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 […]
Websites
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 […]
What is the “duplicate content penalty”?
Reading Time: 3 minIf you’ve done much research into search engine optimization, you’ve likely heard that you should be wary of duplicate content to avoid a penalty from Google. The good news is that there isn’t really a penalty for it, but you should still certainly work to avoid any kind of duplicate content-related issues. Mark Traphagen at […]
Thoughts on the Google Chrome OS laptop
Reading Time: 2 minAs many of you know, Google has been giving away thousands of free laptops to help promote and troubleshoot their upcoming “Chrome OS” operating system. In a nutshell, the entire operating system is just a browser. No files, no “desktop”, no real programs — just a browser. It’s an ambitious move to say the least. […]
Site Review: LaGrange Park Baptist Church – Fayetteville, NC
Reading Time: < 1 minChurch: LaGrange Park Baptist Church – Fayetteville, NC URL: http://lagrangeparkbc.org/ I did this video review live on my LiveStream account a little while ago. Kind of fun. I’ll try to give a little more warning before I do a live one next time. Anyhow, check it out below!