I receive an alarming number of calls regarding WordPress intrusions. Some of the people who contact me are aware they’ve been hacked, while others have only noticed that their website is loading slowly or having other minor glitches. Sometimes evidence that your WordPress website has been hacked is prominent — there’s an advertisement for Viagra or Ugg Boots right on your homepage. Other times, however, your website may not show any signs of the hack at all.
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November 4, 2010
Search Engines
So, you just paid your designer to build you a new sleek-looking website. It’s “optimized” for the search engines and is supposed to do better than your last site (which was just sitting there collecting virtual dust). A month goes by. Is your website doing well? Is it doing poorly? Did you get your money’s worth? How are you supposed to know? Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use to actually measure your site’s performance.
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November 4, 2010
Search Engines
Getting to the top of the Google search results is a big deal, clearly. When I do a Google search, I don’t too often travel far beyond the first page of results, and you probably don’t either. The bottom line is that if your website is on the first page, you get lots of traffic (and business). If your website is on page seven or twelve you’ll get zilch.
So how do you get to the top of the search engine results page (SERP)? Well, SEO (search engine optimization) of course! But, SEO is costly and complicated, right? After all, there are people whose sole profession is to optimize websites…
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November 3, 2010
Web Design
You may have heard about it already, and if you’ve been perusing through my blog posts you’ve heard it from me, but you may not know what website validation is. It might sound like a techie term that’s beyond either your expertise or interest, but it’s actually both pretty simple and pretty important. Let’s take a look at what valid code is and why it should matter to you.
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November 2, 2010
Getting Started
Not all web designers are created equal. Without experience in the industry, it may be a little tricky to know if the designer you’re thinking about hiring qualifies as a “good one” or not. Are you going to end up with a great looking (and functioning) website in a month (and still be happy with it in a year) or are you going to be writing complaints to the Better Business Bureau because the guy you hired never finished anything?
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