Your website is the digital face of your business, and it needs to shine. A website audit is your compass to navigate through the digital wilderness. It’s not just about SEO; it’s about understanding every aspect of your online presence, from content and design to usability. In this blog post, we’ll take you through the…
Website maintenance is the process of monitoring your website’s overall health and performance. Unhealthy websites are a playground for hackers, slow your site down, and can cause unwanted technical issues. With any of our managed hosting plans, we will update your plugins and themes and monitor your web server to keep your site working at…
The short answer: A host stores your website data and files on a web server. If you have a website you need a host, but not all hosts are the same. Think of a server as a storage building for your digital data. If you have lots of valuables or enough items to fill up…
As a general rule in life, you should not apologize for things that are not your fault. Years (decades?) of the half-true mantra of “the customer is always right” have infected the customer service industry to the point where we are now apologizing for things that are not our fault, and using apologies as a…
When you call something “simple,” “easy,” or “self-explanatory” in product documentation, you’re insulting your reader. You should stop doing that. Let’s put it in another context to illustrate my point. Scene: local auto repair shop. Your mechanic emerges from under the hood holding a small piece of rubber between grease-marked pointer finger and thumb. “Here’s…
Starting today, you can beta test pre-released versions of Better Click to Tweet, to test new functionality, ensure compatibility with your environment, and/or lend a hand to aid in development. With version 5.5+, there’s a method for you to update to the release before it alerts you to an update on the plugins page of…
Ever updated a plugin, and had it break some functionality on your site? First of all, here’s hoping that you didn’t do that on the live site, because shame on you for cowboy coding. But now’s not the time to chastise you for that: it’s time to fix the problem. If you still have…
Think to yourself: if I dropped in, directly in the middle of a conversation, and was forced to figure out what needs to be done based on the information being presented only from this point forward, would I be able to do so? That’s what a support ticket is. It’s a conversation between you and…
So I’ve convinced you that switching plugins from Click to Tweet by the folks over at TodayMade (the makers of the top-notch content marketing editorial calendar CoSchedule) is worth it. But what about all of those tweet quotes you’ve already added to dozens (if not hundreds) of blog posts? Going back through to switch each quote manually…
You have an issue, and the first thing the folks on the support forum say is always “deactivate all plugins.” Here’s why:
My neighbors pay someone to cut their grass. As far as I can tell from being an only-mildly-nosy neighbor, here’s how the weekly-ish transaction goes: Yard guy (we’ll call him Pete) shows up to mow the whole lawn. Right before he starts, Pete walks up to a cushioned chair on the front porch, and picks…
I like themes, plugins, and websites that get out of the way. Why do you have a website? Too many folks start with “because we need a website,” and that’s immediately apparent when you look at their site. If they had a specific, measurable, written goal for the website, they’d have a website that gets…
Your plugins are the organs of your WordPress site. They are functional, and enhance content in ways other than just aesthetically. Your theme is the skin of your WordPress site. It’s aesthetic, not primarily functional. In fact, done correctly, your theme could be even more like clothes than skin. Themes change design and plugins change…
Recently in a facebook group someone posted this image, asking for clarification: I thought I’d use that as a jumping-off point to talk about “bargain” hosting. This user is on a large (Super-Bowl-ad-budget large) hosting company’s “shared” plan. The irony is that the user would have no way of knowing what version of PHP they are…
Here’s the thing: I am extremely tight with my money. Some might go so far as to call me stingy. I really don’t like spending money on things, as a rule. On top of that, as a developer I have released plugins into the WordPress ecosystem that are free to download. Even given those two…
When you are driving on an icy road in a neighborhood, it makes sense to only go as fast as you are comfortable running into something. This has been the lesson I’ve learned looking out my front window over the past few days. The same can be said for web coding. Let me tell you…
Blogger.com is like your rich and slightly neurotic girlfriend Julie’s house: Great for visits, bad place to live. When you live there, at first it’s a storybook! She pays for everything, lets you live there rent free, makes it easy for you to do what you want, and you can just keep adding stuff to…
Based on my experience since becoming a web developer, I’m glad I don’t work in television, because I’d never enjoy shows the same way. Last week I went online to purchase a ticket to a local sporting event, and was greeted with the bright red text “Please refrain from using any special characters in your…