When blogging, you usually start out with nothing but a blank document and a ton of thoughts to work with. It can sometimes be hard to get those thoughts and ideas out on paper, simply because one does not know where to start or they are over analyzing everything. How to Combat a Creative Block, by Desizn Tech, explains how to get over a writer’s block using five helpful steps. Read the rest of this entry »
Read moreSearch engine rankings and traffic are still very important in today’s SEO world, but goal measurement and analytics is increasingly crucial to a successful campaign. In How to Configure & Track Google Analytics Goals for SEO, by Search Engine Watch, important tips and “how to” information on configuring and tracking Google Analytics Goals is explained. Read the rest of this entry »
Read moreEver thought about creating a custom 404-error page? In Web Designer Depot’s post, How to Build Effective 404-Error Pages in WordPress, Ms.Ladoshkina explains why having a good 404-error page is important and goes into detail about creating one. Read the rest of this entry »
Read moreOwn a small business? Want to be the big dog? Want to be on top of the game in your industry? Since our clients are small businesses everywhere, we try to keep up on ways to help them improve business in any way possible. A recent article on Forbes, 7 Habits of Great Small Business Owners, elaborates on what awesome small businesses have in common that makes them successful.
Below is a summary of their main points, and to read the full article, click here. Read the rest of this entry »
Read moreAfter dealing with some site/server security issues with one of our clients recently, 5 Ways to Secure Your Hosting Account is a very timely article we found that may help you avoid such a circumstance. The average webmaster probably needs to spend between 4 and 8 hours boosting the security of their websites, accounts, and servers. Hopefully we can help!
Here are 5 good tips that TemplateMonster’s article suggests: Read the rest of this entry »
Read moreWe attended the Dallas SEO/SEM Meetup last night regarding Tips and Tools to Help Small Businesses Succeed.
Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance was able to recommend several tools for online marketing that small business owners can use to gain more traction online. Here are just a few of them: Read the rest of this entry »
Read moreFinding material that can be used by graphic designers to help ease workflow is sometimes hard. According to a recent article by Template Monster, the best place to start looking, of course, is online. Anything from fonts and icons, to color schemes and custom forms can be found. These online tools, found on Adam’s post, Ease Your Workflow with Free Design Tools, can be extremely useful in the development and design of your website.
“And the best part is…they’re all free to use.”
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It looks like Google is testing a new version of their image search preview function. Please note that you may not experience the same visual experience, as it appears they are only rolling this out to certain users (A/B Testing). Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve got a quick tip today. If you are using WordPress or another PHP based platform, you can place the following code in your footer, next to a copyright ( © ) symbol and it will always display the current year.
Note: The code in the snippets below needs to be in php tags. Not sure why my pre tags aren’t working properly and allowing me to put the code as-is…
php echo date("Y")
Hope this helps someone out there on the search for a solution to this!
And if you need to put the date anywhere else on your site, this works as well.
To display the three letter month, simply replace Y with M
php echo date("M")
For the day of the month, use “d”
php echo date("d")
For a full list of the available options, take a look at the php manual for the date function.
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If you have purchased a theme from TemplateMonster or another WordPress theme site, it is likely that some of the custom post types used to create things like portfolio, client, or testimonial pages, as well as the URLs that those pages write to, may not be named optimally.
Most recently for us, we had a client that owned a shopping center and wanted each store to have a profile page. Well the template they chose had a “Client” custom post type that did exactly what we wanted it to, except it was labeled “Clients” in the admins and the urls it wrote to were “/clients-view/page-name“, which is less than optimal.
What we want to do is change the “Clients” label in the WordPress admin/dashboard to “Stores” so that the admin is more user friendly, then change the “clients-view” in the URL to read “store” so that the URL makes sense and it is a tad bit more SEO friendly.
Read the rest of this entry »