If you haven’t setup 3rd party email before, it can be a bit intimidating setting up G Suite the first time. I’m going to walk you through the info you need to gather in advance and then the setup process.
How to Select a Business Email Provider
You’ve selected and purchased a domain for your business, now it’s time to decide how your email will be powered. If you go out and search for “email provider” you’ll see tons of possibilities out there, but honestly very few of them are relevant to your business.
WordPress vs Squarespace: Is Open or Closed Source Better for You?
There are a lot of WordPress vs Squarespace articles out there, but they strongly leaning towards one or the other. While I am a WordPress developer and love WordPress, it’s not right for everyone. And I’d rather not take on a client than have a client have a bad match for their needs. So I’ve written up this comparison which goes into a lot of detail showing the two platforms side by side. This chart is broken down into sections because there are a LOT of things to compare.
New GDPR law and what it means for website owners
The European Union has a new privacy law, the GDPR, which goes into effect in May 2018, and unlike previous laws, these are extra-territorial. That means the new privacy law applies to countries outside of the EU. We’ve put together a breakdown of what it means for you as a website owner.
How to Securely Send Logins, Passwords & Files
We all know that we shouldn’t just send our logins, passwords and sensitive or large files in regular email. But while we know we shouldn’t, most people don’t know how to send these types of things safely & securely.
What are registrars, hosts, nameservers, and DNS records?
This is a question that I get asked about all the time. What are registrars, hosts, nameservers, and DNS records? And more importantly, how do they actually affect me and my website?
Email Types & How to Actually Get Your Email Delivered
Maybe it’s happened to you, one day your email is working fine and the next it’s not. You didn’t do anything, so how did your website suddenly go from reliably sending email to not. I’m regularly asked this question. Trust me, I’d love to wave a magic wand and get rid of all your email woes. Unfortunately, I can’t. The issue is that for your emails to get delivered they have to interact with literally hundreds of servers and thousands of filters. And to add more complexity, these filters change literally every day. This is why things can suddenly stop working. They suddenly stop working because the filters changed. Prefer to watch this article as a video? I’ve got you covered: Why is it so hard to get email past filters? Because of spammers. Every year spammers get better at getting through spam filters, so the spam filters, in turn, get tougher for everyone to get through. This is why approaches that worked in the past to deliver email suddenly stop working. The top spam filters are updated constantly and are personalized to each account based on that account’s behaviors. This is why you may reach some people at a domain but not others. Personal email providers like @gmail, @yahoo, @aol, etc all make it much harder to get past their filters. Additionally, the owners of these personal accounts are usually clueless about how filters work. How does email get from sender to recipient? Let’s talk about the journey of a typical email (simplified some): An email is created and sent (by a person, by an app, by a website, etc). The email looks on the internet look for the recipient’s server. It hopefully finds the recipient server and delivers the email to there. The recipient server is a lot
4 Plugins to Make Building Pages Easier
I get this question a lot. What is the best visual page builder plugin? A lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs want to be able to get a beautiful looking website without swimming in the mess of all that code. Definition: A visual page building plugin is a tool installed on WordPress that allows you to build complex layouts by manipulating blocks on your screen instead of writing code. There are a ton of web page builders out there. It seems like every week a new one is coming out. Some promise to be simple, others promise to be more robust than my car.
10 Free eCommerce Themes for WordPress
I regularly am asked about low-cost ways to setup an online store. While there are marketplaces like eBay and etsy, a number of individuals and businesses want to be able to sell via their own website. A low-cost option to solve this is using WordPress (which is free) with a free eCommerce theme. The benefit of starting with an eCommerce theme over trying to add a plugin to just any theme is that everything is already designed to integrate together. It can save a lot of design and customization time.
Creating Client & Customer Profiles
Every time we start a new project there is one common question: who is the target audience? You may call them clients, customers, or users. But regardless of what we call them, we need to know something about who they are and what they want. This information decides both what is presented to them and how it is presented.