I’ve written previously about my love of reading my RSS feed on my phone before I go to sleep every night. It’s the perfect way for me to end my day.
However, there is one bad trend I notice on mobile sites and it really interferes with what I want to do on the site – READ IT. Shocking, right?
So many of the sites that I click through to read I’m greeted with a giant and obnoxious email subscription box. Is that any way to greet a reader going to your site for the first time?
Over my 5 years at LyntonWeb I’ve helped launch hundreds of new website, and that’s not an exaggeration.
When launching a new site, you need to update the DNS to point the domain name to the new server (if there is one; there usually is for us).
Wait, “what is DNS?”, you’re probably asking. DNS, or domain name system, is a naming system for computers, servers, or anything connected to a network. Think of it as a phone book. You have a name (hopefully), but you can’t tell your phone to call Steve Guttenberg and expect to be connected to him, the phone system doesn’t work that way. You need to have Steve Guttenberg’s actual phone number to reach him. By the way, if any of you do, please let me know. I’ve got a great movie idea for him.
There are times where I am searching for a business, band, restaurant, whatever, and the top result is a Google+ Place page, or a Yelp page. Or worse, a Facebook page. No real website. This usually happens with smaller or new businesses.
Don’t get us wrong. Having a Facebook, Google+ Page, and Yelp pages are great, and will definitely help your search engine ranking. But you still need an official home on the web where your content lives.
What happens if Facebook shuts down tomorrow and you rely on them to host your web presence?
Look at you with that fancy new website!Now you can sit back and relax until it’s time to redo your website in a few years, right?
Wrong.
Websites are like cars, they need regular maintenance. Like, what would you do if your website kept making a cuuur-CHUNK noise every time you turned left? What would you do?
What WOULD you do?
You may have heard that it’s been a busy week for WordPress hackers this past week.
If you haven’t heard, it’s been a busy week for WordPress hackers this past week.
ArsTechnica has reported that over 100,000 sites have been infected by these attacks.
In under four days, three of my personal sites have had over 800 malicious login attempts. That’s over 8 attempts every hour.
Being hacked isn’t something that happens to non-technical people. It can happen to anyone. I was hacked earlier this year!
So, what can you do to protect yourself? Great question!
When you’ve been building websites for as long as we have you hear a lot of lies, falsehoods, misconceptions, and other stuff that makes you do that confused dog look.
Don’t fear, though. We’re here to clear some of these things up for you. Here are 4 website lies that you really should stop listening to:
We’re long past the days where you could run a business without a website. You need one. That’s not even debated any more. But now that you do have a website (if not, call us) are you talking to your audience? Like, are you truly speaking to them?
First off, are you using language that is way above, or way below your target audience’s understanding? If your target audience is lawyers, you can use very specific language to talk to lawyers. But if you are a lawyer and you’re using your website to attract clients you can’t use the same terminology and methods to attract non-lawyers. People need to understand what you’re saying.
Congratulations. Launching a website is a big deal. We should know, we launch a lot of websites. But now that design, development, and quality assurance testing are done and you’ve launched your site, that doesn’t mean that you can kick up your feet and relax.
No, your work is just beginning.
Your website is a living, breathing part of your sales team. You need to make sure you keep it going. Here are some tips to do that:
QA. Quality Assurance. If you’ve worked on any type of project before you’ve probably heard this term before.
If you haven’t, QA is the process during a project where you put the thing you’re working on, in our case, websites, under a series of tests and user scenarios.
QA is an important process in any project to ensure that your product is 100% ready for launch. You don’t want to find out afterwards that everything is a mess and broken like Apple did this week with their iOS 8 update. We don’t need any crying Dawsons.
Testing and QA is something that we at LyntonWeb think about a lot.
While starting our QA process for a website we ask ourselves a few questions:
I never was a big reader. My mother fought and fought with me to get me to read as a child. As an adult I try to read, but I get bored with books halfway through and abandon them and never look back.
But one thing I do read consistently (besides comic books that is) is my RSS feed. I love reading blogs.
I end every day by opening my RSS reader on my phone and going through the day’s news. I subscribe to many blogs spanning multiple subjects. From comics, movies and TV, marketing, web trends, general interest blogs (like the great kottke.org for example), photography, and a ton more.
Why is reading blogs important?