Welcome to More Than Scratch The Surface, a website about WordPress development, website management, content strategy, search engine optimisation and web development.
WordPress
The self hosted version of WordPress is used to power approximately 25 million websites and this growing at an incredible rate. WordPress has gone from a simple blogging platform to the best all-round content management system and it’s being adopted far and wide.
I’ve been building websites on WordPress since 2007 and have created many WordPress plugins, some of which are publicly released (see below). I’ve also written articles on how to develop for WordPress, how to hack it to improve it’s functionality and shared my opinion on things in the WordPress ecosystem.
- WordPress Development
- WordPress Hacks
- WordPress Opinion
- WordPress Reviews
Website Management
Many things go into managing a website properly: from defining a content strategy and ensuring the right governance is in place to selecting the most appropriate content management system and getting some rock solid hosting. Traffic is important for all websites. Most need to make money as well.
I have spent many years managing websites of all sizes, from small personal sites to large complex government websites with distributed content authors. I’ve written about some of the things I’ve learned through this experience.
- Content Management Systems
- Make Money Online
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Web Hosting
Web Development
Web development is the discipline of writing the code that creates a website. On the client side, HTML provides the semantic structure of the content, CSS styles it and JavaScript allows behaviours to be added. On the server side, PHP (or other scripting language) connects to a database and serves up the appropriate content, including the HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that!
I started out as a web developer. Before I’d ever heard of content strategy, before WordPress was created, I was creating websites. Heck, I even went on a web development course before the term “search engine optimisation” was coined, way back in 1997. These days, I roll with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery on the front end, PHP on the back end. Occasionally, I like to write about it.
- CSS
- Greasemonkey
- PHP Development
- Web Page Optimisation
Other Articles
I have a range of other articles on general topics, including DoFollow, blogging, customer service and site news.
