In the third part of my series about the regular maintenance tasks you need to perform on your WordPress site,  I’m going to talk about optimising your WordPress site (in the UK we optimise never optimize 🙂 ). See the base of this posts for the other articles in this series. What Is Optimisation? Optimisation is my fancy way of saying spring cleaning your WordPress site.  During an optimisation process you would clean up your database,  any unwanted files, any unwanted comments and remove any unused plugins or themes. Here are the things I recommend you do every 3-6 months on […]

Many people are more than happy to squirrel away tens of thousands in investments for their kids education, but are you also thinking about digital investments for their futures? I own jenny-matthews.com (live) and faye-matthews.com (currently parked).   I bought and host these domains for my daughters as a digital investment for their future. In this post I want to talk about my thinking behind this investment. Why I Think Personal Domains Will Be Important The ability to own you own digital identity and use it to further your personal goals will be huge in the future.  I call it a digital persona. If you can […]

In a guest post Claudia Somerfield talks about some essential website design items

WordPress is a great tool for publishing your content, but out of the box it is NOT 100% optimised for SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. I thought it would be a good idea to create a video course to show people how to move through the step by step process I use to setup my clients sites for the best SEO. This post is a toe in the water to see if this course is required. If I get enough response I’ll create the course and make it available as a downloadable video course. What Will I Be Teaching? I’ll be showing people who […]

WordPress comes with a number of inbuilt user roles to control what registered users can do when they login to your blog.  I want to explain the various roles available and what capabilities each type of user will have. There’s Just Me, Why Do I Need Roles? If you are a lone blogger who does all the writing and administration themself then you only need two types of user;  readers who do not login and therefore don’t need a role and an administrator.  This post is probably not for you, but if this is your scenario, there are a couple […]

You probably already use anti spam plugins on your site, but sometimes Spam gets through, so how do you tell the difference between Spam (bad comments) and Ham (good comments). This post shows you the evaluation criteria I use before trashing or spamming a comment. The Difference Between Trash and Spam I have two routes for an unwanted comment, I either trash it or spam it, the differences are quiet important.  If I find a comment that is real but I don’t want it to appear on my site (more about why I do this later) I will mark it as trash […]