Websites are built using lines upon lines of code.  It can be as simple or complex as the developer chooses to make it, but the code, at the end of the day, is really only a bunch of text.  But, when you look at a website as an end user, you don’t see all that code. What you see is a collection of carefully-arranged text, images, video, interactive fields, and more. Do you ever stop to wonder how a website goes from dull pages with nothing but these ongoing lines of code to the finished product that appears live on the web?  The framework upon which the web is HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (cascading style sheets).

More people are accessing the internet than ever before. Many of them are doing so using multiple devices. In 2014, comScore published a study highlighting that mobile internet use had surpassed desktop use. Mobile users are now using their devices to do everything from accessing the internet and checking email to making purchases. There is no denying how far mobile technology has come and how commonplace its use is.

You don’t have to be told that creating a website is easy these days. But making something that sticks and stays relevant for years to come is certainly the exception rather than the norm. With so much competition across various niches, what does it take for your site to stay alive? That’s where Google Analytics, or GA for short, makes all the difference in the world. GA provides access to tools that help you better understand your audience, making it easier to tailor your site to what they want.

Last November, we created a post showing you how to optimize your images for the web. One of the steps was to compress all JPEG image files to smaller sizes – that way they wouldn’t have such a drain on your website’s load time. Today we’re going to discuss a couple of easy ways anyone can easily do just that.

At HostandStore, we’re huge fans of WordPress. In fact, we strongly advocate moving your site to WordPress. Today we will help you get started using this fantastic CMS yourself. We created this post to serve as a beginner’s guide to getting started with the WordPress dashboard. We hope you will use this guide as a resource to familiarize yourself with the platform so that you can become comfortable enough to start using it for your own site!

If you’ve followed our blog for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed that this year we’ve been focusing on showing you ways to learn about digital marketing and SEO (short for search engine optimization) to get the most out of your website. Even if you weren’t sure how each of the techniques we’ve discussed could positively improve your site’s performance, today’s topic is something that can help your business grow in ways you never imagined. Today we will discuss the importance of sharing your NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) information online to help with your local SEO. We’ll also show you how to get started!

If you aren’t using the WordPress content management system (CMS) to manage your website, you should be. WordPress is incredibly easy to use, offers all the tools you need, and best of all, is an open source platform. You read that correctly. The world’s most popular CMS platform is free to use! If you aren’t using WordPress to manage your site, here are 14 reasons you need to make the switch today.

When building a simple website, there’s more to consider than organizing content with HTML and styling it with CSS. While the majority of a web developer’s time will be spent in this area, good websites also utilize Meta Tags to help provide some more structure and additional information about a webpage. Sites who use meta tags are typically providing information to browsers and search engines, making them an important part of any search engine optimization (SEO) or overall digital marketing strategy.

Nothing can ruin a great afternoon like a blasted 404 error page. We’ve all been there – surfing the web like there’s no tomorrow, when BAM! All progress comes to a screeching halt because we land on a page that reads “404 Error: Page not found!”

How frustrating!

And then the questions start to rise. For instance, why is it called a “404” page? And are there any other sorts of pages out there we need to be watching out for? To better understand these pages, which are flagged by server response codes, we have to first understand how the web works. Don’t worry, it’s actually pretty simple.

In April, several members of the HostandStore.com team traveled to Austin to take part in a digital marketing conference called Pubcon. It’s important to us to attend conferences where we can learn from experts because we ultimately hope to share that knowledge with you. We are far more than a hosting company, so it’s important that we stay up to date on what’s going on in digital marketing.

After all, that is a key part of learning SEO or any other aspect of digital marketing. Pubcon was an opportunity for us to hear from many of the industry’s leading experts. So what did we learn? It’s hard to sum up such a useful event in a single blog post, but we’ve narrowed down six key takeaways that we believe can help each and every person that reads this post.