This started out as a comment in response to someone interested in hiring an external SEO company, and got rather long. If you’re a business owner, how do you find a good SEO company or provider? Unfortunately, SEO has a poor reputation to some due to poor providers. You’re right to worry about bad providers. Bad SEO can mean someone spinning up a thousand spammy comment links pointing back to your site, like it’s 2004. This may not sound damaging — but enough of the “bad SEO” can result in your business getting deindexed from Google, meaning you can say […]
Displaying Website Projects in Web Development Portfolios
There are multiple methods for displaying a website project in your portfolio, with pros and cons to each. This is a very frequent question as far as I’ve seen. Many people are unhappy with flat screenshots, and want to show something more. So they wind up thinking about WordPress multi-site and other very complicated solutions — but there are easier ways to display your projects in web development portfolios.
Poor Practices Previously Encountered in WordPress Themes
I haven’t worked with an abundance of other people’s themes so I’m in no way an expert. I’d say I’ve played with somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 premium, paid themes built by other people. It doesn’t give me a huge range of experience to see all that can possibly go wrong… but I’ve seen a fair amount!
Creating Successful Contact Forms
Creating successful contact forms is important. On your website, a contact form is often a primary means of getting in touch with you. For most people, this means money! Money is good — don’t throw it away with poor contact forms. Here’s a really good analogy from Marcin Treder on Design Modo: Let’s compare the online to the offline world. This always puts things into a familiar perspective. Let me make a simple analogy: form validation is the equivalent of having a conversation with a salesman right before a purchase – when everything is still on a knife’s edge. If […]
Non-Technical Freelance Front End Developer Skills
These are skills you might find useful as a freelance web developer. You’ll notice they are not relevant to actual web development. If you’re working in a larger environment, it can still be useful to note the basics of these: someone who understands basic limitations of other people’s jobs is usually easier to work with, and can sometimes provide cross-disciplinary insight. However, in a larger organization you’ll also probably have another person — if not a department with multiple teams — to worry about these things, so it’s not as crucial.
Brief Update on Linode Hosting
Back in October I moved to Linode for hosting my site. Happy to report — I haven’t had any problems! Apparently there have been recent issues in late December (apparently many people were suffering some serious downtime thanks to DDOS attacks). But I wasn’t affected much — maybe a couple hours of downtime one day, but other than that, nothing. So I’m very happy here! MySQL Issues The only problem I have been having, however, are intermittent MySQL disconnections. I lost my database for ten minute stretches maybe once every two days. Of course I could see in my Linode […]
Recommended WordPress Plugins
This is a big old list of my preferred WordPress plugins, what I use them for, and why I like them. Hope you enjoy and find it useful!
Preventing Damage from Hacking, Spam, and Malware on WordPress
I started this as a comment reply to someone operating an e-commerce site, who indicated they were quite frightened of something happening to their site. This was in response to an overall topic where someone posted for help with a compromised WordPress site.
Freelance Web Developer & Designer Contracts
I am a thousand percent not a lawyer. Do not rely on this resource alone to build your contract. This information is provided without any guarantees. This information is not legal advice. You really shouldn’t be relying on a web generalist for your legal advice. Again, I strongly encourage research and consultation for your freelance contract. I also remind you that jurisdictions vary: your town, county, state, or country might be totally different from what you read here or elsewhere on the Internet. Get a real lawyer to verify your contract and ascertain you’re within the legal constraints of your […]
Basic Speed Optimization
Speed optimization is important for your website. It is very easy to build a bloated site, and that’s obviously bad — but why an optimized site? Several reasons: You use less server resources (thus your site is more scalable in the face of lots of traffic). Your site loads faster, meaning: Human visitors are less likely to click away from your site (people give about 2-3 seconds for your site to start showing content before leaving). Search engines give preference to faster sites in search engine rankings (NB: albeit very slight, and as one factor in many). Both of the […]
