Category : Tips & Tricks

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.

How to create WordPress Block Patterns and Block Templates

In this article I will show you how quick and easy it is to set up your page/post layouts with block patterns and block templates. Let’s start with block patterns.

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.”

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.

Choosing a web design/development company to build your website

What do you base your decision on when choosing a web designer?

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

Mind Maps – A great approach for planning a website

The idea behind mind maps is that you start with a central concept, write it down in the middle of a page, then add nodes as you think of different ideas around that concept. You can further develop any of the ideas by branching out more nodes from these ideas and so on. On paper it might look something like this:

Getting video from a DVD onto your web site – easy if you know how!

Ok, so you’ve got some video on a DVD that you want to put on your web site – should be easy enough to do you would imagine, right? Well it can be easy if you know what tools to use but if you’re trying to search on Google to find out what you need to accomplish this task you can end up chasing your tail or chasing up on many bogus leads. Read more »