In years past there were companies who would contact website owners about the need to renew their domain name. There were generally several "problems" with this. The accounts were not nearing the renewal period, The said companies did not register the site, and The said companies wanted to charge exorbitant fees for the renewal. The tone of the sales letters (or reminder letters if you wanted to be kind), tended to be forceful in nature, pressuring you to immediately sign up with … [Read more...]
posted on March 30, 2011 by
“World Backup Day”
A bunch of Reddit users have decided to declare March 31 as World Backup Day, using the clever tagline “Don’t be an April Fool.” I know if I lost my work, it would be bad. How bad, like I don't even want to think about it... of course I don't want to think about it, because I have lost work before. However, I work to not repeat that mistake, and to help others not have to learn like I did. There are numerous ways to back up data. I do periodic backups over time to external drives, which I … [Read more...]
posted on February 2, 2011 by
Challenging Underlying Design Beliefs
Ever had one of those things that you "just know" is better? Ever turn out you were wrong. I hate that! Yet it happens to be periodically. This is why I like to test things. I'll come up with a good design for a website, show some people, and sometimes walk away with changes based upon some thoughtful insights (and sometimes I walk away knowing everything was just right). Over the last couple of years, I've made a habit of checking out ideas with tools like Google's Web Optimizer which lets … [Read more...]
posted on December 18, 2010 by
WordPress Wins CMS Awards
People continue to ask why I look to Wordpress to build even non blog websites. For various reasons of course, including ease of creating content, ease of changing layouts, and ease of adding modules (plug-ins). All of those factors and more led Wordpress to win the "Hall of Fame CMS" from Pakt Publishing. Pakt Publishing sponsored the Open Source CMS contest, and Wordpress won against other strong contenders like Drupal and Joomla. While it's nice to use "award winning" software, the more … [Read more...]