Website Basics articles

Website Basics 993 Customising your theme without writing code Almost everything people want to change about a theme is changed through screens made for it, without touching a...
Website Basics 1,301 Updating themes and plugins without breaking anything Updating is the single most important thing you do for your site’s security, and it is also the thing most people...
Website Basics 1,110 Hosting words for beginners: the terms on your invoice and in your panel The first invoice and the first panel come full of abbreviations nobody explained. You do not need to memorise them:...
Website Basics 1,174 How a website works: from the address you type to the page on your screen The short answer: when you type an address, the browser asks DNS which server belongs to that name, connects to that...
Website Basics 1,066 Ten mistakes first-time website owners make, and how to avoid each one The short answer: nearly all the problems of a site’s first months repeat from person to person. Most are not...
Website Basics 896 Legal pages for any website: privacy, terms and cookies, and which ones you need The short answer: almost every site needs a privacy page, because almost every site collects something (a form, a...
Website Basics 999 A 30-minute monthly routine to keep your website healthy The short answer: a site does not break all at once: it accumulates small faults (a plugin not updated, a form that...
Website Basics 1,102 The parts of a web address: scheme, domain, port, path, query and fragment The short answer: a web address (a URL) is read from left to right, in pieces, and each piece is handled by a...
Website Basics 1,363 Spaces, accents and symbols in links and file names: URL encoding without broken links The short answer: an address can only carry a limited set of characters. Everything else (a space, an accented...
Website Basics 1,400 Relative or absolute links: what breaks when a site moves to another domain or folder The short answer: a link or an image can name its target in four ways: absolute...