Category: Business casual

Kevin Abrams operates Digital Renegades, a web design agency based in Orlando, FL. Catch up with him on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The who:

Given a business name is so central to a brand, we tend to put a lot of importance on it. How did you arrive at a name, and how do you feel about it now that you’ve been in business a while?

I had a lot of trouble coming up with a name. I really wanted something that showed we were different. I thought the newer .digital domains were unique and wanted to come up with a name that I could leverage that domain with.

It had been a few months that I was trying to come up with the complete name when one day I was listening to music, looking out the window, and the song “Renegades” by X Ambassadors came on. I

This article was originally published on Oct. 15, 2018, and updated on April 8, 2021.

An above-average blog security setup for WordPress can be handled with a couple of plugins — it’s good enough to stop most of hacking attempts, but it’s not an iron-clad approach. Someone who’s really determined might still find their way in.

Better blog security involves taking several steps using things like plugins, complex passwords and a few best practices.

I’ve been called in to clean up a couple blogs, but we were able to undo the damage that had been done — mostly spam links that had been injected into several blog posts for a black-hat SEO attack — but they wouldn’t have happened if the owner had practiced strong blog security to begin with. We could clean out the links by hand, which would have taken hours. Instead, we had to restore the blog … Read the rest

This post was originally published on Oct. 11, 2018, and was updated on Sept. 17, 2019 and April 9, 2021.

If you have a brick-and-mortar shop, you should have one major priority when it comes to your online presence — showing up in local business searches. It doesn’t matter if someone in Dallas, Texas finds your business online if you’re located in Tampa, Florida.

You need the people who live, work and spend time near your physical business location to be able to search and find your business.

The rest of this post will explain how you can make changes to start showing up in local business searches.

11 ways to start showing up in local business searches

The search placements listed below can be broken down into two categories, paid and organic. Both the Google Guaranteed listings and paid ads are placements your brand can get by paying to … Read the rest

If you were planning to register for Expand 2021 but never got around to it, the time is now. This free virtual event for web designers, developers and other digital pros runs April 27 and 28, with a schedule packed with knowledgeable experts — including pros from Google, WooCommerce and more — ready to share their secrets on starting and growing a thriving business.

Created with busy professionals in mind, Expand 2021 is a compact six hours in length, with eight speakers scheduled over two days.

Register for Free

Register for Expand 2021, network with peers, and unlock your potential

Have you ever pondered how working pros set up a project stack? Or how about handing over an online store, fully confident in its security? You might just need a few tips on bringing in new clients and building relationships with that that last.

These topics and more will be … Read the rest

What is the first thing you do when you need new SEO ideas? Our guess: Google. Yes, maybe you reach out to a referral network or a trusted colleague, but at some point, we’re willing to bet that there’s some search going on within that discovery process.

Around 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (SEJ) That equates to an estimated 63,000 searches per second. (Search Engine Land)

The point is that when anyone encounters a problem, challenge, or choice—they probably google it. So how do you gain a competitive edge and improve your search rankings to take advantage of even 1% of those search results? To start:

• Pause searching for the top SEO tips,
• Bookmark the intro 101 advice for another day, and
• Put on that technical thinking cap.

Optimize your site like a UX pro

Mastering Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help you generate more targeted … Read the rest

This post originally appeared March 15 on the Skyverge blog.

The checkout flow on your WooCommerce site (or the sites you build and manage for your clients) is one of the make-or-break parts of the entire online shopping experience. After all, checkout is where the final conversion happens. It’s where your store’s visitors become paying customers. So without an optimized checkout flow, you’re at a real risk of losing visitors instead of gaining new customers.

According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.8 percent—and it’s been in that “seven out of 10 carts are abandoned” range for years. The top reasons for cart abandonment are virtually all things a customer encounters during the checkout flow, including hidden costs, payment or shipping issues, and mandatory account registration.

While you can’t completely eliminate cart abandonment, there are definitely ways to reduce it—optimizing your checkout process can increase your … Read the rest

This post was originally published on Aug. 26, 2015, and was updated on August 1, 2019 and April 5, 2021.

One key component of every web page — every well-optimized web page, that is — is the meta tags. These are the parts of the webpage that tell Google and other search engines what a site is called, what it’s about, whether search bots can index it, what the keywords are, how it should look, and even where it’s located.

Some meta tags are more important than others, and if you’re not careful, you can waste a lot of time and effort trying to fill out tags that really won’t do your website any good.

Related: Beginner’s guide to search engine optimization for small business websites

Quick-start guide to meta tags

This article, which reflects important changes in Google’s search algorithms, will tell you important things like:

• Where can

If you’re like most web freelancers who’ve been around the block, you’ve done plenty of small freebie jobs for clients, friends and family, and maybe even for former clients. In fact, you may even have built entire websites for free.

I’ve been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt.

We need to talk about boundaries, the value of time and the true cost of a quick change for web designers and developers when you’re doing things properly.

Can you make a “quick change” as web designers and developers?

Recently I had a client — somewhat apologetically — cancel their $40/month “website maintenance & content updates” package with me as they were cutting costs. Hey, it’s COVID times out there, I truly understand. But a couple of weeks later, the now-former client emailed to ask if I could make “a quick change” to five pages on their website — for free.… Read the rest

We built the Hub by GoDaddy Pro to streamline workflows and shave time off tasks that typically eat up a workday. But we aren’t done yet. You can keep track of our progress here, as we regularly publish our updates to this platform custom made for web designer and developers.

March 2021 Hub updates:

Code snippet tool — You can execute custom code right from the Hub, without signing in to a website. This time-saving feature eliminates the need for plugins to run commands like list files, check file readability, remove default widgets and more. It’s easy to save, edit and delete snippets to reuse them without re-entering code. To find the code snippet tool, go to the Sites section of the Hub, click into a single website, and then from the Misc menu, select Code Snippets.

Adding sites to projects — When you’re running a project, you … Read the rest

If there were a formal education for budding web designers and developers, it would need to include something like that cringey class we all had to endure as teenagers. You remember… diving into the facts of life?

In the web professional curriculum, World Backup Day would be a particularly important event.

See, without website backups, web designers and developers aren’t practicing safe web dev. Any Maker of the Web who’s created a project stack should be sure it includes backups — stack up, back up.

Imagine getting that frantic call in the middle of the night. Often, it’s a manageable situation: reliable backups at least ensure there’s a place to begin rebuilding. Although World Backup Day encourages people in general to back up their data, it’s a particularly important reminder when a client’s online presence hangs in the balance.