I had a client recently ask me whether or not his hosting company was backing up his website files. At first, I thought this was a silly question, because I thought the answer would be “of course!” I host my own website and have nearly all my website clients hosted with DreamHost (for a bunch of reasons listed here), and I have, on occasion, become overzealous and accidentally deleted something I shouldn’t have. Yes, even web designers make mistakes

Read the rest of this entry »

There are many decisions a new website owner must make, and one of them is selecting a font for the content of their website. Often clients ask me to try out different fonts to see how they look. I’ve now made this process easier by creating my very own font-selection tool.
Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had an experience working on a website that was created using an online website builder tool. My client had created the website herself using one of the many available do-it-yourself online template tools and wanted to integrate a shopping cart. After a few tests, it became clear that my work on the website would interfere with this website builder, and we had to abandon the builder altogether if we were to have a successful shopping cart integration. After working with the files that were generated with this website builder tool, I wanted to share the experience, because many of you might be contemplating doing websites yourself using an online website builder tool (free or otherwise).

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re in the market for a website, selecting the right website designer for your particular project is crucial. Here are some things to keep in mind as you are shopping around and interviewing potential website designers:

Read the rest of this entry »

Selecting the best domain name for your new website is often the task that new website clients tackle first. Since there are a nearly infinite number of possible website domain names to choose from, how does a prospective website client go about choosing just the right domain name for his or her small business website or personal project?

Read the rest of this entry »

Selecting a good website hosting company is extremely important for the success of a website. If the hosting service isn’t reliable and doesn’t have good customer support, your website’s performance will be negatively impacted. (Read this article on why not to choose 1&1 for your hosting and also read this article on why to avoid Aplus.net as well).

Read the rest of this entry »

I understand that to most folks, creating a website can be pretty scary and daunting. Several years ago I set about to design my own website, and I too was very intimidated at first - and I have degrees engineering and computer science!

Read the rest of this entry »