I was interviewed about my WordPress and business journey for the KitchenSinkWP podcast. I met host Adam Silver a few years ago through Dustin Hartzler, host of the Your Website Engineer podcast. Podcast summary Tools mentioned Conclusion What did you find interesting or helpful about this episode? Leave a comment!
Note: The No Longer in Directory plugin was, ironically, removed from the WordPress plugin directory in 2018. There's no direct replacement. The Vendi Abandoned Plugin Check plugin will show on your Plugins screen the number of days since a plugin was last updated, which is useful for detecting abandoned plugins. For plugins that aren't in […]
I gave this presentation, Website Mistakes Small Businesses Make, and How to Fix Them, at WordCamp Grand Rapids 2014. I’ve seen many small businesses make website mistakes that hurt their results. My presentation was about how to fix these mistakes so your site delivers business results. Below are the video, slides, and detailed notes. Not optimizing to sell How […]
I'm very excited to announce that I'll be speaking at WordCamp Grand Rapids 2014! My session is titled, Website Mistakes Small Businesses Make, and How to Fix Them. I'll be giving away free advice, so join in! My speaker interview was just posted. WordCamp Grand Rapids is the annual WordPress conference in Grand Rapids, MI. This […]
These are the best WordPress podcasts I've found. They have content for WordPress site owners, designers, and developers. My favorites are those that are focused on education rather than news. I listed them in order of preference. If you like these, you should read my other posts about podcasts. I’m always looking for more, so please […]
We talked about WordPress Performance Optimization at the April 2014 meetup of WordPress Grand Rapids, a group I help organize. Since the meetup, I've spoken with a few clients and prospects whose WordPress sites were loading slowly, so I thought it'd be helpful to post here too. The speed of websites has become more important than ever. I talked about it […]
WordPress All-In-One for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson My rating: 3 of 5 stars A broadly informative WordPress book, covering installation, administration, publishing, SEO and social media, design, development, and Network/Multisite. Because it covers so many topics, it doesn't get very deep into any of them. You'll want to read more focused WordPress books (or websites) for […]
You've probably pasted code into WordPress' Text editor, then switched to the Visual Editor, and found that parts of your code were stripped out. The Post Snippets plugin prevents that from happening. It lets you create snippets of text and HTML that can be entered as shortcodes into WordPress pages and posts. For example, you can create shortcodes for Google […]
SiteGround is an excellent WordPress-optimized shared host. They're fast, secure, and reliable, yet inexpensive. They're the host I most frequently recommend to small business and nonprofit clients. From firsthand experience, I've found their plans to be superior to similar hosting plans from GoDaddy, Bluehost, DreamHost, Hostmonster, HostGator, iPage, and small local hosting companies. For clients with larger and/or […]
"What does a small business website need?" This was one of the many questions asked at the Small Business Tech Panel at the Warehaüs, a coworking space in Holland, Michigan in March 2014. Here's an expanded version of the answer I gave. The items (in no particular order) are as follows: Effective content (text, images, video) Too […]
The Advanced Automatic Updates plugin is one of my favorite WordPress plugins, but it lacks a way to easily specify exclusions. I'll show you how to to exclude plugins from being automatically updated by this plugin. May 26, 2020 update: Advanced Automatic Updates hasn’t been updated for over 2 years, so although it may still work, […]
Imsanity is my favorite plugin for resizing and compressing images that are uploaded to WordPress. It's better to resize and compress on your computer prior to uploading, but many people don't know how, or simply won't do it. So, I install Imsanity to do the job for them. What Can Imsanity Do? Resize JPG, PNG, GIF. […]
