Social media marketing has never been more relevant.

Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram is now being used by businesses all over the world to get the attention of (and spark the interest of) their target audiences.

I feel like Facebook is easily the most obvious social media network for a business to be on. With over a billion daily users, it’s become much more than a social media platform—it’s a large part of life itself. If you’re not on Facebook, do you even exist!?

Other platforms, like Twitter and Instagram, may or may not be relevant to your target audience, so whether your business uses these is totally up to you.

Should an investment firm have an active account on Instagram? Probably not. Would you trust a doctor who used a Snapchat account? I’m not sure if I would.

Actually… some people might.

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You’re a beginner, but you’re getting this WordPress thing down—until the Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance error rears its ugly head that is.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Updating and managing content changes, installing new plugins, or adding new photos to your slider — you can do it all.

Look at you!

You’re even going above and beyond and actually updating your plugins and themes once a week (but not without doing a backup first).

Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance

You notice several plugins need to be updated, so you create a backup, head over to the Updates panel and run those updates. Easy, right?

Until you accidentally navigate away from that panel or close the tab before the updates have a chance to complete. You head back over to your site to finish those updates and you don’t see your website.

Instead, you see a white screen where your website should be and a simple but scary looking error message:

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.

First things first, don’t panic! You made a backup first, right? You’re good—you’re gonna make it champ.

Even if you didn’t run a backup first (why would you do that?!), chances are, there’s an easy fix that can clear this up.

Read more at Blue Steele Solutions

If there’s one thing I know (and love) about WordPress, it’s that editing content on pages and posts is a lot easier than you think it’d be.

The backend of a page may look a little scary at first, but one thing you recognize right away is the visual editor, the TinyMCE WYSIWYG visual editor to be exact. It’s integrated into WordPress out of the box, and it has simple, straightforward text formatting options.

No knowledge of HTML or CSS necessary, which most clients love.

When I help clients get familiar with their new website, adding and editing pages is always a top concern for them—they think they need to learn HTML to change anything on their website.

When I show them this WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, it’s like something ‘clicks’—they get it, and they’re usually quite relieved that they don’t need to take a web development class to understand what’s going on.

It seems like clients are always a little more at ease when they see they can edit and add content, format text, and insert images in WordPress as easily as they might in Microsoft Word.

Things become problematic when I try to show them how to change content contained in widgets.

Read more at Blue Steele Solutions

 

Earlier last year, I was setting up an FTP account for a client. Simple enough, right? I just logged into the cPanel, typed in a username, generated a password and clicked “Create Account.”

However, there was a slight problem.

I forgot to specify the folder that that specific client’s website files were in.

I had given the account access to ALL the files. So, I decided to delete(instead of configure) that account and start fresh.

“It’d be easier, right?” I thought.

I clicked delete.

An option came up to delete either the FTP account or both the FTP account AND the files.

I was too confident.

I was too fast.

Within seconds, I clicked “Delete.”

Then I checked to see what I deleted.

What did I delete? Well. I clicked “Delete Account & Files”.

As soon as I clicked, I realized what I think I had done. I checked one website that was on the shared server. Yup, it wasn’t loading.

Well that could be a coincidence, right? Right!?

I went to another site. Yup, it didn’t load either. I slowly came to the horrible realization of what I had done.

I had deleted every single website from our shared server.

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I consider myself a “wannabe minimalist”. I love the ideas behind minimalism when it comes to lifestyle and living, but when it comes down to it, sometimes it’s a little too hard to let go of some of the physical stuff I have laying around.

A minimalist approach towards web design is a growing trend that I’ve been seeing a lot of lately in themes and custom websites, and I’m REALLY diggin’ it.We’ve been pushing the importance of meaningful content, but what good is that content if you’re distracted by spinning or flashing elements or even too much text that the content just looks overwhelming?

This awesome blog post by New Minimalism lists several core minimalist principles to embrace. Some of these can easily be applied to websites and design.

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