Author: Juan Lopez

The Basics on WordPress Website Maintenance

Leave a comment Wordpress
WordPress Website Maintenance

WordPress website maintenance – why? Back in the “old days”, you would get a website designed and launched and you were done. A majority of websites are now developed in WordPress and this CMS platform has grown over the years. As it is continuously evolving, it needs to be maintained. WordPress works very hard to keep their platform secure while adding new features. Security updates are released to address vulnerabilities that are found or for certain things to work an update is needed. There are specific WordPress website maintenance tasks you should make sure are executed regularly to keep your site secure and functional. Make sure your website is being backed up It is often that a client thinks their website is being backed up regularly by their web hosting provider. However, this is not always the case. Many entry level or cheaper hosting plans don’t have backups, or don’t back them up on a schedule you are comfortable with. […]

Developing an Application? Define your MVP first!

Leave a comment Mobile Apps, Web Applications
Define Your MVP

What is an MVP? According to Wikipedia an MVP (minimal viable product) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future development. Some experts suggest that in business to business transactions an MVP also means saleable: “it’s not an MVP until you sell it. Viable means you can sell it”. Before you decide to build a new product or application, make sure you define your MVP first. It is very common that a client approaches us with an idea to automate or streamline existing processes to increase productivity. We find that often that their ideas are very large and can take a long time to develop. This can cause a lot of a lot of feedback, delays, changes and revisions. Even worse, when put in production, the actual usage is much lower than expected. These problems can happen because you didn’t take an MVP approach or the MVP was poorly defined.  You […]

Your website needs a check-up!

Leave a comment Website Design & Development
website check-up

Have you done your Website check-up? Your website is your online business card, so it is important that you monitor your website and make sure it is in good hands. Many business owners have learned how to manage their own sites, run campaigns and often do a good job. However, more often than not, there is something that can slip by. Maintaining a website is very time consuming and now more than ever, because it is never finished! In order to be relevant, you need to be adding and updating your website content, ensuring the overall design is still up to standards, and that the message is geared to your target audience. Updating your website is takes a lot of time so you need to make sure you are editing the right pages with the right content. Whether you manage your own website or pay for a service to do this for you, here is a list of basic things you can review […]

Validate your HTML code | W3C Validation

Leave a comment Website Design & Development, Website Development
Validate your HTML Code

What is HTML validation? The world wide web consortium (W3C) is an international community that has defined the de-facto standards of how to code HTML on your website. Without them, people who make web browsers would not know what do change in the code to render (show) your web pages correctly. There has been many versions of HTML standards, the latest version is HTML5 which added cool features such as improved video, image rendering on the fly and geolocation. For HTML code to work properly on the latest browsers it needs to be written correctly and that is determined by the W3C standards, so when you validate your html code against these standards then your web page will have better chances of showing up correctly and consistently on all browsers. The good news is that the W3C offers an online validator for HTML and CSS so check them out! How can you validate your HTML? Besides the traditional way of validating […]

Difference between domain hosting and web hosting

Leave a comment Hosting, IT Services
difference between web hosting and domain hosting

It can get confusing on understanding the difference between domain hosting and web hosting. Often when I ask a client “Where is your domain hosted?”, they say one of the following: “Oh, I have everything in GoDaddy or X service.” “What’s domain hosting? I bought the domain many years ago, I don’t know.” “Don’t you host my website? You should know.” “I don’t know, ask my IT guy.” What is a Domain? A domain is the “master” address of your internet name, for example nearsource.net is our domain. You purchase domains at registrar sites, for example we have our own registrar nearsourcehosting.com available for clients to register domains. There are many popular registrar sites like www.godaddy.com and register.com. These usually also offer web hosting as well (explained later in this article). Domains are normally purchased (registered) for 1 or more years and needs to be renewed yearly or when it expires. There is no one-time purchase option when registering a domain. […]

WordPress 4.8 coming out in June 2017

Leave a comment Website Development, Wordpress
WordPress 4.8 June 2017

WordPress 4.8 is already announced to be released in June 2017! This is not a security update or minor update like the past releases earlier this year. It is the first major release for 2017. WPbeginner.com has release an article with screenshots and an overview of what is coming out. If you are a WordPress enthusiast, you should check it out. Some changes that are coming: Text Widgets will now have a visual and text editor instead of just a text editor. New Image widget for sidebars New Video widget to embed videos from different sources such as Youtube and Vimeo Updated News & Events widget in the WordPress admin/dashboard page Full article below: http://www.wpbeginner.com/news/whats-coming-in-wordpress-4-8-features-and-screenshots/

How and why to use images on your website

Leave a comment Website Development, Wordpress
Images On Your Website

There are many reasons to add images on your website and blog posts. Besides illustrating your content, it makes your site look nicer, more user friendly and can help you with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You don’t want to have a boring page with just paragraphs and no images. It has been proven that adding images increase the chances of user engagement, social media sharing and can increase your site traffic. However, you need to do it right otherwise you won’t get the most benefits out of them. If your images are too large, it will make your page load slower and page load speed is an important factor for both user experience and SEO. You have to make sure you have rights to use your images, you can’t just do a Google search and grab images and put them on your site. Where to find images for your site You can use your own photos, design files or […]

Steps to Build a New Website

Leave a comment Website Development, Wordpress
steps to build a new website

Have you wanted to build a new website but not sure how to get started? Or you hired a web team or developer to get your site done and want to make sure you will be happy with the results? Everybody has their style or approach. Some people are design oriented, others are content driven while others just start throwing things together to see what works. The following is an overview of our basic steps to build a new website with a web development team. When we work on a new website, we start with a questionnaire which helps both the website owner and the development team to understand or define what is wanted. This will help clear up many typical questions that come up in any website project. The following are the steps we follow when building a new website. 1) Website Questionnaire We attempt to find out what the website goals are. We start by defining what company is this […]

Plugins 101 – 5 Essential WordPress Plugins

Leave a comment CMS, Website Development, Wordpress
WordPress Plugins

What WordPress plugins should you have on your site? This is something a lot of newcomers or DIY (“do it yourself”) website builders ask when getting started with their WordPress website. This is a basic list to get you started, but I am sure you will come across many more that you will setup for your site. Each website is different and has different needs and different target audiences. Some sites need an image gallery, other sites need an e-commerce component (we suggest using WooCommerce), and the different options goes on and on. WordPress lists more than 40,000 plugins in their repository, so the possibilities are endless! Whatever the case, I am confident you will need the following plugins, so this is our list of 5 essential free plugins you need on your site. Each of these plugins have alternative options, so it is up to you which one to use, but we find these the easiest and most comprehensive […]

Should I go with WordPress for my site?

Leave a comment CMS, Website Development, Wordpress

You are thinking of developing a new website and you keep hearing of WordPress. As of now more than 25% of websites on the internet run on WordPress, so it would be hard to believe that all these people are wrong. However, it is not for everyone. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) which allows users to easily setup and edit their website via a user friendly interface. When we first started developing websites for our customers, we did all kinds of sites from static HTML Websites, custom CMS systems to custom coded websites. Over the last few years we have been developing more and more WordPress websites because of it’s many benefits: Widely Supported: It is easier to find people and information on how to manage your WordPress website. SEO Friendly: It is built in a way that it is ready for you to optimize your website for search engines. Plug-ins: There are many plugins (free and paid) […]