The Author

Donnacha MacGloinn

Donnacha is a freelance writer at Effective Text who combines a deep understanding of technology and business with the rare ability to convey complicated ideas in a clear, engaging manner. He believes that the natural SEO of good writing is the most effective way for companies to build their visibility and credibility online. He has been an active member of the WordPress community since 2005 and is a regular contributor to WP Mayor.

Articles written by Donnacha MacGloinn

Toolset – Now Everyone is a WordPress Developer

One of the first things new users to WordPress worry about is that it will be too difficult for them to build the exact website they have in mind. Thanks to Toolset, that is no longer a concern. Toolset is the perfect set of tools (pardon the pun) for anyone hoping to build a professional website regardless of whether they are a coding wizard or novice.

Why WooCommerce Requires Specialist Hosting

WooCommerce is, of course, a WordPress plugin but, like almost any form of e-commerce, a WooCommerce site requires far more resources than a regular Wordpress content site. We explain why that is, and how the subsequent poor performance and errors are far more damaging to an online store.

Sometimes WordPress is Not the Answer

We love WordPress but it is not a good match for every situation. It is handy to know about the alternatives and in this article we introduce you to a free hosted website builder called Site123.

How WordPress Users Can Survive the GDPR

The thing that attracted many of us to WordPress is that it allows you to do a lot with an extremely small budget. Where, previously, a team of developers might spend weeks or months working to enable some specific functionality, and a team of designers might spend a similar amount of time to achieve a certain look, suddenly an ordinary person, with no coding ability, could find plugins and themes that would allow them to achieve the same thing within a few hours.

Top Education Sites Built with Toolset

We continue our exploration of the potential of Toolset, in combination with any theme or pages builder.

In the previous article in this series, we took an epic journey through the Top 10 directory sites built with Toolset. That most typical type of use, the directory, gave us a sense of the variety of approaches you can take, influenced by the strengths of the theme you choose to use alongside Toolset.

In this thrilling installment, we look at another very common category for advanced WordPress sites, Education. Whether you want your site to provide services to students on your campus, or provide courses online, or sell fake degrees to morons, Toolset will allow you to put together the functionality you need without the expense and trauma of trying to hire a vaguely competent and honest coder.

Reaching into the Guts of WordPress with Elementor Theme Builder

  In the early days, what attracted us to WordPress was that it allowed regular people to do what seemed to be, at the time, advanced things. As the range of things WordPress could do increased, the more optimistic among us got a carried away and presumed that we would

Grow and Engage Your Mailing Lists with MailOptin

It seems as if every marketing blog or podcast over the past few years has been obsessed with mailing lists. It has been made clear that if you have a popular website but are not doing all you can to capture your visitors’ email addresses, you are an idiot.

The idea is that your website is only the starting point in your relationship with your readers. If the trust you establish through your content is enough for them to give you their email address, you now have the ability to regularly reach out and update them on what is going on at your site (or, more realistically, to remind them that your site exists).

How to Replace Your Web Host with a Robot

The best thing about attending WordPress meetups is when you chat with someone who has been working with WordPress for only a year or two, and you are able to tell them about a tool that will instantly solve a problem they have been struggling with every day. The look on their face as what you are telling them sinks in is always a joy to behold.

This article is about a tool that could impact your use of WordPress in that profound way if you currently pay for Web hosting.

Top 10 Directory Sites Built with Toolset

We are living in a golden age of WordPress. The imminent addition of Gutenberg to WordPress core is a transition that, although there will be some teething problems, will be a quantum leap forward in design flexibility.

Meanwhile, a healthy array of page-building plugins are all competing to provide the best set of tools to enable users without any coding skills to produce increasingly advanced WordPress sites.

Toolset is one of the most popular, providing an entire set of plugins, each providing a different type of functionality you will need when creating advanced sites. I describe the entire set of Toolset components in another article here, Toolset – Now Everyone is a WordPress Developer.

How to Convey Your Message to The Entire Planet

Sometimes, in technology, massive changes take us by surprise. For example, it took decades for most people to realize that the Internet was changing human life in fundamental ways.

Other changes are anticipated for decades before they finally become a practical reality. Artificial intelligence, commonly abbreviated as AI, was widely discussed with a mixture of excitement and fear for over half a century before there were even any real examples of it.

The label AI is applied to a broad range of things, some ridiculous, but there is one type of AI that is already making a profound difference to my life and is now set to make an equally profound difference to your website and business.

The Biggest Opportunity in WordPress History

At WordCamp Europe in Paris last weekend, there were many inspiring people who have built a thriving business upon WordPress. For each success story, however, there were dozens more attendees scrambling to find their own way, chasing the dream of working for themselves and making a living from WordPress.

There was a general sense that many of the most profitable avenues peaked a few years ago, with much discussion about just how screwed the theme market is. The plugin market is even harder to crack, unless you have a particularly useful new idea, but it seems that almost anything that can be done has been done, and now the fight is down to who can market most skillfully and assemble the most financial firepower.

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