I‘ve been in Santa Cruz County since 1981, designing and maintaining websites since 2002. You can be confident of my skills (yes, I’m delighted that your nephew builds websites, too!) because as a business owner myself, I want to help you grow your business. Melody Sharp Web Design has developed hundreds of websites—from standard HTML to WordPress CMS—but specializes in collaborating with smaller clients and nonprofits to give them a unique and successful online presence.
Melody Sharp Web Design is small enough to give you one-on-one service, yet well-connected enough to recommend other local professionals for larger projects, including project managers, marketing people, logo designers, programmers and search engine optimization gurus. We collaborate to offer content creation, blogging, SEO, SEM, e-mail marketing, Web analytics and social media.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Understanding analytics is important to any SEO strategy and there are resources that will help. Google Webmasters Tools (GWT) is a valuable (and free!) resource that helps users uncover information about their site and those who visit it. Within GWT are two...
Why do I need to update PHP?
Your WordPress site will be faster and more secure. I recommend my clients be sure to host their WordPress sites with "Managed Wordpress," an upgrade that offers better security and automatic updates. Your hosting company doesn't offer it? Then get new hosting. In...
Yes, You Gotta Have an SSL certificate
Time is precious...so who wants to burn through hours of drudgery making websites more secure? Well, in this case, we have no choice. Starting July, 2019, Google marks all sites that haven't adopted HTTPS as not secure. To make matters worse, eventually those sites...
WordPress Website Hosting Nightmares
Unfortunately, most small, reliable hosting companies are getting swallowed up by the big guys. These boutique companies start out with great service and tiny monthly fees. Then, they get bought out, enter into greedy price wars, and things start to fall apart. And...
SEO: What should you do first?
I first encountered Joost de Valk at one of the early WordCamps in San Francisco. He struck me as a smart, good guy; willing to provide plenty of insights. During the ensuing years, I've seen his free plugins grow into a whole set of various free and pro...
Why I believe in net neutrality
Getting Set Up With Google Local
Google has been working to make things easier for people who want to verify a local business on Google but that doesn't mean it isn't time consuming and frustrating! Add to that, when trying to help a client set up their local business, Google sets up all kinds of...
Study of SEO Ranking Factors
I use a software called SemRush when working with my business partners on Search Engine Optimization projects. They just did a survey and revealed some interesting new insights into how Google rates one website higher than another. The main goal of the study was to...
WordPress Just Gets More Popular
Grousing with a colleague recently, as web developers often do, about all the "you'll have a website up and running in a few minutes" ads on TV (not really true, frankly). Those "hosted" solutions can be the right choice for, say, a photographer who just wants to...