Recent Posts from the LWN Blog
We don’t post a lot, but when we do, it’s worth reading. Check out our latest articles here.
Two Simple WordPress Security Methods You Should Be Using on Your WordPress Website
WordPress runs over 40% of the Internet, which makes it a target for attackers for many reasons. Fortunately, WordPress is incredibly flexible and has an incredible amount of community support, so there are several ways to make it more robust and secure using free plugins. Here are two simple WordPress security methods you should be using on your website to prevent it from being compromised. This isn’t everything you should be doing, but these methods are very simple and very effective. Use Two-Factor Login WordPress Security Two-Factor authentication has become far more common in the last several years. This method…
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Five Plugins You Should Be Using on Your WordPress Website
One of the reasons WordPress is used so widely (40% of websites) is because of its extensive plugin library. As I write this post, it has over 55,000 free plugins, and thousands of more premium plugins, all created by skilled (and some not-so-skilled) software developers. Not all of these plugins are created equal though. Some are great. Some… not so much. When choosing the plugins to use on your WordPress site, you need to be careful to choose trusted plugins that have a higher number of installations, solid reviews, and are well supported. Otherwise, it’s easy to get in trouble…
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10 Things to Check on Your Website This Year
One of my pet peeves is when web designers, developers, and agencies build a WordPress website for a small business, and then leave it behind to be unsupported. Think of your website like your house. You can’t just build and then never maintain it. Eventually life will pass it up and it’ll fall apart. Websites work the same way. The Internet is constantly and rapidly evolving. Just in the past 18 months as I write this post, WordPress has completely upgraded to a new editor and made massive strides in how its software operates. Yet, millions of websites have been…
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Why You Should Always Own Your Domain Name, Plus Common Mistakes
A domain name is the address of your website (louisvillewebnerds.com, for example). You should always own and control your domain name. It’s the #1 asset you need to own to make sure your website is always yours. Not the hosting. Not even the website itself. It all comes down to your domain name. Here’s why. Over the course of my 15+ year web career, I’ve run into several situations where website owners lost control of their domain name. They either had to go through a legal hassle and shell out a lot of money to get it back, had to…
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Why You Should Keep Your Website Simple
When you run a business building and supporting WordPress websites, you see just about every type of website you can imagine, and one thing is almost always the same. The simpler websites are usually the better ones, especially with WordPress. Photo by Sarah Dorweiler, Evano Community One of the strengths of WordPress is that is has a powerful plugin library that will allow you to extend the core functionality of the platform far beyond what comes with it. But that can also be a weakness, because the more pieces of software, addons, plugins, etc that you use, the more complex, insecure,…
8 Reasons to Hire Louisville Web Nerds for Your Website Project
Since our founding, Louisville Web Nerds has become a trusted partner to dozens of companies in the Louisville, KY area, and even a few in other states. Here are a few reasons to hire LWN to help with your website project. We Design and Develop with WordPress As I write this post, WordPress is used on 34% of websites on the Internet. That’s a full 1/3 of the websites online. For a single software platform, that’s an incredible number. This is up from about 30% of the web a couple of years ago. Even with competitors spending millions of dollars…
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7 SEO Musts for Your Louisville Small Business
If you want the opinion of a true web nerd, Search Engine Optimization should be a part of the marketing strategy of every small business. Getting free traffic from search engines is highly valuable, and not all that difficult if you understand the fundamentals and the process to keep the traffic coming in. Plus, for most of the population these days, if your business doesn’t show up in search results, you might as well not even exist. Here are 7 SEO musts for your Louisville small business. Fix Your Website Errors Search Engines hate website errors. These are things like…
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The Massive Value of Louisville Web Nerds’ WordPress Website Help and Support Plans
We’ve written before about the cost of not keeping your website up to date over time. It’ll cost you in more ways than one. It’s a huge problem that plagues small businesses. The good news is, Louisville Web Nerds was created to help solve that problem. Our Support and Maintenance options were designed to perform several key technical services that go into running a website smoothly, some on the front end of a website, and some on the back end. This is all delivered at a low monthly cost, far lower than an in-house employee or a large agency would…
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How Louisville Web Nerds Uses the Screaming Frog Web Crawler to Increase Website Quality
As anyone who has ever managed a website knows, it can be difficult to keep up with, all the time. This is especially true when software updates are applied, pages are updated, images change, or old pages are moved and / or removed. This is just some of the maintenance we deal with on a daily basis with our monthly support clients. While one website is difficult enough to keep up with, it’s exponentially more complex to apply updates and maintain the quality of dozens. As Louisville Web Nerds has grown over the past two years, the manual process of…
Louisville Web Nerds Partners With SendGrid to Guarantee WordPress Email Delivery
WordPress is great at a lot of things. Email deliverability is not one of them. Many of the sites we build for our clients send emails in some manner. This can be from things like a free trial signup form, a quote request form, a waiver signature, a membership signup, forgot password emails, a help request form, and many other varieties. Many web hosts are a little bit wary to send these types of emails because they don’t originate from the actual account of the email sender. They use a method called spoofing to appear as if they are sending…
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A Simple Trick to Get Google Reviews for Your Business
Want us to create a page like this to get more Google Reviews for your business? Contact us here to get started. Aside from your website, knowing how to get google reviews is one of the most important pieces of establishing a powerful online presence for a business. It’s a digital world, and a mobile world. Many consumers check online reviews (many do it on their phones) before ever deciding to spend money at a business, especially for places like restaurants, child care centers, doctors offices, dentists, landscaping companies, gyms, and other service-oriented businesses where repeat business is key. Having…
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The Creative Software Mix We Use to Keep Your Site Running Fast and Safe
One of the most frequently asked questions we get whenever we’re bringing on a new client is what we’re doing behind the scenes for our monthly WordPress Support clients. Aside from the various levels of maintenance and support we offer in each package, there is also a lot that goes into keeping a website running smoothly, from ongoing security monitoring, to ongoing image and script optimization, to software and plugin updates (and the testing that comes with this), to keeping things like PHP updated, and beyond. We spend a few hours each week behind the scenes keeping all of these…
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The Easiest Way to Accept Online Payments for your Small Business, Even If You Don’t Have a Website
If you’re a small business owner and you’re not set up to accept online payments, you’re probably either leaving money on the table, or you’re creating an inconvenience for a significant portion of your customers. I know what you’re thinking. “It’s not that hard to write a check and mail it.” You’re right. It’s not, but we live in a world today where a rapidly growing portion of the population doesn’t even own checks, because all of their bills are paid electronically (myself included). While Baby Boomers and Generation X may be used to writing checks, addressing envelopes, keeping stamps…
No. Your Website Is Not a One-Time Project.
A huge percentage of the website projects I build are “from scratch” rebuilds of websites that have gotten old and stale over time because they were not properly maintained. This is a big problem for small businesses. Here’s what typically happens A business hires someone to build their website for what usually ends up being thousands of dollars. That person finishes the website, which is usually exactly what they need at the time, then hands over the keys to the business owner. At this point, the business owner typically says “I can handle it from here,” but guess what -…
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How to Set Up Your Very Own Web Hosting Account and Website
To build a website, the absolute first thing you need is webhosting (not a domain – we’ll handle that later). Just like you can’t build a house without land, you can’t build a website without a web server. Your web hosting account is where this web server will be. Once you have hosting, you can start building the website. Don’t worry. We’ll handle all of the technical details. Just follow the guide for now and we’ll do the rest towards the end. What I recommend for hobby blogs and side businesses is Bluehost. It’s by far the easiest low-cost host…
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Five Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Working for Your Website
It’s no secret that blogs are awesome for generating web traffic and ultimately real money-making business. If executed correctly, a blog can be the difference between a failed business and a wildly successful one. I’d be willing to bet that you know at least one person who has generated a significant amount of revenue for their business using a blog if not more. I’d run out of fingers before my count ended, but do you exactly know how those people do it? There’s A LOT that goes into blogging strategy design. A lot of business owners just start blogging without…
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Easy Content Generation Strategy for Your Blog
You know how people really love watching re-runs of old TV shows? There’s a reason for that. They love the content of those shows. This blog post explores a clever content generation strategy that uses this re-run principle to add quite a bit of posting power to your blog.
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