Incidents of hacking are on the rise, with some 30,000 sites daily being turned into hosts of spam email, malware, or other unsavory content. Several times a year, we receive a panicked call to clean out a hacked WordPress website. It's never fun for anyone involved, but we like putting clients at ease, and there are steps you can take to protect your site. There are many detriments to having a hacked website, extending much further than the obvious security risks. Even a few days of leaving your site under a malicious party's control can damage your search engine ranking…
It’s the big day! The development is done, the content is in, and your pre-launch requirements are all met. It’s time for a smooth and painless launch. Launching WordPress sites is a fairly painless process when the right precautions are taken. Migrate the database -- WordPress databases will often have arrays of data stored as serialized strings. If you're migrating "dev.example.com" to "example.com" by running a find and replace on the database, any serialized values that include the old domain will break. This usually results in broken slideshows and empty widgets. To avoid this, we use the excellent WP Migrate…
It's almost the big day! After months of planning, design, and development, it's time to launch your new website. What steps should you take to ensure the launch is smooth and successful? At Treefrog, we've had our fair share of launches, and in that winding history we've encountered almost every kind of speed bump and obstacle. Over time, we've developed a checklist of all the necessary steps and precautions. Because we want to promote a happier, more beautiful web, we're going to share our process with you. First up: everything we like to take care of before launch-day. Long before…
With information about SEO trends and tips running rampant on the internet - some of it years out of date - it is easy to become overwhelmed and misdirected. Floods of information, seemingly giving new advice on updated trends, easily leads us to believe SEO practices are constantly in flux. And, while there is some truth to this, Google's frequent updates to its algorithm aren't always major game changers. Google Hummingbird, however, launched in September 2013, actually is a new algorithm as opposed to a simple update to the existing. Prior to, and especially after the announcement of the new…
Search engine optimization requires time, dedication, and in many cases some monetary investment. While there are many free SEO tricks, it may be worth it to spend a bit of money to increase traffic to your business. Hiring a marketing firm to design and develop an optimized site or paying the yearly dues to the BBB and/or the Chamber of Commerce in order to gain some back links are wise investments. A more flexible means of funding higher searchability is through SEM, or search engine marketing. SEM, or search engine marketing, also known as pay-per-click advertising, is the process of…
