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What is caching?

By Kirsty Gasston 13th March 2018


At some point during your website's development or maintenance, your web developer(s) are bound to mention caching to you, and will likely stress how important it is for your website's speed and optimisation. But what is caching exactly and why is it so important? Caching basics First, you need to understand the basics - when you load a webpage in your web browser, the browser must download the required files to display that page. This includes...

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WordPress plugins for a successful CMS

By Kirsty Gasston 4th October 2017


WordPress has always been a very powerful blogging platform, but for website developers and those looking to update and add to their website on a regular basis, it can also be used as a very powerful content management system (CMS), with the implementation of the right plugins. Here's a summary of the plugins that we consider to be crucial in the setup of a website that will be using WordPress as a full CMS. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) As web ...

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Advanced Custom Fields Basic Introduction

By Kirsty Gasston 24th August 2017


Advanced Custom Fields is a particularly useful WordPress plugin which allows you to take full control of your WordPress edit screens & custom field data, making content editing much easier. Installation You can install the free version of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin in the same way as you would any other WordPress plugin - login to your WordPress administration and search/install the Advanced Custom Fields plugin from the plugins pag...

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What are website wireframes?

By Kirsty Gasston 24th April 2017


The important first step in the design and development of any website is the production of a set of website wireframes. This is even more important since the introduction of responsive website design and mobile-first web design. But what exactly are website wireframes and why are they so important? What is a website wireframe? A website wireframe is a layout for a page of the site, demonstrating the structure of the page and the elements to be ...

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Web design and development terminology

By Kirsty Gasston 4th March 2016


As web designers and web developers, there is a certain amount of terminology that we use on such a regular basis that it often doesn’t occur to us that other people that we’re working with, including our customers, might not know what some of the things we’re referring to are. We’re working on a bit of a ‘glossary of terms’ at the moment to help clarify some of words we use – this is helpful in that we can provide a copy to clients...

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How to access your social media analytics

By Kirsty Gasston 12th June 2015


So by now we all know that we should be using social media for our businesses right? And hopefully you know how to engage with your audiences across Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Pinterest. But do you know how to measure the results of your activity on these social media channels? Well if not, here's a quick overview of the social media analytics that are available and how you can access them. Twitter You can see detailed reports on the numb...

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Writing website content

By Kirsty Gasston 1st April 2015


If you're having a new website built, are adding pages to your existing website or just updating the content on the site, you need to think carefully about the approach you take to writing the content. Before you get started, take a step back and make sure that you've thought about these basics. Web users won't read your content So, probably not want you want to hear when you're setting out to write your website content, but you need to accept th...

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Google’s new mobile usability reports

By Kirsty Gasston 19th November 2014


A couple of weeks ago Google added a new report within Webmaster Tools - the Mobile Usability report. This new report is automatically available within your Google Webmaster Tools account (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-usability). This new tool highlights usability issues for your site on mobile devices so that you can aim to improve the mobile experience for your website users. The errors that the report monitors and reports on...

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Enhance your search engine results with rich snippets

By Kirsty Gasston 10th October 2014


Rich snippets are a great way of enhancing your website's search engine listings, making them more informative, helping them stand out more and ultimately increasing your click-through rate. So what are rich snippets? Essentially, they are the additional lines of information that you see with a Google search engine result that are designed to give users a better sense of what the webpage may contain and therefore aid their decision as to whether...

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Looking for an ecommerce system to get your business online?

By Kirsty Gasston 12th September 2014


Setting up your business with an ecommerce system is a great way to get setup with an online shop, therefore expanding your potential market and sales dramatically. Choosing the right ecommerce system for your business can be tricky though - you need a system that offers all of the features that you need to make the process simple and straightforward to add and administer products and effectively and efficiently monitor orders. But at the same ti...

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Google Plus Business Pages Setup Guide

By Kirsty Gasston 6th August 2014


Following on from my previous post, which explained how to set up a personal Google+ profile and your Google Authorship, I now move on to how to set up Google Plus Business Pages. To get started with creating a Google+ company page, you need to log in to Google with the account which will own the page (other users can be invited to be managers of the page, but there can only be one owner). Then select ‘Pages’ from the menu on the top left. ...

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Google Plus and Google Authorship Setup Guide

By Kirsty Gasston 22nd July 2014


Google+ (or Google Plus) is Google’s social media channel – their equivalent of Facebook or Twitter. Setting up your Google+ profile correctly and actively using Google+ as a social network using a Google+ company page can be a great help to your search engine optimisation. Google Authorship is how Google associates authors with articles that they write across the web. Ever seen listings in your search results on Google with a thumbnail of th...

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