Happy new year, Dustin! Wishing you, your family and YWE a great year ahead!

My aims in 2014 are to continue learning WP, take great photos and get my photography website noticed.

Looking forward to your weekly podcast. 🙂 Pls keep up!

Btw, do you mind me asking you about retina display? I understand you have one episode dedicated to it, but am wondering whether retina display is going to be mainstream and PC makers will follow the trend or not. Any thoughts?
I believe majority of the websites today are not retina compatible, so images used on those websites all look blurred on retina compatible devices, I guess.
As a webmaster of a photography site, I’ve found retina display nothing but troublesome, and have no intension to make my website retina compatible by re-editing all my photos (at least for now).
I’m a bit like an Apple fan boy, but I feel this was a wrong move, and secretly hoping retina display will be discontinued, haha.

Thanks Dustin for your view! I may need to re-edit all my pics one day… Anyway, have a blast at NMX! Looking forward to hearing about the event on your show. Now I am in Brunei for holidaying. 🙂

Hey Justin. Upfront – thanks for a great podcast. Your content – and enthusiasm – has really helped me “train up” my WP skills the last few months.

WP Goals for 2014:
Put. Some. Content. On. My. Blogs. I swear I have blogs that have less blog posts than birthdays.
Learn Child themes. I love to hack at themes, but I always go direct.
Do some video training for clients.
Speaking of clients – sort out my WP services and start pimping them.
Update my own work and personal website – and kill off my very very old company site.
Start WordPress MeetUp Dubbo / Central West NSW.

and then in February….

JoeyF My 2 cents on Retina. When it first came out there was a bit of a “thing” a couple of months later by some of the blogging royalty to update their blogs NOW to handle the retina displays. Well that’s OK for them but really you were talking about 1% of normal people with MacBook Pro’s and maybe iPads with Retina.

Fast forward a couple of years – yeah it’s probably time. Most tablets sold are now retina, most laptops are too. I’d be surprised if 25-50% of your visitors didn’t have a retina display.

I just ordered a new iPad Mini with Retina to make sure my sites don’t look bad on retina displays. (that and the A7 chip plus extra RAM makes a big difference on the iPhone so – and sold my MBP and the iPad Mini will be my main mobile device).

As far as I know there isn’t a good standard way to deal with Retina graphics yet. Retina graphics are bigger by nature and often your simply breaking a basic rule of website design by shrinking a much larger file into a smaller space. Some people load up 4-6 resolutions of the graphics and use responsive design to deal with it. But that’s messy and work intensive for even a semi-pro. Time.

MichaelQThanks for your input! Must appreciated. Maybe I soon need to start considering to make my photography website retina display compatible. It’s horrifying to think that 50% of my visitors might be seeing blurred, pixelated photos on my site.
Saying this doesn’t change anything, but I still feel that Apple’s move to retina display was wrong (or “unnecessary”). For those who run a big website may have some hundreds of images hosted, and getting all those images to be retina compatible by re-editing is nothing but troublesome and time-consuming.
Also for those webmasters/bloggers with no or little coding knowledge can never be able to post images that look good on retina-enabled devices. That’s sad, cos no matter what pics they post, all look pixelated and ugly on retina display (unless blogging platform implements a function to do all the behind-the-scene work to make images retina compatible upon uploading).

I understand that I cannot go against the tide, though… Anyway, thanks!

JoeyF Hey Joey. You’ll have to post your site so we can check it out for you – still waiting on my Mini – hopefully today!!

I don’t think it was really photo’s that were the issue with retina screens. The main problem seemed to be graphics and elements like that. So if you had an old theme maybe, the graphics might not look so good upscaled.

Twitter and a couple of others got caught because they designed apps especially for Apple’s old (mac) screens with minimal res graphics – then looked terrible when they upsized. They didn’t get much credit for designing an app in the first place with minimal size and maximum speed – just abused when things went wrong.

Apple are merely playing catchup for the most part. Especially on desktops / laptops. When I switched back to Mac about 10 years ago I was appalled by the poor resolution on the displays in terms of pixels. Sure it looked nice, but I got about half the information on my screen than I did on my old Dell. Windows laptops would be 1400x and Macs would be 800. Yet no one really mentioned it.

The “Retina” branding on the iPhone screens was pure marketing. Sure they were first, but quickly caught and even surpassed by most others who all by their screens from the same place. Apple probably has the lowest dpi on phones – still the best looking screen – but other have higher specs, but no branding.

Two things for you to do. OK three.

One: Go find a store or a friend and see what your site looks like on a retina screen.

Two: Go find a new shiny sexy theme anyway and spruce up the site.

Three: Go install Google Analytics and see for yourself what screens visitors are using, mobile or desktop, bounce rate, time on site, where they are coming from etc. Free.

Actually do Three first – then you can see if its a problem and track changes.

Cheers.

@michaelq

MichaelQ Thanks again for your suggestions! My website is this – http://lastlights.net

Yes, I’ve seen my website on 13 inch MBP with retina display at an Apple store. Photos did look pixelated. On iPhone (the only retina device I have), photos look fine cos the monitor is very small anyway. All my photos are 640px x 424px, btw.
As for switching a theme, that’s not my option cos I’ve spent countless hours customizing a theme to an extent that no one can tell what theme I’m using. Cannot think about doing it again with a new theme to create the exact same look as now. So, if I make my site retina-compatible, I’ll manually do what Dustin suggested on episode 139.
I have Google Analytics installed, but still not getting large enough traffic to be analysed, haha! Anyway, thanks for your help! Cheers.

Hi Dustin, getting caught up on the YWE podcast to start the new year. One thing I’d like to learn more about are ways to generate leads (website clients). Currently my leads mostly come from referrals, which is great, but I feel like I don’t have much control as to when a new client rolls in. I’d like to know some ways to find clients or generate leads.

Thanks!
Tim

dhartzler10 Aside from referrals, I have one Craigslist ad in the Madison & Phoenix areas. I’ve responded to jobs on jobs.wordpress.net and wphired.com before, but never heard anything back. Looking for other ideas and ways to fill the pipeline.

Hey Joey, nice looking site. And great pics.
Your site looked fine on my iPad mini retina. It’s the pictures that’s the problem.
Retina screens caused problems with some sites if they had lots of graphical elements, like using Gifs for rounded corners, arrows, buttons etc. Sometimes a logo might be the biggest problem.
It’s your low res 640×424 pics that will be the problem, changing the site graphics won’t fix them. Upload higher res pics – maybe 800x or 1000x as a minimum. Put them thru something like JPEGmini to shrink file size and retain best quality.
Cheers.
@michaelq

MichaelQThanks for checking on your iPad mini! I believe that using 1000px width photo will solve the pixelation problem on iPad mini cos the display is not big, but will still have the problem when viewed on retina-compatible desktop or laptop computers.

I’ll probably wait and see how the things will go. At this moment, there seems no standard way (for web designers/developers) to handle retina display. Preparing two files per image (as described at http://retinajs.com/) is troublesome and rather stupid…

Hopefully, the industry will come up with a standard way of handling retina display. This thing (retina display) is very web designer/developer unfriendly, to say the least. Anyway, thanks for your help!

I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this.