can improve the visitor experience. Once again, this can encourage them to convert.
Performance is another reason why it’s a good idea to replace the default WordPress search with a better alternative.
The larger your WordPress website gets, the longer it’ll take WP_Query to scan your database and get the results. This means your site’s search will get slower, as your website gets bigger.
On-site search helps visitors find what they’re looking for, including products to buy and interesting blogs to read. Since it’s such an important part of your site, it’s a bad idea to rely on the limited built-in WordPress search.
With that being said, let’s see how you can improve the native WordPress search.
Show Instant Results With Live Ajax Search
Live Ajax search adds a dropdown and autocomplete feature that’s common in search engines like Google.
As the user types, live search guesses what they want to search for and then shows them results without even reloading the page.
This can help visitors find the right content, without having to manually press the ‘Search’ button or wait for the page to reload.
The easiest way to add Ajax live search to WordPress is using the free SearchWP Live Ajax Lite Search plugin. It enables instant search automatically and there are no settings for you to configure, so it’s very easy to set up.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, the default WordPress search form will automatically use the Ajax live search feature. If you visit your site and start typing into the search bar, then you’ll see the instant search in action.
Change the Default Search URL Slug
By default, WordPress search URLs typically look something like this:
http://example.com/?s=search-term
The extra ?s= characters make this URL more difficult to read and understand, which can confuse visitors who are trying to find their way around your site.
Even worse, these URLs aren’t optimized for search engines which can stop them from correctly indexing your site’s contents.
The easiest way to change these URLs is by adding custom code to WordPress using a plugin such as WPCode.
You can go ahead and use the following custom code to replace the ‘/?s=search-term’ characters with ‘search.’ Your slug will look something like this when finished: http://example.com/search/wordpress
To use something other than ‘search’ in your URL, simply customize the code snippet below.
function wpb_change_search_url() {
if ( is_search() && ! empty( $_GET['s'] ) ) {
wp_redirect( home_url( "/search/" ) . urlencode( get_query_var( 's' ) ) );
exit();
}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'wpb_change_search_url' );
For detailed instructions on how to insert this code to your WordPress website, please see our guide on how to change the default search URL slug in WordPress.
Make PDF Files Searchable in WordPress
By uploading PDFs to your WordPress website, you can share information about your services and products in a format that works on all devices. They’re also perfect for offering your visitors ebooks, user manuals, menus, and more.
However, WordPress only searches the contents of its database by default, so it will only look at the title and description of your PDF files, and not their contents. As a result, your visitors may struggle to find the best PDF for their search query.
The good news is that you can use a custom search plugin to improve the default WordPress search experience. If your PDFs are unencrypted, then the right search plugin will index the contents and metadata of your PDFs and add them to the search results.
For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to add PDF indexing and searching in WordPress.
Add a Search By Category Feature to WordPress
If you have multiple categories of content on your website, then you might want to let users restrict their search to a specific category. This can help visitors find the right content, faster.
For example, if you have an online store then it often makes sense to let customers search within a particular product category.
If you run a membership site, then you might use search by category to help visitors find other members, groups, forums, online courses, and other specific kinds of content. For more information, please see our guide on how to add search by category in WordPress.
Make a Smart WooCommerce Product Search
WooCommerce has its own built-in search, but it doesn’t look for matches in product attributes, reviews, or product descriptions. This omission can stop shoppers from finding products they want to buy on your online store, so you get fewer sales.
Luckily, there are some excellent WooCommerce plugins that can show more helpful search results, and fetch them faster. To learn more, please see our guide on how to make a smart WooCommerce product search.
To get even more sales, you may want to fine-tune the kind of products WooCommerce includes in its search results. For example, you might only show products that are on sale or come with free shipping.
To learn more, please see our guide on how to customize WooCommerce product search results page.
Create a Search Form for Custom Post Types
Custom post types allow you to go beyond posts and pages and create different content types for your website. Custom post types can have different custom fields and their own custom category structure.
For example, if you run a movie review website, then you would probably want to create a ‘movie reviews’ post type that has fields for the director, release date, and more.
At WPBeginner, we use custom post types for our Glossary section to keep it separate from our blog posts.
If you use custom post types, then you may want to create a form that allows visitors to search only that content.
For example, we also have a form that only searches WPBeginner’s coupon codes.
This can help visitors find the right content faster, even when you have lots of different content types. For step-by-step instructions, check out our guide on how to create advanced search forms in WordPress for custom post types.
You can also make custom fields searchable in WordPress, which is ideal if you’ve added extra metadata to your pages and posts.
Exclude Content From WordPress search
By default, the built-in WordPress search will include all posts and pages in its search results.
However, you may want to exclude certain pages and posts from the search results. For example, if you’re running a WordPress membership website or selling online courses, then you’ll typically want to exclude your premium content from public search results.
If you’re running an online store, then you may want to hide content like your account page, checkout page, and thank you page. To help you out, we’ve created a guide on how to exclude pages from the WordPress search results.
Do you want to exclude posts, authors, custom post types, categories, tags, or even custom taxonomies? Then you can take a look at our guide on how to exclude specific pages, authors, and more from WordPress search.
In this guide, we’ve explored how the default WordPress search works and shared lots of tips on how to improve it.
However, you may still have some questions about this important feature. That said, here are some of the most frequently asked questions about WordPress search.
How Do I Improve WordPress Search?
The best way to improve the built-in WordPress search is by using SearchWP.
SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress and allows visitors to search any content on your site including documents, WooCommerce products, custom fields, tags, comments, and more.
It also lets you customize the WordPress search algorithm, so you can control exactly where the content appears in the search results.
For more information, please see our guide on how to improve WordPress search.
Does WordPress Search Include Tags?
By default, WordPress search doesn’t include tags. The easiest way to make tags searchable is by using a custom search plugin like SearchWP.
SearchWP also has a relevancy slider, so you can control exactly how much tags influence where an item appears in the search results.
How Do I Add Search to My WordPress Theme?
If your theme doesn’t have a built-in search form, then we recommend adding a search bar to the WordPress navigation menu.
Since the main navigation menu typically appears across your entire site, visitors will be able to search for pages, posts, products, and more, from any page of your website.
If you’re using a block-based theme such as ThemeIsle’s Hestia Pro or Twenty Twenty-Three, then you can add a search bar to your theme using the full-site editor (FSE).
To do this, go to Appearance » Editor in the WordPress dashboard.
By default, the editor will show your theme’s home template. If you want to add the search bar to a different template, then click on the small arrow icon in the toolbar.
Then, select ‘Browse all templates.’
You’ll now see all the templates that make up your WordPress theme. Simply find the template where you want to add the search bar, and then click on its title.
For example, if you wanted to add a search form in your WordPress posts then you’d select the ‘Single’ template.
You will now see this template in the full-site editor.
To go ahead and add a search bar, click on the blue ‘+’ icon.
In the popup that appears, type in ‘Search’ to find the right block.
You can then drag the block to the location where you want to show the search bar.
To customize the block title or placeholder text, simply type it into the search block where it says ‘search’ or ‘optional placeholder.’
When you’re happy with how the block looks, click on ‘Save’ to make the search bar live.
How Do I Add Search to a WordPress Page or Post?
You can add a search bar to a specific page or post using the built-in Search block.
This is a good choice if you want to control exactly where the search bar appears on every page and post, or you only need to offer search on specific areas of your website.
To get started, simply open the page where you want to add a search form and then click on the + icon.
In the popup that appears, type ‘Search’ to find the right block. Once you click on the Search block, it will add the block to your page.
By default, the block uses ‘Search’ for both its label and the button text.
This will be visible to visitors, so you may want to replace it with something more descriptive by typing into the text fields.
You can also add some placeholder text to the search bar. This text will disappear automatically when the visitor starts typing.
To add a placeholder, simply click on ‘Optional placeholder…’ and then start typing.
When you’re happy with how the Search block looks, you can go ahead and either publish or update the post.
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how WordPress search works, and how to make it better. You may also want to learn how to make money online blogging with WordPress, or check out our list of the best email marketing services for small businesses.
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The post How Does WordPress Search Work (+ Tips to Make It Better) first appeared on WPBeginner.