When we’re on the prowl for new developers to join our team or help out as freelancers, there’s a common scam we’ve run across multiple times in the past few months. It’s easy to fall for, and letting this slip by can mean hiring someone that doesn’t actually have the skills they portray.

Continue reading “Don’t be fooled by this Github scam when hiring a developer” …

We’ve all seen the headlines. “Yahoo confirms major breach — 500k accounts affected” … “JPMorgan Chase hacking affects 76 million households” … “Hackers selling 117 million LinkedIn passwords” … and the list goes on. Hackers are out there, scouring the web and looking for sensitive information they can use or sell for profit.

Even with these well-known companies being hacked, many site owners don’t take the steps to protect their own systems to thwart intruders. Many business owners may not consider the potential liabilities if a security breach does occur.

Every site is a target

There’s a common misconception that hackers only target sites with lots of traffic. Continue reading “Your responsibilities as a site owner and the liabilities if you are hacked” …

If you have a WordPress website and are using a theme purchased from ThemeForest or another theme marketplace, the best practice is to use a child theme for your customizations. This allows you to update your theme in the future without overwriting the custom code that adds additional features and functionality. However, there’s a growing misconception regarding child themes and this post will help clarify the situation.

Recently, both Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce came out with new versions that changed how code should be written to change functionality within the shopping experiences. We started receiving messages from site owners who had placed code within their child themes and were wondering why the updates would have affected them if they used a child theme.

Some believe that if you place code within a child theme, that means it will always be compatible with future “updates”. This may be true when it comes to theme updates (depending on how much your theme’s developer cares about backwards compatibility), but there is no guarantee that your code will work with future plugin or WordPress core updates. This is a huge difference. Plugin developers are under no obligation to make their plugins work with previous code snippets that placed in a child theme – and it’s likely that any custom PHP code you place there will need to be updated due to a WordPress or plugin update in the future.

[bctt tweet=”‘A child theme keeps you compatible with future theme updates – not plugin or WordPress updates'”]

In short, if you place PHP code within your child theme, test your site when new plugin or WordPress updates are released to make sure everything is still compatible and know that you may need to tweak the code in the future to keep your functionality alive.

Did your site’s functionality break due to a recent plugin update – and you need some help getting back in shape? We can help get your site back to normal and maintain it regularly so this doesn’t happen again. Contact us here.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. (Alan J. Perlis)

Your computer’s software was written by some of the smartest minds in the world. Yet, it has bugs. Errors. Security holes. That’s why your computer prompts you  to update all the time- new patches and fixes are introduced to take care of bugs that are uncovered.

Websites are compromised of software, as well. And just like computers, they can have bugs that affect their performance or usability. But how are bugs discovered and patched?

Uncovering the bugs

When code for a website is written, it goes through a QA (quality assurance) process by the development team. This means someone is performing each task on the site – adding a product to the cart, going through checkout, writing a review, etc – and ensuring that it’s working as expected. QA will also cover testing on different screen sizes and browsers. A great number of bugs – especially showstoppers that prevent core features from working at all – are found during this phase. This means that the majority of issues never make it to the live server.

However, some bugs manage to get past QA. There’s a multitude of different tests that can be tried during the QA process, but bugs can be discovered when something new or different is attempted. Here’s a short list of things that can affect websites:
Continue reading “How to report technical issues to your development team” …