Category: Website Development

In mid-2019, I had written a post about Google’s decision to stop supporting “noindex” directives in robots.txt. My feelings on the subject haven’t changed since then – the robots.txt should be the right place for this tag, as this directive is exclusive to robots. But Google powered ahead anyway, so I have no choice but […]

The tech and browser world has been abuzz with Google’s “FLOC” technology that promises to do away with cookies entirely in favor of federated learning. But will any of this have an impact on website owners? And is it a good thing for us? What is FLOC? Simply put, FLOC means that Google will show […]

I’ve had it with plugin-based contact forms! I’ve shifted to Google Forms, and so far, it’s going great. No plugins! A while back, I began my journey to decouple my website from Jetpack. By far the most difficult part of the transition, was finding a replacement for the contact form. I want nothing fancy. Just […]

With WordPress taking the high road and deciding to favor inlined CSS vs large stylesheets to only load CSS that’s on the page, I feel it’s time to examine our own bloated stylesheets and do what we can to reduce the number of unused CSS rules on our page. While WordPress’s latest changes will take […]

Google keeps changing its recommendations for the right way to incorporate product reviews in your structured data. For example a couple of years back, I’d written about some changes in Google’s specifications and how to deal with them. But since then, standards have changed again, and it’s time to provide a new JSON template for […]

Google has been pushing its new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for a while now. It’s been urging website owners to upgrade their existing Universal Analytics code and to run the GA4 code side by side. I first tried it out months ago, and then deleted the account because I followed Google’s advice and tried to […]

For a lot of people, their websites evolve over time. You might start with a simple blog, then decide to add a section for your profession, then perhaps branch out into different services. Perhaps even language translations! Each time this happens, you need to make a structural choice about your new section. Is it going […]

Updated: May 1, 2023 Every website is different. So when you hear a general rule about web design, always understand that there are going to be exceptions. This includes advice that I give myself! For example, I’ve often talked about responsive design on the NameHero blog, and the importance of having a site that gracefully […]

Yesterday as I sat down to work, I took the time to update some plugins on my site. Based on my golden rule, I always wait until an updated plugin has been out for at least 4 days before applying the patch. This allows time for the developer to become aware of any new bugs, […]

Since announcing free InterWorx with all our VPS hosting packages and Cloud Dedicated servers, we’ve had hundreds of happy customers switch from cPanel where they don’t have to worry about the new “per account” license structure. While InterWorx comes native with a PHP selector, allowing users to select specific PHP versions for their domains/sub-domains, often […]