Reading Time: < 1 minI recent had an interesting conversation with a developer from another web agency. He was showing me a site they had just launched, and it looked great! However, I quickly noticed there was no SSL on the site, so it was showing “not secure” at the top. It’s an important thing to have these days, […]
Websites
Keep control of your digital business assets
Reading Time: 3 minWe’ve long been believers that our GreenMellen clients should keep control of their digital assets. Among other things, their domain name and website hosting should always be something that they own and that they pay for. There are a lot of tricky technical pieces that we handle for them on a daily basis, but in […]
My first real post with Gutenberg
Reading Time: 3 minIf you do much work in the WordPress world, you have likely heard about the new “Gutenberg” editor that is coming to WordPress in the coming months. It’s a drastic change to how you work with posts and pages, and it should be a great thing. If you’re not familiar with it, this Meetup recap […]
The SSL checklist
Reading Time: 2 minHaving an SSL certificate on your website (making the address start with “https” and include that little green padlock) has always been important for eCommerce sites, but never very much for any other site. However, Google is now pushing that as an increasingly important ranking signal, so if you want your website to show up […]
You need to keep your website backed up — use ManageWP to do it
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve talked about ManageWP quite a bit at our Meetup, but some of their recent changes have made it even more amazing. If you’re not familiar with it, ManageWP is a system to help you manage a bunch of WordPress sites from one place. A “bunch” could be 3, 30 or 300 — it can […]
Please don’t have your external links always open a new tab
Reading Time: 2 minI posted a few years ago on the GreenMellen blog about sites that have links automatically open in new windows, and how that wasn’t always the best move. The logic I hear is “if you’re taking them to a new site, have it open in a new tab so that they don’t leave your site”. […]
My favorites things in 2016
Reading Time: 3 minWith 2016 behind us, I thought it might be fun to look at some of my favorite things from last year. Favorite phone I ended up using six different phones last year, largely related to the Galaxy Note 7 fire fiasco. Mine never caught fire, but the various recalls were messy. Droid Turbo 2: I […]
Uptime monitors with a delay are very useful
Reading Time: 3 minA few years ago, I set out to find a good service to monitor uptime on all of the websites we manage (it varies, up to around 150 of them at any given time). It initially came down to two leading contenders: Pingdom – Undoubtedly the best, but it would have cost us around $249/mo. […]
Stopping fake Google and Lifehacker links
Reading Time: 2 minIf you pay close attention to your Google Analytics stats, you may have recently been excited to see that you’re getting some traffic from sites such as lifehacĸer.com and ɢoogle.com. Before you celebrate too much, take a closer look at those addresses; do you notice anything strange about the “k” in Lifehacker or the first […]
Wrapping up WordCamp US 2016
Reading Time: 3 minWe’re at the airport about to fly back to ATL after WordCamp US in Philadelphia, so I thought I’d share a few of my takeaways. Of the dozen or so sessions that we attended, I have four main things that I’m coming away with. We’re doing a lot of things right In listening to search […]