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 …
Sometimes it can seem like building a website is some sort of mystical, magical process. And while I do sometimes joke about “working my magic” on websites, it’s not really magic at all. It’s a process, and it’s one that I’ve developed and adjusted over the years (and continue to tweak as needed) to something …
Last time I checked, WordPress websites power over 30% of the top 1-million websites in the world. That’s a LOT. The downside of this is that the popularity of WordPress makes it a big target for hackers, because they know that there’s a lot of potential targets. Some basic website security will help you strengthen …
Why WordPress? With all of the choices available that you could use to build your organization’s website, why should you use WordPress? WordPress is a CMS (content management system) that now powers over 27% of websites worldwide. Some of the world’s biggest and most powerful brands use WordPress for their web presence, include many nonprofits, …
Having images on your site makes it a lot easier to read. We are visual people, and images should be used to help the reader understand your content or relate to it in some way. Pictures and other graphics also make your content seem less daunting. When your visitors come to your site and there …
A few weeks ago, I wrote about getting your site set up on Google Analytics because of the wealth of free information available from that source. This week, I’m going to show you how to get your site connected with Google Search Console. This post is part of the WordPress Weekend Projects series. In this …
This post is part of the WordPress Weekend Projects series. In this series, you will find bite-size tips to enhance, secure, or optimize your website. Each tip should take an hour or less, and can be done without interrupting your precious weekend time too much. See all of the WordPress Weekend Projects posts at http://beyondtheoffice.com/blog/wordpress-weekend-projects. Today’s Weekend …
This post is part of the WordPress Weekend Projects series. In this series, you will find bite-size tips to enhance, secure, or optimize your website. Each tip should take an hour or less, and can be done without interrupting your precious weekend time too much. See all of the WordPress Weekend Projects posts at http://beyondtheoffice.com/blog/wordpress-weekend-projects. Today’s Weekend …
Google Analytics is a great free service that allows you to track information about your website visitors and learn more about their behavior while they’re on your website, and how they got there. There’s a treasure trove of information available, and the only thing that’s required to get it is a YouTube account. I’ve split …
I’ve had this idea rattling around in my brain for a while, and decided that 2018 is the year to make it happen. What’s the big idea, you ask? WordPress Weekend Projects! The idea behind WordPress Weekend Projects is to provide a series of bite-size tips to enhance, secure, or optimize your website. I know that …
Your website is only as safe as your last good backup… Thanks for checking out my talk at WordCamp Lehigh Valley. I am passionate/slightly neurotic about backups, mostly because I’ve seen lots of cases where bad things happen to good websites because they don’t have a good recent backup of their site. Enjoy the slides, and …
I was at a business growth workshop one time and was asked by a professional photographer at the end of it, “With all of the DIY website builders available these days, do I really need to hire a professional website developer?” I spun the question around and said to him, “Well, with all of affordable …
1 – Not making regular backups. Even if you correct all of the things listed above, your website could still get hacked. Or your webhost could crash. Or you could update a plugin or theme that breaks your site – nothing’s infallible. Having current backups will help you recover more quickly in the event that …
As part of their continued effort to make mobile internet usage more user-friendly, Google changed their search algorithm to penalize pages that have “instrusive interstitials,” which refers to popups and popovers that cover the majority of the visible area. “They can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were …