Screen shot from eclipse IDE
Posted on General

Free Editors to Help With Web Development

Whether you are a full-time developer or a coding hobbyist, there will come a time where you need a professional editing tool.  These are often called an IDE or integrated development environment as these tools do far more than help you edit code.  However, there is good news.  There are some highly functional free tools.  There are several great commercial tools as well, but let’s look at the free editors you should try before spending a dime. The focus for these editors is web development tasks including HTML, CSS, XML, and PHP.  If you are looking for an IDE for another language, take a look at these anyway.  They have plugins and expansions available to help with most popular languages in... Read more

SEO plugins
Posted on Tech Notes

Useful WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress SEO Plugins Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with SEO when it comes to optimizing and promoting your site.  SEO is a complex set of rules that determines the ranking of your site in search engine results.  To improve your website ranking, you need to make sure your site complies with the long laundry list of rules.  Maintaining your sites SEO can be difficult because these rules are ever changing.  So unless you want to make managing your SEO a full-time job, you may want to consider some SEO plugins.   Thankfully there are a handful of free and paid SEO plugins in WordPress that help reduce the overhead of being SEO compliant.  With the support of these... Read more

Billboard with My Blog text
Posted on Tech Notes

Free Sites to Promote Your Blog

We did some research in building our sites and have found these resources for freely listing your blog.  Some have a paid option to promote your blog faster or better.  However, these are a great way to get your blog started and announced. Keep an eye out for opportunities for mutual links and other ways to help your site SEO ranking. There are a lot of directory sites that come and go each year so check back here periodically for new or discontinued sites.  You can always do an Internet search for sites as well.  One last thing, before you go nuts registering all these sites, it does help to show up in sites over time.  We recommend you register with... Read more

Promoting your site
Posted on General

Getting the word out, promoting your blog

A lot of bloggers make the mistake of thinking that if they build a cool site people will just naturally propagate to their site.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  The internet is vast and full of information.  Thus, the chances of someone coming across your site at random are small.  So, if you wish to drive people to your site you are going to need to give your audience directions.  Thankfully, there are some blog services, social tools, and email campaign sites that can help make the process of promoting your blogs easier. Options For Promoting your Blog Using Blog Services Social Media Scheduling Tools Sending Email Campaign Blog Services These are communities of blog sites already available.  I... Read more

wordpress plugins gears
Posted on Tech Notes

WordPress plugins you should check out

One of the strengths of WordPress as a platform is its plugins.  Wordpress plugins are available in all shapes and sizes including a large number of free options.  We have mentioned a few plugins we use and like, but here is our top list of plugins we find useful.  These are worth spending time with as they can save you time and ease administrative tasks.   Analytics WordPress Plugins You spend time building your site and content.  Thus, you want to know how it is being received.  The plugins we find best for analytics related administration are Google Analytics Plugin, Yoast, Jetpack, and Google Analytics Dashboard. Google Analytics plugin and dashboard The Google Analytics plugin provides a quick way to... Read more

Image Recycler Logo
Posted on Tech Notes

Image Recycler – A Great Way to Improve Your Site

In both my consulting jobs and development of personal websites, image size has been an issue.  Marketing focused sites that highlight products and services tend to be full of screenshots and high-quality images.  However, even blog posts will often need a picture or two to avoid pages full of text.  The problem with all these images is that they can be large files and thus slow down your site.  Even though more users have high-speed connections to the Internet, a good site will aim to be “friendly” to low-speed connections. For professional developers and sites, the importance of smaller file sizes goes beyond aesthetics.  Google and other search engines include page load times as part of the calculation in page... Read more