Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Well-Designed Site

I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog,” one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. What a marvelous question! We brainstormed all the elements that make up a web standard site, and mixed in personal preferences of the students […]

WordPress School: Web Browsers and The Search

Search is used in WordPress for many different purposes as you prepare, develop, implement, and launch your website, and as you continue to maintain and publish on the site. This tutorial will help you understand how to search within a web page with the web browser, search within a WordPress site, and provide helpful tips […]

WordPress Publishing Checklist

The following is a brief summary of the workflow to publishing content in WordPress. Print this out to remind yourself of each step in the process. Consider this your checklist to review before publishing every post until you become accustomed to the process. This is your guide to the WordPress publishing process. This guideline is […]

The Web is All About The Writing

Reading “7 Things You Need to Know about SEO in 2014” from Compete Pulse, I was fascinating to read that “size matters:” Most blog posts range between 400 and 600 words, but the ideal length for highest ranking is actually around 1,500. Many still believe that a successful website is one that offers the information […]

Robin Williams Starts Our Conversation on Depression, Suicide, and Mental Health

The world is grieving the loss of one of our favorite comedic and dramatic geniuses, Robin Williams, and the conversation begins about mental illness, depression, and suicide. The Facts As We Know It: The news arrived about 3:30PM PST that the actor had died due to suspected suicide. CNN reported that according to the Marin […]

It’s About Access

If you have a few minutes today, watch this. Oh, watch it anyway. And share it. It won a Webby, the equivalent of the Oscar for the web world. And I have to admit that at the end, I cried. Seriously. Like those in the satirical episode, I don’t live in the wildest woolliest of […]

Blog Exercises: Emulator, Original, or Teacher?

In a candid interview on The Culture Show, Lady Gaga described the artistry of her work. I don’t know if any of it is any good, and I’m not sure it matters…it is a life force on its own. I’m still very young, in the duration of my life’s work. If you look at the […]

Blog Exercises: Patterns in the Stats

As we proceed through this year of blogging tips and exercises, we’ll talk more about statistics and web analytics to help you check in with yourself that you are on the right track. Today’s blog exercise is to familiarize yourself with tracking your site’s stats, learning the key numbers and data to watch. I introduced […]

Nelson Mandela Tribute

In January 2011, Nelson Mandela became a trending topic on Twitter as false rumors of his death circulated the world. He was 92 at the time and this was one in a long string of stories shaking the world’s confidence in his survival. Today, at age 94, those rumors seem more prophetic as the world […]

Blog Exercises: Dissecting Post Categories

In a recent article, Noah Weiss shared his struggle to figure out categories and tags on his personal site. I know many of you following these Blog Exercises have also struggled to figure out your categories, so I thought Noah’s site would be a perfect example, He has gratefully given me permission to rip his […]

Blog Exercises: Sex Changes and Age Matters

I often get comments that say “Thank you, sir” or emails through my contact forms addressed to Mr. Lorelle. In France, “Lorelle” is a last name as popular as Johnson in English countries. I understand that “Lorelle” is a tough name to identify with a sex. Not the point. I live online in a world […]

Blog Exercises: Check Your Site Title Tag

Do you know what the title of your site is? Not the name of your site or the title of your post, but the HTML <title> tag for your site buried in the source code. In HTML, every website is required to have the <title> tag in the <head> of the source code HTML structure. […]

Blog Exercises: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About

In 2006, I spent three months thrashing, not sleeping at night, agonizing over what I had written and desired to publish. I knew it would be received with resistance at the least, revenge at the worst. I had already tested the waters and found out that the subject could get me in very hot water […]

DuckDuckGo: The Search Engine You Need to Meet

Recently, DuckDuckGo has been turning up in my referrers list. Curious about the name, and thinking it was a spam site, DuckDuckGo needed investigation. Seems I’ve been missing out on what could be the major competition to Google as a search engine. Here is a quick summary of what I learned about DuckDuckGo. It is […]

Prove It: Kym Huynh Exposed

After reading Prove It: It’s Starts With Defining Who You Are as part of my Prove It Campaign, one of my best friends volunteered himself for a bio tearing and ripping as he is now involved in several startups that are gaining the attention of investors, which means everything he does online is now subject […]