Mickey Mellen
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of WordPress. We’ve been using it since 2004, we’ve been hosting a monthly WordPress Meetup for a few years, and I’m one of the co-organizers for the excellent WordCamp Atlanta Conference this year. But the question remains — why do we choose WordPress? The popularity of WordPress is undeniable. More than 23% of the web is running on WordPress, including sites such as The New Yorker, BBC America, Variety, Sony Music, MTV News, Xerox, Fortune, Time, and literally millions of others. That doesn’t really answer the “why”, though; using a product simply because a lot of other people use it isn’t reason enough. More than 25% of the web is running on WordPress There are two main angles to look at when comparing WordPress to the alternatives. You can choose a hosted solution, where everything is handled for you, or a self-hosted platform […]
Read MoreOur All Things WordPress Meetup this month was a hands on walk through of Google Analytics and how to add demographics tracking to your Analytics panel. Here are 8 reasons why you should be checking your Google Analytics: 1. See your site usage statistics at a glance. If there is data you want to see at a glance, be sure to set it up in the Dashboards area. Dashboards are great if you want to see an overview of your stats for traffic, goal completions, and other metrics all in one place. You can even change the date range on your dashboard and see all your widgets update to reflect the change. You can create several different dashboards, each set to reflect specific data. To create a new dashboard, simply go under “Dashboards” in the menu bar of your analytics and then select “New Dashboard” and add your widgets. Each type of widget can be filtered and customized to drill […]
Read MoreThere are a handful of times when you might need to set up redirects on your website. We’ll take a quick look at those situations and show you how best to handle them.
Read MoreAli and I first met back in 2005 when we both worked at Mt. Bethel UMC in the marketing department of the church. We redesigned the church site a few times while we were there, and helped get their first blog off the ground. We recently took a look at the current state of the church website, and were blown away by the consistent quality content that they post on there. In the month of February alone they posted 37 blog entries talking about everything going on at the church. This includes everything from staff changes and worship service details to events and photos. It’s everything that every church blog should be talking about, but few are able to pull off. I reached out to Johnna Bain, the Director of Communications at Mt. Bethel (who Ali and I worked with years ago), to have her share how they’re able to […]
Read MoreThanks to all of you who made it to our Meetup last week. We had a great discussion about features and tips you should consider when creating a website. Whether you’re building a new site or tweaking an existing one, these thoughts will help steer you in the right direction. 1. Be mobile responsive Mobile devices are overtaking desktop computers on many websites, so your site needs to be ready. The best way to do that is to make sure the agency that builds your site does as a “mobile responsive” site. Most should automatically, but be sure. 2. Skip the sliders There are some cases for having a handful of large rotating images on your homepage, but not many. Studies show that users rarely see more than one or two of them, and almost never click them. Keep your most important information front and center where your customer can see it. Sliders […]
Read MoreJust over four years ago, I first shared my experience with a Google Chromebook. Now I have a new one to play with and I’m quite impressed! For Christmas my wife picked me up an Acer C720, a very affordable and portable Chromebook. It sells for around $200, and was the top selling laptop on Amazon this holiday season. It’s worth noting that the second and third most popular laptops on Amazon were also Chromebooks. The C720 is a solid little machine. It has an 11″ screen (just a smidge larger than an iPad) and a battery that lasts up to around 8 hours. Given the tiny size of it and the great battery life, I expect it will be my go-to laptop for meetings and Meetups. Chromebooks are Google Chrome and nothing else The key to a Chromebook is the special operating system that Google has built for it; […]
Read MoreA new year equals a fresh start for so many of us, so why not your website? Here are 8 things you can do to whip your website into shape: Out of date or irrelevant information does not build trust or relationship with your readers. Delete old and out of date landing pages. Along those same lines, delete old blog posts unrelated to your business. Make sure you have updated your copyright date on your website. Here’s a tutorial on how to have your copyright automatically update if your theme doesn’t do this for you. Clean up and remove old events off your calendar page. Has your “About Us” page changed? Update your team bios, contact page and “about us” pages as needed. Check any online forms and make sure that the landing pages or autoresponders are up to date. Use Broken Link checker to ensure that the links on your website work. Use the […]
Read MoreA popular trend in websites lately is a single-page design. An example would be this theme from StudioPress; it has a few sub-pages, but is largely a single, long home page. Single-page sites make some sense. Users are used to scrolling and having a long page won’t hurt that. In addition, it allows users to read various sections without having to click and wait for additional pages to load. The problem is how Google treats content on the internet. While there are ways to optimize single-page sites for better SEO, as a general rule you can only optimize a particular page for one or two key phrases. If you have a single page site, that really limits your options when compared to the various phrases you can use across a 10 page site. Going from single-page to multi-page A great example is a well-optimized single-page site that we recently rebuilt […]
Read More“Daily, millions of airline passengers depend that the pilot will follow the WRITTEN checklists so they will have a safe takeoff & landing at their desired destination. Is a written checklist required to successfully launch our website ? Does it need to be updated?” ~ Carl Stifter YES! Websites have many bits and pieces. Moving a site from testing to live is tricky business even for the most seasoned developer. Broken links and missed redirects are just a couple of things that can easily be overlooked. “And of course, a handful of things could go very, very wrong. Like what if you forget to test an important data capture form and then lose out on generating a bunch of new leads? Or worse, what if you forget to properly set up site redirects, and those valuable search engine visitors get a page not found message?” – Hubspot When we launch a website, we have a checklist of […]
Read MoreWordPress version 4.1 has just been released and it’s available for download now. While this isn’t a security-focused update (provided you’re already on 4.0.1), it’s always wise to stay on the latest version of WordPress after you’ve performed a full backup of your site. What’s new in 4.1? A few nice new features can be found in version 4.1 of WordPress: Twenty Fifteen: The new default theme, Twenty Fifteen, is now included. It’s much cleaner looking than the past few defaults. Distraction-free writing: A simple, optional interface to clear out clutter and help you focus on your work ( (https://make.wordpress.org/core/2014/11/11/focus-v2-demo-video/)). Language pack integration: As part of their attempt to make WordPress more global, some enhanced language features are now included. Inline image formatting: A new inline formatting toolbar for images embedded into posts. Developer tools: In addition to the above items, there have been quite a few back-end improvements including […]
Read MoreGoogle Analytics is a great tool to see how visitors interact with your website. You can see where they came from, what pages they viewed, what kind of device they’re using, and a lot of other data. If you haven’t used Google Analtyics much, check out some of our other posts about it to learn more. It can still be difficult to see exactly how a person interacts with your site. While in-person user testing is the best way to do that, installing a heat map plugin can give you glimpse of where exactly people tend to click on your site. These plugins will track the exact location of each click on a page, and then create an overlay that shows how “hot” various areas of your page are. For example, here is a recent snapshot from our home page: The basic heatmap shown above is incredibly useful, as it […]
Read MoreWordPress has just released version 4.0.1, which is a small update that helps to resolve some potentially nasty security holes and everyone is encouraged to update their sites immediately. Among the fixes: Three cross-site scripting issues that a contributor or author could use to compromise a site. A cross-site request forgery that could be used to trick a user into changing their password. An issue that could lead to a denial of service when passwords are checked. Additional protections for server-side request forgery attacks when WordPress makes HTTP requests. An extremely unlikely hash collision could allow a user’s account to be compromised, that also required that they haven’t logged in since 2008. WordPress now invalidates the links in a password reset email if the user remembers their password, logs in, and changes their email address. If you’re already on version 4.0, the update should happen automatically. If you have GreenMellen […]
Read MoreNet Neutrality is a complicated issue. Do we want government controlling the flow of information, or large companies catering our service to those who have the deeper pockets? Is it that simple? No, of course not. My brother, Eric Joiner, blogs regularly at FreightDawg.com. Freight Dawg is a blog that follows the container shipping industry. Eric recently posted an interesting article on the issue of Net Neutrality with a historical perspective. Striking points from Joiner’s article: The net result of collusion by the rail barons was a monopoly on rail traffic and ultimately oil and commodity prices This system eventually became burdensome to industry and starting in the 1970’s transport industries started to become deregulated. Interestingly, the law that applies to the utility companies is the same one that applies to transportation. My feeling is that there is going to be some sort of government regulation on monopoly control of information, […]
Read MoreThere is a segment of people like myself that fall into a specific category: Android users that are on Verizon. If you’re one of those, have I got a phone for you! If you prefer iPhone to Android, Susanna has a post to keep you covered. If you prefer Android but you’re not with Verizon, we’ll get to that in a bit. Last week, Motorola launched the new Droid Turbo and it’s a beast. It’s remarkably similar to the Droid Maxx that I picked up last year, but with some great improvements. I’m loving Motorola’s new phones because they keep them very close to stock Android, without all of the crazy bells and whistles that other manufacturers (such as Samsung) tend to stick on them. This leads to two wonderful things: All things being even, the phones run more smoothly. When a new version of Android is released, these phones […]
Read MoreThis past weekend at WordCamp San Francisco, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual “State of the Word” speech and had some interesting things to share. WordCamp San Francisco is changing For the past seven years, WordCamp San Francisco has essentially been the “main” WordCamp in the United States. Starting next year there will be a “WordCamp US”, though the date and location are yet to be determined. WordPress Survey WordPress sent out their annual survey earlier this year and it received over 33,000 responses. Some of the numbers from it: 25% of the respondents make their living fully off of WordPress. Combined, the 33,000 respondents are responsible for 500k-1m websites. Roughly 10% of those websites took longer than 200 hours to build. Five major releases in the past year Since WordCamp San Francisco 2013, there have been five major WordPress releases, including the big release of WordPress 4.0 last […]
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