Google Analytics provides a massive amount of information about visitors to your site, but it can be a bit overwhelming to wade through the statistics and know what to do with them. With our busy lives, many of us rarely get beyond looking at the basic figures of how many people came to our site, where they came from, and what pages they looked at.

Stephen Cronin gave us some practical Google Analytics tips on what to look for, and more importantly, what we can do with that information to improve our site’s performance.

If you have a smartphone, you’ll be familiar with the frustration of trying to navigate around websites that aren’t designed for use on smaller devices. James Banks believes that not only must we ensure that all our websites are mobile-friendly, but that we should be starting our development process with mobile web, not adding it on as an afterthought.

I’ve just added some exciting new features to the artist template websites, making the sites more search-engine-friendly and allowing you to add a blog or news section if you want.   More Search Engine Friendly Your website has been more search engine friendly, and you now have the ability to control the information that is sent to search engines. You will find some fields at the bottom of your page editing screen to add the Meta...

Wordpress is an excellent tool for building websites:, with great usability as a content management system, and search-engine-friendly URLs.
Design websites for people, not for search engines!

Child themes are the recommended way of making modifications to a theme. You should never modify a theme you have downloaded, because if the theme is later updated, you will lose all your changes. The correct way to make modifications is to create a child theme, in which you put only the things that are changed from the parent theme.

With the rise of mobile devices, responsive design – which allows sites to be viewed and used at a range of different screen sizes – has become increasingly important. Rather than just focusing on mobile web, Jordan stressed that we are in the age of the flexible web – not just mobile and smaller, but a huge range of different devices and sizes, such as:

One in five Australians have some kid of disability, and inclusive (or accessible) design is generally understood as ensuring that your websites are accessible to all visitors, including those with various kinds of disabilities. Joe points out that this accessibility is not just for those with permanent disabilities, but also temporary conditions such as sprains, or those accessing the web in less than ideal environments, with impediments of noise, lighting, crowds, slow connections, etc.

Brad started off with the state of Wordpress today, presenting some pretty impressive statistics:

There are currently 54 million Wordpress sites.
15% of website worldwide are running Wordpress
22% of new websites in the US are using Wordpress
48% of the top 100 blogs are using Wordpress

I was getting a review ready to publish for another of the popular business website builders when the Optus MyBizOnline offer popped into my attention. OK, so this is not really a review, as I haven’t tried one of these websites, but the FAQ is enough to give me cause for alarm (or laughter). (Warning – sarcasm follows.) Q. I don’t have a lot of time. How much time will it take to get it up and running? – No, just...

This is the second of a series of reviews of free or low-budget website builders. I speak to many small business owners at local networking events, and very many of them have a website set up for their business using the service offered by Vistaprint. Vistaprint are one of the biggest players in the business printing industry, and many small businesses (including myself) take advantage of their huge range of templates to get their first...