Yoast SEO and Theme building with Foundation Framework

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Yoast SEO and Theme building with Foundation Framework were the topics for this weeks well attended  WordPress Northern Ireland meetup @ Farset Labs.

Yoast Seo

YOAST SEO

Search Engine Optimisation for WordPress is of interest to content providers and developers. There was a good turnout with plenty of new faces at the meetup. The normal format of this meetup is a workshop where the topics get demonstrated. Questions were taken during the process explain topics in more detail. The presenter, Mark Smallman, discussed the parts of the Yeost plugin and their functionality. The value of the readability and SEO ratings of the tool get displayed below the post or page. Other topics such as the importance of the focus keyword, snippet , meta data were discussed. The tool rates the search engine optimisation values of these with a colour bar and list to review. This showed the nature of the plugin and its approach to improving ratings through well crafted content.

As a result of the workshop I have started to look more in depth at the Yoast plugin and hope to improve the readability and SEO rating of future posts.

Foundation Framework

This topic got an airing at the previous meetup in the context of script libraries and re-usability. This time it had a much longer treatment – showing how Mark had developed his own starter theme. This theme includes the basic functionality and features that he uses in the delivery of new client WordPress sites.
 
Touching on the support for XY grid versus CSSgrid – this was useful to hear the pros and cons. This  had recently been considered at the CSS Grid for the basis of a new project design. Finally comments were made about the favourable performance of the framework version against Bootstrap.
 
The benefits of a mobile first framework , with clean markup that is accessible and customisable were highlighted and it reinforced the point that the documentation is good. Videos cover many aspects of the framework.