There are a gazillion different reasons people start their own businesses, and just as many ways of going about it. I started mine, in 2009, having thought about it for 3 years and learnt the skills I needed. But then I found the decision made for me by my then employer. You could day I… Read more

For those of us who are Boomers, or late Generation-Xers, and who have good jobs with good companies, here’s something to keep in mind: The older we become, the more likely that it will be us, rather than our younger colleagues, who will be downsized when the cost-trimming starts. And, of course, getting a new… Read more

In 2009 I was leading a US$20 million project when the Global Financial Crisis hit – and the project was canned. I had been thinking about my own business for a while, and suddenly I had the decision made for me! By then, I had been dabbling online for some years – I knew how… Read more

Membership Sites can deliver a major revenue stream to your business In this article I’ll review the Paid Memberships Pro plugin, and show you how I use it to build membership websites with WordPress. Key facts: Product name:Paid Memberships Pro – Membership Site Plugin What it is:A highly flexible, highly customisable, powerful WordPress plugin to… Read more

Google recently announced that it will be introducing an update that will assess the quality of the experience users have on your website – the Page Experience Update. But what, exactly, does that mean? Well here are Google’s guidelines, which are typically opaque. Good website design should be all about delivering a good user experience… Read more

I am often asked to help people customise an existing website layout or design, where the element they want to edit is not included in the standard Appearance > Customise screens (assuming they’re using WordPress). In this situation there’s no option but to add the styling manually through the Additional CSS tab, which you’ll find… Read more

Over the past year or more I was becoming increasingly frustrated with Google Search Console because I kept getting error warnings. Initially these mostly related to ‘Mobile Usability’ and I’d get a warning that ‘clickable elements were too close together’ or ‘text too small to read’ – when no changes had been made to the… Read more

Every now and then I get an error message from Google Search Console that tells me a ‘submitted URL is marked noindex’. This is an easy error to attract because it’s caused by marking a new page on your site as ‘noindex’, but then forgetting to exclude it from your XML sitemap. Basically, the rule… Read more

12 years ago, when I first got into marketing online, getting regular search traffic from Google was reliable, as long as you played by their rules. I played by their rules because, at the time, their rules made a lot of sense and did result in a good user experience. And I got traffic. In… Read more