My Personal Web Customization

Table of Contents

Favorite Fonts

Readability > Aesthetic

Arial (very easy to read) [wikipedia]
Calibri (does it look better than Arial on paper? I think it does…) [wikipedia]
Kozuka Gothic (elegant for ad copy)
Magneto (Signature)
Mool Boran (Signature)
OCR A std (code aesthetic) [wikipedia]
Lucida Console (Great code aesthetic) [wikipedia]
Prestige Elite Std (code aesthetic) [wikipedia]

GIFs

Rules:

If you Gif is too big, WordPress will compress a png image out of the GIF and use that. You’ll end up with a static image. To fix that:
- In-Page: You can fix this by setting the GIF to load at “full-size”
- Featured-Image: Try to use the maximum size that your website accepts. In other words, make a smaller version of the GIF, upload it, and try that as a featured image.

Use this to make & edit GIFs:

Video to Gif: http://ezgif.com/

Article Formatting Checklist

When in doubt about how to organize an article, put the most interesting information first and most boring information last. The hook is the most important part of an article to get shares and retention of the reader.
Directly copy (quote) sources and link back to them. Don’t try to put it in your own words if it is highly technical. A better idea is to simply interpret what the source is saying in your own words.
Previous paragraphs smoothly transitions to the next one; Make sure that the Topic of the previous paragraph connects to the first sentence of the next paragraph. Although you are going to talk about a different point in the next paragraph, you want to have a smooth transition from one idea to another.
Use a structure for a better reading experience:
- Intro-message, supporting paragraphs, repeat message
- Chronological

Read more from my article: Guidelines for the Digital Writing Process

Publishing Checklist (Writing from Start to Finish)

Find Topic
Free Write on Topic
Do research, take short bullet point notes. If you find a really nice paragraph, copy & quote w/link to source.
Reread before publishing
Ask peers to review material
1. /r/writing; there is a critique thread where you can ask people to give you feedback on your writing
Remember to submit each article you write to the Google Search Engine at Google Search Console.

WordPress Tools

So far, I covered a lot of the tools or plugins that I use in this article.

I would like to add that you should invest into a CDN, like CloudFlare. The hosting that I am currently using, United Cyber Development, already provides a paid version of CloudFlare as a part of my hosting package; read my thoughts about them if you like. Anyways, the reason that I recommend CloudFlare or any CDN is because CDNs can serve a cache/static copy of your website from many different places locally. So a person can visit your website from the closest CDN server, depending on where the visitor is located; meaning that visitors can experience faster loading speeds. Whereas if you only rely on a single server located in one place, the visitors who are further away from the hosting server experience slower loading speed.