Warning of a PayPal phishing scam email that arrived in my inbox this morning.
General
Most articles in this category address general Web and Internet issues. Some of them are rants and ramblings that may have less to do with the Web and the Internet and more to do with life lessons and business lessons.
How to Create an Effective Value Proposition
Ray Kinsella, in “Field of Dreams”, turned his cornfield into a baseball diamond, and people came. In real life, as business owners, we have to persuade people to come. We do this by establishing trust, being reliable, treating customers with respect, and offering quality goods and services at prices that are deemed valuable. And when it comes to our marketing efforts, we persuade people to take the first steps by presenting a value proposition that resonates with them — a value proposition that shows, most of all, that we understand who they are and where they want to be. This article offers a formula for building an effective value proposition that increases your chances of engaging with the members of your target audiences.
What Exactly is a Web Application, Anyway?
When I tell people my business is building and maintaining Web sites and Web applications and providing WordPress support services, I get interesting reactions.
Pretty much everyone knows what a Web site is.
Fellow WordPress developers/designers and WordPress Do-It-Yourselfers (people who build and manage their own WordPress Web sites) know what WordPress support means.
But many people don’t understand what I mean by “Web application“.
In this article, I attempt to explain.
Offer Live Chat for Enhanced Customer Engagement and Sales
Live Chat is here to stay, and smart businesses everywhere and in every industry are using it to provide the immediate personal touch that their prospects and customers long for. In this blog post, I discuss the Live Chat software I’m currently using (Tawk.to) and offer some reasons you ought to consider going “Live Chat” as soon as possible.
Decisions
The decisions we make (as well as the ones we don’t make, because not to decide is to decide) can have profound, life-changing consequences. Dang if that’s not both scary and exciting. In this article, I share a couple of anecdotes about decisions and remind myself it’s good to stop sometimes, smell the coffee, and reflect on things.
Protected: Gravity Forms API Tutorial
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Do I Need to Hire a WordPress Developer? – Part 1
Friends, family, acquaintances, and clients often ask the question, “Do I really need to hire a WordPress developer”? While WordPress is an extremely accessible tool for building Web sites, there are some reasons to consider bringing in a professional. In this admittedly thinly-veiled pitch, I offer some insights that focus on the potential problems associated with WordPress plugins – and how professional WordPress developers can avoid and address them.
BlueHost Implements Auto-Updating of WordPress. WTF?
This is crazy. I’m not talking about managed sites here. BlueHost decided on their own to implement auto-updating of WordPress for all their shared hosting accounts using WordPress. And not just minor/security releases. I just discovered four sites I manage were updated to WordPress 4.3 without my knowledge or approval. I had good reasons for […]
Side Effects of Rebuilding Web Sites to be Responsive and Mobile-Friendly
What drives many to rebuild their existing Web sites to be responsive and mobile-friendly are justifiable concerns about user experience and search engine placement. After all, the need to make Web pages look and act right on small mobile devices has only intensified as more and more people spend proportionately more of their Internet time on those devices. And then there’s Google, who, on April 21, 2015, started boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Yet it is a side effect of this rebuild process that may turn out to be the best reason of all to undertake it. In this article I share the insightful and unsolicited comments of a client with whom I am rebuilding his Web site to be responsive and mobile-friendly.
Traffic Does Not Equal Audience
Making coffee this morning with one of the network news shows on in the background, I caught the tail end of an interview with Michael Wolff. Wolff, the provocative essayist, author, and columnist, was promoting his latest book, "Television Is the New Television". Something he said reminded me of Pamela Anderson.