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

Posted on Tech Notes

Using Amazon S3 to Backup Your WordPress Site

We are big fans of the Amazon services and the free tier in particular.  The site you are on includes a WordPress server, and we like to use Amazon to help out our administration of the server and its applications.  One of our regular tasks is backing up and migrating applications to other servers.  In this article, we will look at how to easily backup and restore your server to Amazon S3. The Amazon S3 Plugin One of the strengths of WordPress is the number of plugins available to it.  You can add too many plugins however there are some that just make sense.  With that in mind, let’s look at a plugin that will help us simplify a common task.... Read more

A grid of example domain names
Posted on General

Whats in a Domain Name?

Do I need a Domain Name? A new business is rarely going to skip out on a domain name these days.  A website and Internet presence have become a cost of doing business.  However, a small operation or a blogger might decide that they can use other options for their Internet site and skip the domain registration process. The free options available from social networking sites, blogging hubs, and even Google provide a way to create some web pages or even a blog site within an existing domain.  Many of these options are tempting as the hosting provider touts that you will become a part of their network and provided some free advertising and access to their community. Your Content,... Read more

Posted on Introductory Course

Personal Brand Building – You are the Brand

The Internet not only allows us to launch a business, it allows us to create and build a personal brand.  A brand has always been associated with a product in the past and that has not changed.  Now you are the product and your personal brand will help you build awareness that can lead to revenue across a family of services or businesses.  Building a brand takes time and effort.  In this class, we will take the first steps in creating our brand.  After the first steps, we will set ourselves on a course to continue to build our empire. This class focus is marketing and how to use the Internet to solve common marketing problems.  If you have not had much... Read more