Random posts about developing online businesses

Here are the different website topics that we have available. They've mostly been written by our Drupal web developer, Guy Doughty. They include both technical web development and general website topics.

What you need to know about SSL and secure websites
What is SSL? SSL secures transmissions between our visitors computer and our website. A SSL certificate is the thing we buy in order to turn everything into gibberish whilst in transit. Slightly over simplifying. Depending on the certificate, the verification process differs....
FTP stopped working on Plesk / Centos
After an update to ProFTPd package, the server (Plesk Panels 11.5.3 on CentOS 6.5) stopped allowing incoming connections. A somewhat awkward situation for active developers, even more so when hosting client websites. After checking the Xinetd logs at...
How I got CKEditor to work with Geshi in Drupal 7
This is a quick post. I've just spent hours getting Geshi to properly format special characters. Namely "<" and ">" being the most annoying.  You see when you have ckeditor installed it encodes special characters into HTML. So you end up...
SEO: Structured data mark up for a enhanced presence in Google.
Structured data mark up is fairly new and is used by Google to better understand your website. There are various things, or better said objects, that you can add mark-up to. Such as: Reviews Breadcrumbs Local businesses Social network profiles Videos Music...
Where have the Facebook likes gone on my website?
When looking at our homepage today. I was surprised to notice that all the Facebook likes had gone. Particularly strange because we had done nothing that could possibly have broken it. So whilst getting to the bottom of it, I wondered if things had changed at Facebook...
How does Facebook comments on your website improve your return on SEO?
71% of Internet users are on Facebook.  Who wants to create a new account on your website to quickly post a comment? Would you? We wouldn't unless we really really wanted to leave the comment. By allowing a visitor to post via Facebook, we remove a huge...
What is a hashtag ('#')? and how do we use them for social marketing?
What is a hashtag ('#')? Hashtags ('#') are now added to posts across most social networking websites, by individuals and companies alike. The # proceeds relevant keywords to the post being published. Take this example I gave a Dog walker friend of...
End user focussed Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Why you should focus on the user if you want to get on top and stay there Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. - Google Google's mission statement sums up what the search engines are all...
What is a sitemap.xml file and how do we use it for SEO?
Note: If you're a client of mine this is already done. What is a sitemap.xml file? A sitemap.xml file is a list of pages on a website that the search engines can understand. It lists every page that you wish to be shown in the search engine.  It's...
What the hell is a robots.txt file and how do we use it for SEO?
Note: If you're a client of mine this is already done. Ok, so it may sounds like I'm going a little sci-fi on you. To understand how we use a robots.txt file for SEO, we need to get clear on a couple of things. What is a robot in this context? What then...

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