Why You Cannot Push a Pig Through a Keyhole Building an effective responsive design website entails much more than simply designing a responsive theme. The primary purpose for using a responsive design is to have one website that works with all viewing devices, from desktop monitors down to small smartphone displays. Unfortunately, a theme may be mobile ready, but the web … [Read more...]
Russian Hackers Have Stolen Over 1.2 Billion Passwords
The web is abuzz with a report from a Milwaukee-based security firm called Hold Security saying that they have evidence showing a Russian hacker ring has collected a whopping 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from around the web. They discovered this through the use of presumably proprietary deep web monitoring tools. The first question that came to mind when I heard … [Read more...]
Google Adds Encryption As a Ranking Factor
Google made an announcement in a Webmaster Central Blog post that says using encryption throughout a website is now a ranking factor. You heard that correctly. Google wants to see Secure Sockets Layer encryption used throughout a web site. Encryption is no longer something reserved for use with e-commerce sites on pages where sensitive personal information, such as credit card … [Read more...]
Design Considerations With Responsive Design Websites
Responsive design mobile-ready websites--also known as fluid designs--can solve a range of issues and will increase the mobile usability of your website, but there are some issues to consider if you want to site to be effective with a wide range of mobile devices. Most site owners build a responsive design website primarily because of the compatibility with smaller screen … [Read more...]
Be Careful When Registering Domain Names
At one time if you wanted to build a web site, you looked for a good domain name, registered it, set the nameservers, and built the web site. That may no longer be the case. We are finding out that domain names need to be scrutinized before registering them, because penalties are sticking with the domain. A case in point is a recent web site we built for a financial services … [Read more...]
Where Does Missing e-Mail Go?
The problem with missing e-mails that someone sent to you but you never received, or those you sent but were not received by the recipient, can be perplexing. Here are some of the explanations we have seen for missing messages. E-mail is an unusual web service because messages can literally vaporize and disappear forever if the proper connections are not made between the … [Read more...]
Problems With Tech Support at Hosting Companies
It seems to be getting harder to find a hosting company with very good tech support. For business web site hosting, the company needs to have techs on duty 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The techs also need to be experienced. While most of the larger hosting companies do provide 24/7 support, we are seeing a decline in the quality of the services provided by some hosts. … [Read more...]
Display Seasonal or Holiday Images Using PHP
We recently built a wild bird food products web site where the site owner wanted to display a summer image of birds on a bird feeder during the warm months, but automatically substitute a Christmas bird feeder image during the November and December Christmas holiday season, and then a winter shot during the following winter months. In this PHP tutorial I thought I would share … [Read more...]
Chinese Spam Comment Network Hitting WordPress Sites
Tech-Evangelist was a recent victim of a comment spam attack that originated from a wide range of Chinese IP addresses. This is a malicious attack that can temporarily disable web sites and servers. Here is what we saw and what we did to fight off the attacks. The attacks started to come in waves once or twice per day for about an hour in duration. This was clearly a … [Read more...]
How To Buy a Web Site and Avoid Scams
There is no question that the market for buying and selling web sites is depressed due to the worldwide economy and pressure from Google's Panda and Penguin updates that have reduced the profitability for many web sites. That means that there are tons of opportunities for buying web sites at bargain prices. This also means that hungry scammers are coming out of the woodwork … [Read more...]