Skype: the Bastard Child of Malware and the Terminator

I swear if I have to uninstall Skype from a Windows 10 machine again I'm going to sue somebody.

There used to be an option in the Skype settings to disable 'run automatically on start-up.' It's gone. Like a persistent piece of malware or The Terminator, the bloody thing refuses to go away.

7-Step SEO Basics for Beginners: Optimise Your Posts and Pages

The site is up. It has pages and posts with good relevant content. You still need to optimise it to show up in the search results for your target keywords. Here, you tread the fine line between clunking search-bait and beautifully optimised content that will rank highly.

7-Step SEO Basics for Beginners: Readable Content

The phrase ‘content is king’ has been done to death, but the point is important: good content matters now more than ever since Google implemented BERT, a set of natural language processing algorithms matching content to searches in the way that people, not machines, comprehend.

When the Tin Cans Break

Trees are not always your friends. Neighbours trees, less so. Especially when they break the string that joins the two tin cans.

In other words, our broadband broke. Cue two weeks of frustration trying to get the phone company to raise the fault with the other phone company that owns the hardware.

Build Responsive Layouts with Media Queries

You take a lightweight WordPress theme, hand-craft the basic homepage layout, fill the content blocks with a couple of responsive plug-ins, save it, test it on your phone and tablet and... the layout breaks. In today's world of mobile first, the layout answer is... how to build responsive layouts with media queries.

7-Step SEO Basics for Beginners: Link Building

Page ranking is influenced by the number and quality of the back links to and from other pages other websites. The search engines are looking at the relevance of internal links to posts and pages on the site itself, as well as relevant links to authoritative external sites on the Internet. Not forgetting important links from other websites back to yours.

7-Step SEO Basics for Beginners: Go SSL

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are small files installed on a web server which enable web browsers to communicate securely with web sites. Having secure SSL encryption has been a ranking factor for the search engines for several years already.

WAVE goodbye to accessibility errors. Maybe.

We put a string of our own and client sites through the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) tool. It got ugly.

As we saw from the results, the combination of platform, theme, plugins and hosting plan makes a huge difference to the accessibility of each site and also determines what you can and can't fix.