Don’t Pay Lots of Money for a Domain I wanted to buy a domain today. I found that both the domain I wanted, 123.com let’s call it, and a variation, the123.com, appeared to be available. The former was for sale from a brokerage, the latter through any registrar. Though I’m perfectly content with the123.com, I […]
How Do People Find My Website?
There was a time when all you had to do was put up a webpage on the internet and people would find it. However, that time is long past. As in, decades past. Then time when you can get people to come to your website without doing anything is over. In 2018, you need to […]
How Do I Know if My Site Has Problems
I’m sorry to say that putting a website online is not as simple as uploading it to a server and leaving it there untouched forever. Technology is constantly changing and your site will require updates. If you are using an out-of-the-box site creator, these will be handled for you. But if you are using a […]
Who Visits My Site? Website Traffic
Every single time a computer visits your site, that visit is tracked in your site logs. But site logs are awful to look at; the log is a list of IP addresses and, if you have a busy site, that list can be incredibly long. So your logs are painful to read but they also […]
Contacts from Clients
A lot of small business owners still imagine that if they get a website online that their phone will start ringing. Though that may have been true in certain niche industries 15 years ago, it’s not longer true. Getting the traffic can be really difficult. But in addition to getting the traffic, you need to […]
Do I Need a Webmaster
Or: How to Perform Maintenance on Your Website There was a time when every person or business with a website needed a webmaster, unless you built that website yourself (i.e. you knew what you were doing). But times have changed. You do not need a webmaster who works for you full time or even part […]
How to Create a Sitemap
Before you let the search engines index your website, you should be sure to create not one but two sitemaps. A sitemap is essentially a directory of pages on your website. However not all sitemaps are created equal: you need both a sitemap for the search engine and a sitemap for the user. […]
Launching Your Website
There are a number of steps you need to go through in order to launch your website, including building your website, uploading it to a server and ensuring that it can be “indexed” (found) by the search engines. You can approach launching your website on a spectrum from a bare-bones approach to the most thorough […]
Who Should Design Your Website?
Unless you are using an out-of-the-box website creator, or a CMS template you find is perfect for your needs, you likely need a web designer. But there are a few things you need to consider. Who Should Design Your Website? The first thing to think about is, what type of site are you building? The […]
Who Should Build Your Website
Once you have decided what type of website you should have (choose a CMS like wordpress!), you need to decide who is going to build it. If you are using an out-of-the-box website builder, you may need no help, especially if you yourself have an eye for design. (If you do not have an eye for […]