Peter Brown Blogs

Top WordPress Plugins Reviewed

Self-hosted WordPress sites are versatile platforms for building a business. The secret to WordPress’ flexibility and functionality lies in customizable plugins that allow users to handle multiple tasks with minimum effort. Here are some of the top WordPress plugins for security, SEO, website optimization, analytics, and marketing. Best WordPress Security Plugins Security is an important consideration in today’s world.A well-secured website provides current and potential customers with a safe, consistent experience. These plugins can help prevent security issues or get a websiterunning quickly after resolving a security problem. Sucuri Security Sucuri’s website security and firewall app handles multiple threats: DDoS, malware, XXS, and brute force attacks. The company specializes in security for WordPress sites. In addition to blocking hacker attacks, Sucuri also offers website auditing, malware cleanup, and more. Login Lockdown This free security plugin thwarts would-be hackers by limiting the number of times users can enter their admin username and password before locking down further attempts. Login Lockdown records IP addresses. Default settings allow up to three attempts in a five-minute period before initiating a one-hour cooldown. However, these settings are generally adjustable through the Options menu. BackupBuddy Keeping a current site backup enables admins to get websites up and running again after a security breach. With BackupBuddy users can implement the plugin’s automatic backup feature for a complete backup of their website and peace of mind. Prices start at $80 per year for one website. Must Have SEO WordPress Plugins SEO tools help your website rank higher in search engines. Multiple factors influence page ranking, including keywords, usability, and using headers and meta tags effectively. Use these plugins to optimize your WordPress website content. Yoast SEO Yoast SEO plugin is a user-friendly website optimization tool. Yoast SEO helps users select and use keywords effectively for both visible and behind-the-scenes content. The readability feature enables users to gauge whether posts are easy to understand. Other Yoast SEO features improve how pages look in search engine results. The bare bones version is free,and premium prices tend to be affordable annually. All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets Rich snippets provide extra information about your website content and blog posts to search engines. In turn, that can improve how your content is displayed in search results. Examples of rich snippets include star ratings, reviews, and images. This free informational plugin can help you get Search Engine Results Page (SERP) enhancements and improve …

The importance of responsive web design

If you are a business owner looking to grow your business online, here are three important facts: Today more people are accessing the web on mobile devices more than they do on desktop and laptop computers – and this number is growing. For both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), not having a website that’s easy to access on mobile devices can hurt business. Search engines are promoting mobile-friendly websites and penalizing websites that are not. In fact, Google is aggressively promoting a mobile-first approach, has created a separate mobile index and is developing a number of technologies focused on mobile devices like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA). Your target audience is mobile – Your website needs to be mobile too! In today’s mobile-first ecosystem, responsive website design (RWD) increases traffic flow, search engine ranking, and online sales. It also maximizes return on investment (ROI) for businesses with an online presence. Read on to understand what RWD is, how it works, and how to implement it for your business to gain an advantage over competitors who do not use it. What is responsive website design? RWD gives users a seamless experience when visiting the same site from multiple devices. This means that someone can visit your website on a desktop, than access the same site from a mobile device. It eliminates the need to maintain a desktop site and a mobile site. Brand identity and user experience stays consistent because the content scales to the appropriate size for the platform, screen size, and orientation of the device. Responsive web design uses a variety of elements to achieve this fluidity, including: A combination of flexible grids and layouts Resized or cropped images CSS media queries This enables users to switch from a laptop to a tablet to a smart phone without compromising design integrity or website appearance. Difference between standard and responsive web design With standard web design, users transitioning from a laptop to a mobile device must be redirected to a second, mobile site. Thisredirection splits traffic to the same page from computers and mobiles and complicates analytics. With RWD, multiple CSS style sheets are used to create breakpoints for each device. This means that mobile and PC users visit the same website. Brand identity and site aesthetics remain consistent between the two versions because the site automatically switches between styles based on the user’s device, screen …

What is a Payment Gateway?

A payment gateway facilitates online credit card payment processing on your website. The software and servers transmit and authorize key information of real-time transactions to the corresponding banks, usually the acquiring and issuing banks. They are also known as merchant and customer banks. Transactional information is exchanged between both, the payment portals and processor or bank involved in the transaction. As a payment service provider, it must be secure and use encryption to store sensitive data to ensure confidential information remains safe and protected from fraudulent activities. This includes data such as credit card numbers, ACH account numbers, AVV and CVV2 numbers. Payment processing is also automated where a secure software vendor communicates with the online payment gateway and the acquiring bank. Payment gateways are necessary due to the popularity of online payments on most websites. They ensure seamless payment processing for your business, like Point-of-Sale (POS) systems in retail shops and establishments. Payment Gateway vs. Payment Processor Payment gateways are responsible for authorizing and transferring payments. Payment processors analyze and transmit transaction data. Functions of a Payment Gateway Several tools help payment gateways screen orders to filter out fraudulent transactions. Verifying the delivery address Performing AVS checks Fingerprinting technology Analyzing velocity patterns Detection of identity morphing Geolocation How a Payment Gateway Works Payment gateways facilitate communication within banks where servers transmit transaction information and responses to acquiring and issuing banks. When the payment gateway receives the credit card details, it sends the data to the bank for verification. This information includes transaction details along with approvals or declines of a transaction. Then the payment gateway sends the received response to the user through the web server. Since security is an integral aspect of payment gateways, card associations have created a set of rules and security standards. They are called Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS or PCI) established to be followed by those with access to card information. Once a completed order is submitted usually using HTTPS protocol, it communicates personal information confidentially to the parties involved in the transaction. When a cardholder purchases a product or a service, most payment gateway providers enable added options to merchants with merchant accounts. Payment gateways can conduct real-time transactions, where providers convert currencies between two different countries, bridge language, and payment methods. Often a transaction fee is charged for using payment gateways. There are several tasks the payment gateway performs for a transaction …

What are Iframes?

An iframe or inline frame is essentially a browser window set within the web page. These frames are sections of the web page that can be ‘cut out’ to allow information from an external source. Iframes are one of the only type of frames that HTML5 allows and are usually present on websites that show external content as a feed within their web pages. Defining iframes An iframe or an inline frame is an HTML document on a website that is embedded within another HTML document. It is used to add or include content such as advertisements, interactive applications or content from other external sources into the web page. The interactive applications include those that use Asynchronous Javascript and XML such as e-commerce applications and Google maps. It is possible to configure the iframe on its own scroll bar, independent to the background page scroll bar and it behaves like an inline image. The web designer can alter the content of the iframe without the user having to reload the surrounding page. This is possible through Javascript or the HTML anchor’s target attribute. What do Iframes do? Iframes essentially allow for external content to be included within a web page. External content would consist of advertisements from advertising networks or any promotional material which is not editorial content. Using an iframe for this information is similar to having two browser windows open on the same page, where the main window shows the webpage content, and the secondary window displays the external content. The benefit here is that the actual content on the website does not get diluted because search engines do not consider these advertisements as primary content. How to use the Iframe element? A simple iframe can be built by setting the source URL, width and height. For example: Alternate text if the iframe cannot be rendered . It is also possible to use percentage instead of pixel values for the settings of the Iframe. This is useful while building a responsive website where the size changes with different screen sizes. The iframe uses HTML5 and HTML 4.01 global elements apart from others. They are as follows: URL which is the source of the frame. Name, height and width of the window. ‘srcdoc’ takes priority over any URL. It is the HTML for the source of the frame. Sandbox is the features that should be defined as allowed or not …

Choosing a Graphics Design Computer

If you want a computer for graphic design, do not plan on buying just any old computer, laptop or tablet. Computers used for graphic design will need higher capabilities like processor speed, RAM disk capacity and the ability to expand..

Web Hosting Explained

Your website is your real estate on the Internet, and it is important that it resides on a strong foundation. A reliable web hosting service is that foundation.

How to Create Website Content Strategy

Content marketing creates organic traffic, but it requires sound strategy. Separating the two is like going hunting blindfolded. You aim in a general direction …..

Corporate Website Evolution

When we look back over the last 10 years, it is amazing how corporate websites have evolved over time. From the early days of “brochure-ware” websites…

Cross Browser Compatibility Issues

When one mentions browsers, most instinctively think of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Few realize that besides these, there are…

CSS Typography

Not often are CSS and typography used in the same sentence and in many ways, this is right too. Typography is a form of design with variations and cho…

How to Fix 404 Errors?

It’s rare to find a website to be completely free of errors. This is usually because most website owners are either unaware of the errors on their web…

Custom Web Fonts

What are web fonts? When designing for offline media like brochures, billboards, press advertisements, etc., a designer can choose from a wide variet…

Customer Centric Web Design

Everyone has their own idea about what a good website design is. Since design and aesthetics are so subjective, there is no right or wrong about good …

Flash and SEO

What is Flash? Flash is a software that lets you create animation and movies. Because the file size of animations and movies created using Flash is s…

Google Panda Explained

With the flooding of information on the internet, separating high quality content from rehashed, duplicate and near duplicate content has become incre…

How to Make a Website?

The process you need to build your own website A website is not just about looks or content. It’s much more than that. When you set out to make your …

How to Use Iframes

Remember the websites where the main navigation did not scroll with the rest of the page? Yes, that age old system of using frames to lock one part of…

HTML5 is Ready

The debate about HTML5 has been raging and will continue to for a while yet. Whether HTML5 is useful or not, whether it will ever be the future that …

Importance of Robots.txt

Few webmasters and fewer website owners realize that their website is incomplete without a good robots.txt file. It is a little known and often ignore…

What is Minification?

Minification of source code is the process of reducing the size of a file such as an HTML file, a cascading style sheet or JavaScript by removing thin…

Mobile Ecommerce

In an age of convergence, where a person accesses the internet is no longer limited. Customers are no longer satisfied with using a computer for purch…

Google Page Layout Algorithm

Have you searched for something and landed on a website that greeted you with nothing but advertisements? Ever been to websites full of Google Adsense…

Designing for Scalability

Challenges of planning a website design Web sites change all the time. Websites that stay and are liked by visitors evolve, responding to the changing…

Section 508

About 57 million Americans have disabilities. Globally, that number is in the hundreds of millions. Each day, more than 3.5 million web pages …

SEO Content Writing Tips

Everyone recognizes the need for ranking in search results. Most recognize that content rules. These two, in combination, have resulted in a flooding …

Shopping Cart Usability

Thinking of building ecommerce capability on your website? Already have an ecommerce website that doesn’t seem to be working well enough? Do you have …

Tableless Web Design

Web designing has evolved since the days of predominantly text based websites. With evolving technologies and increasing bandwidths, web programming t…

Tools for Webmasters

Building a good website doesn’t end the role of a web designer or webmaster. Just monitoring uptime isn’t enough either. In order to ensure the health…

User Experience Testing

If you have already read our article about user experience design, you would have a fair idea about how designing a good user experience is no longer …

Web Design Essentials

From its early days of text-based HTML content, the web has come a long way. Today, just about anything qualifies as content on the web — from images…

Web Jobs

Web Design Job Roles & Responsibilities Quick Links Requirements Modeller Branding Serviceser System Architect Config..

Website Footers

Among the most ignored element of a website often is its footer. How much – if at all – do you as a website owner think about your website’s footer? A…

Website Monitoring Service

It wasn’t that long ago that web design companies offered a “website maintenance” package to clients to have some recurring revenues from existing cus…

Free Stock Photos

If you need any free stock photos check out the sites below. Terms of Use may have changed on each site so check to make sure they are still free for your use.

What is a Custom Search Engine?

When you say ‘Search Engine’, you automatically think of ‘Google’, MSN Search’, ‘Yahoo Search’, etc. But do you realize that these are not the most common ones? The fact is that there are millions of private custom search engines out there.

Internet Jargon Glossary

It can be confusing trying to sort out all of the Web and Internet Jargon, so we have put together this great reference to help you sort out whats from what.

Internet Privacy Law

Internet Marketing is the modern age miracle for Marketers. Getting your word out to the masses quickly and automatically, and at next to no cost retrieve customers details and information, is a boon for many companies.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is considered by many as one of the new age marketing techniques. Most internet users are likely to have email accounts allowing them to receive an unlimited number of messages instantly…

Types of Internet Marketing

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” ~ Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Yes, the Internet is the town squa…

Internet Marketing Method

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” ~ Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Yes, the Internet is the town squa…

What are Google Penguin Updates?

Google has over 200 parameters that go into deciding where a page should rank for any given keyword. In spite of having such advanced ranking factors,…

Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid

Search engines try to serve the most relevant result that would meet the needs of a searcher. In order to do that, they set guidelines that all websit…

How to Make a Successful Blog

Blogs are like informal platforms for people to share information and communicate. Many times, search engines crawl blogs faster than websites. Hence,…

Benefits of Blogging for Businesses

When it began, blogging and blog writing was only a means to express one’s personal feelings and opinions on the internet. However, in today’s world, …

How to get your website on Google?

When most businesses invest a lot of time and effort in getting their website looking just right, they naturally expect the website to spread their me…

Google Analytics Real Time Analysis

Google Analytics Real-Time is a new feature introduced in Google Analytics, that lets to monitors the visitors to your website in real time while they…




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