WordPress professionals often find they need to work on a copy of a client’s site. It’s almost never a good idea to work on a live site — too many things can go wrong. When changes are needed, it’s better to copy the client’s site, make the necessary changes, test them, and then integrate any […]

At the highest level, search engine optimisation is about three things: creating great content, promoting that content to generate links, and making sure that Google and other search engines can find it. It’s the last of these tasks I’m going to talk about here — specifically, how WordPress site owners can make sure that when […]

Magento may be one of the best eCommerce platforms in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that easy to use. Quite the contrary, setting up a storefront using Magento can be a complex, involved process which only technical experts can weather their way through. The results, however, are more than worth it – […]

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil” is a (mis)quotation that anyone who has seriously studied development knows. Coined by Donald Knuth, it’s intended to convey the idea that some optimizations are better than others, and that wasting time on minor optimizations is an inefficient use of time that could be better spent elsewhere. […]

If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, it’s possible you’ve experienced the white screen of death. When you or another visitor to your WordPress site tries to load a page, they get a blank screen instead of the content. It’s not a common occurrence, but it’s common enough that a WordPress user should know […]

In the early days of the web, every site’s domain name was prepended with “www.” It’s nowhere near as common today — many sites choose to simply use the naked domain, but I’m often asked whether there is any particular reason to choose one option over the other. Is there any advantage to having “www” […]

Unless you’re a PHP guru, WordPress theme development has a steep learning curve. WordPress is popular among users with a modicum of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge, but unless you have a fair bit of PHP under your belt, attempting to develop a WordPress theme can be a confusing endeavor. Drag-and-drop page builders exist to […]

Magento is fast, but, each time a Magento page is built and loaded, billions of instructions are executed on the server’s CPU and memory resources are consumed. On a busy server, that can lead to slow page loads and insufficient resources to serve every page quickly. The solution is caching. When pages — or parts […]

The web has come a long way since the days in the early nineties when Tim Berners-Lee first published his ideas about a new way to organize information. But the web as we know it would be recognizable — if astonishing — to its early users because the core technology of the web, the link, […]

If you are a relatively successful blogger who wants to enhance the revenue your site generates, what are your options? Premium content is the obvious avenue, with many bloggers opting for paywalled articles, podcasts, and ebooks, but one of the best revenue spinners for bloggers — and one that I see used relatively infrequently — […]