Running a Website

Tutorials and tips for managing your website. Topics include WordPress tutorials, website hosting guides, how to use FTP, and how to manage and control your web server.

How Google Analytics Can Answer These 11 Burning Questions about Your Website

17 March 2016 / 12 Comments

Do you sometimes struggle to get useful information from Google Analytics?

You’ve installed Analytics on your site. You know it could give you lots of useful information about your site, your visitors, and your business. But you just don’t know where to begin with it! Its sheer number of reports, options and settings can be overwhelming.

How can you simply use Google Analytics to answer those really important questions about your site? Questions like:

How popular is my site?
Are my visitors really interested in my content?
Which are my most popular pages?
What are my visitors searching for?
How do people reach my site?

That’s what this article is all about! In it, you’ll cut through Google Analytics’ forest of submenus, options and reports, and you’ll learn how to use Analytics to answer 11 of the most important questions you can ever ask about your website.

Once you’ve read through the article, you’ll be able to find exactly the stats you need, quickly and confidently. You’ll end up with a ton of useful, actionable data that you can use to improve your site, attract more visitors, and even make more sales.

Sound good? Let’s get started!

The Future of Elated

7 July 2014 / 18 Comments

If you’re a regular subscriber to Elated, you may have noticed a distinct lack of updates for the last few months. Here’s why.

In 2011 and 2012, elated.com was badly affected by Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. The result was that traffic to our site dropped to less than one quarter of its original level. You can see the effect of these updates in the graph below:

[Read more…] about The Future of Elated

20 Ways to Make Your Freelance Web Business More Productive

25 February 2011 / 6 Comments

Running a freelance web business can be a challenge, and part of that challenge is keeping yourself productive! Inefficiencies, distractions and a lack of organization can all contribute to bogging down your business, killing productivity.

However, armed with some useful strategies and working practices, you can reduce these roadblocks to productivity and make your business run more smoothly and profitably.

In this article you’ll discover 20 useful tips to help you improve productivity in your business. Enjoy!

Hold That Website! 12 Things to Check Before Launch

27 January 2011 / 6 Comments

After weeks of hard work, your new website’s ready to launch! It’s uploaded, you’ve set up the domain, and you’re ready to take the wrapping off and reveal it to the general public.

Before you hit the proverbial switch, however, it’s important to check that your site is functioning correctly — especially if you’re launching it with an expensive marketing campaign.

Here’s a list of some important things to look for when giving your site its pre-launch testing.

WinSCP Tutorial – How to Upload Your Site with WinSCP

17 May 2010 / Leave a Comment

WinSCP is a popular free FTP program for Windows. An FTP program lets you transfer files between your computer and your Web server.

In this introductory tutorial, you’ll learn how to use WinSCP to upload your website’s files to your server.

This tutorial assumes you’ve already downloaded and installed WinSCP. It also assumes you’re using WinSCP with the “Commander” interface, rather than the “Explorer” interface. (To change interfaces in WinSCP, choose Options > Preferences, then click the Interface option and select either Commander or Explorer.)

How to Transfer a Domain Name Between Registrars

1 March 2010 / 6 Comments

When you first register your domain name, you purchase the registration through a domain name registrar. Often the registrar is affiliated with your hosting company or ISP, or it may even be the same company.

Many people stick with the same registrar for the lifetime of their domain(s). However, sometimes you want or need to transfer your domain registration to a different registrar. For example:

You want to save money. Most registrars offer essentially the same service for wildly differing prices, ranging from a few dollars per year up to $50/year or more. By moving registrars you can save a lot of money in the long run, particularly if you own several domains.
You’re not happy with your current registrar. Maybe your registrar’s customer service doesn’t meet your needs, or there has been some problem with your registration, and you want to move to a more reliable registrar.
Your current registrar is going out of business. This does happen! If your registrar is going bankrupt then obviously you’ll need to move your domain to a different registrar.

There are hundreds of registrars in operation today. If you haven’t yet selected a new registrar, find out how to choose one in the “Registering a domain name” section of How to Set Up Your Own Domain Name.

If you’ve chosen a new registrar and you’re ready to transfer your domain, this step-by-step tutorial walks you through the process. Read on!

mod_rewrite Tutorial for Absolute Beginners

3 January 2010 / 21 Comments

mod_rewrite is a marvellous feature of the Apache Web server. It’s very flexible and can do all sorts of useful things.

mod_rewrite can be quite tricky for beginners to pick up due to its somewhat complicated syntax and processing mechanism. However, once you understand a few basic concepts then you can use mod_rewrite to do some pretty clever things with your site.

In this tutorial you’ll find out what mod_rewrite is, and the kind of things you can use it for. You’ll learn how to create a few basic mod_rewrite rules, and you’ll explore some useful real-world examples that you can use on your own website.

Create a Site Map to Aid Navigation

10 December 2009 / 4 Comments

Site maps have been around for almost as long as the Web itself. They’re a great way to improve your website’s navigation and usability.

Although site maps aren’t used that often by visitors — around 7% of the time, according to Jakob Nielsen — a site map can really save a visitor if they can’t find what they’re looking for using your site’s regular navigation menu.

In this article you’ll explore the concept of site maps, look at some examples, and learn how to design and create a site map for your own website.

Choosing an Email Newsletter System

24 November 2009 / 3 Comments

A regular email newsletter is a good way to keep in touch with your site visitors and encourage them to return to your site. If you run an online business then it’s also perfect for telling existing and potential customers about your products or services.

With an email newsletter, visitors add their email addresses to your mailing list (usually via a form on your website), then you regularly send an email message to all the subscribers on the list.

There are many ways that you can set up and run a newsletter mailing list. In this article you’ll explore 3 broad approaches:

Hosted services that run on a third-party server
Off-the-shelf newsletter software that runs on your own server
Sending your newsletter using your desktop email program

Move a Website to a New Server – The Seamless Way

18 November 2009 / Leave a Comment

In Move a Website to a New Server – The Easy Way, I looked at a simple way to move your website and email from one hosting company to another. This approach is fine for sites that don’t have too much user-generated content. However, if you run a busy site with lots of blog comments, forum posts, or customer orders then things can start to get messy with this approach.

Why? Well, when you move your domain to the new hosting company’s nameservers — a process known as redelegation — it usually takes a couple of days for the change to propagate around the internet. During this time, some visitors will be seeing your site on your old server, while others will be looking at your new server. This means that you’ll end up with new content being added to both the old site and the new site at the same time, which can be a major headache!

Fortunately, there’s a way round this problem. It’s a bit more fiddly than the “easy” approach, but it does result in a seamless transition. The great thing about this approach is that there will only be a few minutes where both the old and new servers are being accessed at the same time, as opposed to several days.

Running a Website

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