I was asked recently to “brain dump” my thoughts and experiences about organizing a WordCamp and I thought some of you might find this helpful, too. I was Co-Organizer of WordCamp Pittsburgh in 2016, and Organizer of WordCamp Pittsburgh 2017 & 2018. All of this is as correct as I can make it as of …
One of the under-recognized groups that are being affected by social distancing, stay at home orders, and shelter in place orders is small business owners. The reasons these various orders can affecting these businesses are varied and include things their customer base not being able to get to them, or conserving spending because of an …
This isn’t my standard sort of post, but I feel like a lot of you might be in the same place I am, with kids at home from school because of social distancing initiatives, and you might potentially be at a loss at how to fill their time (especially if you’re trying to get work …
Creating content is a never-ending part of running an online business. Everything is content – web page content, blog posts, newsletters, social media content. Maybe you’ve even got video and/or podcast content in the mix. Then, when you try to follow the marketing advice of creating/sharing content regularly, it can seem very overwhelming. But there’s …
Marketing funnels are one of the best ways to help generate leads while you are off doing other things – working with your customers, playing with your family, vacationing, sleeping – whatever. Funnels help you to connect with your audience without having to send every email individually. Exploring the funnel Basically, the idea of a …
Websites are not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing channel, but I feel like a lot of business owners treat them like they are, especially in a service-based business. At least once a year, I recommend that you take a look at the products/services that you have listed on your site and make sure they are still relevant, …
Why should I backup my WordPress website? “…My host does that for me.“ Sometimes I hear people ask this question, usually because they have a website hosting service that does backups for them. But these services are not infallible – and if something does happen, you’ll be very glad you have your own backup. And …
Running a business online means there’s a lot of pieces that need to fit together to make everything work – and as smoothly as possible, so we business owners are not spending our days in tools and integrations instead of working with our customers and using our gifts. So, I now present a listing of …
With many things, one can adopt a “if it ain’t broke it, don’t fix it” mentality. But, it’s not always easy to know when your website is broken and is need of fixing. I’ve compiled a list of some of the more common issues you may be facing with your website that could indicate it’s …
Gutenberg is the new editor for WordPress that was released with WordPress version 5.0 in December 2018. It’s an entirely different editing experience and has been confusing and frustrating many people in the WordPress community. The plugin has been available for testing as a plugin since development on it began. This allowed WordPress users to …
If your website is slow to load, you probably want to look at some ways to improve your website loading time. Website load time is used as a ranking factor by search engines, and studies have shown that people will leave a website if it doesn’t load in 2-3 seconds. While the specific plugin solutions …
Having a website that loads fast is important. And having images on your site to break up the text is important. So what do you do when the images that are supposed to enhance the visitor’s experience on your site are actually causing a less-than-ideal experience by making the site take longer to load. Well, …
I hang out in a bunch of Facebook groups full of entrepreneurs, and I see a lot of people asking which platform to use for their budding business. I may be a little biased, but I think WordPress is the best platform to start a website on. Aside from other reasons, WordPress is more flexible …
If you have a WordPress site, and you’ve logged into the Dashboard anytime recently, you’ve probably seen the big banner talking about Gutenberg. But, if you’re like a lot of people I know, you probably didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. Do you know what it is? Is your website ready for it? …
If you have a website, you may have heard that optimizing the performance of your website is important both for a positive user experience and for search engine optimization. There’s several tools that will give you information about the optimization of your site, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights. But, what they don’t tell you is what …