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 […]
Basic On-Page Search Engine Optimization for Web Developers
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another discipline of the web — albeit one not exactly relevant to design or development. More broadly, SEO is “web marketing.” More narrowly, however, for your purposes as a web developer — SEO is simply the process of making your website more understandable to search engines. Even if you do not plan to be a web marketer, when you build a site you should usually adhere to basic SEO standards. This information is primarily relevant to on-page SEO. There’s such a thing as off-page SEO, too, where you focus on gaining links to your website […]
Working with Mock-Ups and Web Graphics
As a front end web developer, you may not necessarily have to create mock-ups. By the time you see the design, it may be finalized already. The web designer is usually the one to make and work with mock-ups heavily. In larger team environments, you might never touch a mock-up aside from slicing it up and turning it into code. However — you will almost certainly have to work with mock-ups in some capacity as a front end web developer, even if you aren’t creating mock-ups. On the other hand, as a freelancer, or working in smaller teams, or as […]
Local Development for Beginning Developers
Local development is the practice of using your local machine to develop websites or web applications. Didn’t know you could do that? Sure you can. A web server is basically a big, powerful computer — and you can install software and similar that can help you turn your local computer into a place where you can develop websites.
Web Design and Development Workflow
This is a post describing my workflow for creating a website from scratch. It’s not necessarily right, just descriptive of what I do. If you see any flaws or potential areas of improvement, please let me know. This is primarily relevant to personal projects, where I do exactly what I want regardless of what anyone else wants out of me. This is not likely to succeed in environments where you’re working on a team! Added — this isn’t really step-by-step. Sometimes I’ll go back to Photoshop after doing the colors in code to design some specific things. I definitely doodle […]
Things to Change After Installing an SSL Certificate
The actual process of installing an SSL certificate will vary by server. This is not a guide for how to install an SSL, period. This is for all the other stuff that can slowly break when you install an SSL certificate — stuff you might not notice immediately. For SSL purchasing, I recommend Namecheap. I’ve used them as a domain registrar for a while now, and I’m very happy with them. They’re the only cheap SSL certificate ($10/year) I’ve found that seems reputable (i.e., other SSL certificates I’ve found for similar and lower prices have seemed to come from disreputable […]
Not a Google Webmaster Tools Owner of Your Site?
At work, we had a weird situation wherein one of our properties wasn’t “owned” by our account in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). The differences between Owner and non-owner accounts are minor, but significant. An Owner has full control, while non-owners are more restricted. They can’t make certain changes to the property — perhaps the most important of which is linking the property to a Google Analytics (GA) account. This causes some data share between GWT and GA, which is important to have. It seems whoever set the site up had only added our account as a non-owner. This might be […]
Introduction to WordPress Posting (Without Strong Technological Background)
This post assumes knowledge of logging in, navigating to the post section, getting into the editing screen on a post, and basic familiarity with the editing screen. If you need more basic information than this post provides, see the Simple WP Guide. It walks you through the very basics and is a great way to get started. If you know all of that already, this guide should help you bring your WordPress posting skills to the next level. If you’re looking to go even further, there are a number of side-notes in this post. Use them as opportunities to search […]
Buying a Website 101
This is a 101 guide to buying a website. It’s intended to guide first-time website buyers through some preliminary preparation steps. As the buyer of a website, these are things you can do to prepare before talking to anyone or asking questions. Note: if you’re thinking about buying a website and you have a specific developer in mind, you should probably read their information on preparation.