Blog, News, Tips & Tricks

Blog categories:
  • CMS (2)
  • E-Commerce (1)
  • General (5)
  • Security (3)
  • SEO (4)
  • Tips & Tricks (9)
  • Web Hosting (1)
  • WordPress (12)
  • Choose your WordPress plugins carefully

    One of the great strengths of WordPress is the availability of a vast amount of ‘plugins’ that can add almost any functionality that you can think of or change the way WordPress works. With so many plugins available to enhance a website, it can be tempting to over-use plugins but there can be downsides to using plugins on a website.

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    SEO resources for our clients

    Here I include some hand picked online resources intended for our clients to educate themselves on SEO. These are resources that which we feel are suited to small New Zealand businesses.

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    What is Website Hosting?

    In a nutshell, website hosting (or web hosting) is a service that stores a website (which is made up of computer files and sometimes databases) on a special purpose computer and delivers it to anyone who requests some information from your website.

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    Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Basics

    Note: this an excerpt from our Web Site Management Instruction Manual

    Search engine optimisation is all about improving how a website performs in the results returned by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing/MSN, etc.) for related keywords and phrases. There are 2 main aspects to it – 1) On-site SEO and 2) Off-site SEO.

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    Simple fix for WordPress “The response is not a valid JSON response” error

    On a new WordPress site that I was working on I got an error message “The response is not a valid JSON response.” when I attempted to upload an image to a page via Gutenberg block editor.

    After Googling it, I found a myriad of different solutions and troubleshooting steps to take but in the back of my mind I remembered encountering this before and remembered that it was a simple fix. One solution suggested using the Media Library upload button instead of the direct Upload button. This did actually did allow me to upload the image but when I went to save the page I got the error “Updating failed. Error message: The response is not a valid JSON response.”

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    Why WordPress Page Builders Suck

    In the context of WordPress, page builders are add-ons that provide an alternative interface for creating and laying out web pages. I have concluded that page builders are not a good solution for me or my clients. Here I discuss why.

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    My Top 8 WordPress Advances in the last 12 years

    In the last 12 years I’ve witnessed the evolution of WordPress from a blogging-centric system that could be adapted to work as a basic CMS into a full-blown CMS and even a web application framework. In this post I identify 8 of my favourite WordPress advances.

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    How to adjust zoom on embedded Google Maps

    Update May 2023: This solution still works in 2023!

    I was embedding some Google maps and was having trouble setting the initial zoom level. But after playing around with it for awhile, I figured out the simple trick for how to do it. I thought I would share it here in case it helps someone.

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    Design and Enhance Your Website for a More User Friendly Experience

    When designing and maintaining a website, user experience is a simple, foundational concept that is often overlooked.

    User experience is about how easy or difficult it is for visitors to your website to interact with the website to achieve their goals (and your goals). A good web site user experience requires:

    • easy to find and access content and use the functionality on the site (ease of use)
    • visual impact of the site is engaging and consistent with the brand identity
    • suitable functionality and features which engage the user and make it easy to complete the tasks appropriate to the site (e.g. purchase products, book a room, interact with other site visitors)
    • the website contains compelling, up-to-date content, appropriate to the needs and goals of the visitor
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