Over the last 13 years that we’ve been building great websites for great people, we’ve worked with dozens of different content management systems (CMS). Of these, the platforms that we’ve worked with the most are the ‘big three’: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. As of this writing, WordPress accounts for 58.7% of the market share of … Read more
While we here at Watermelon love working with a variety of Content Management Systems including WordPress for specialized e-commerce solutions, we often want to offer clients the choice of Magento for sites that require a more robust and complex e-commerce configuration. There are many reasons why Magento is a clear leader in the field for … Read more
Maps are something we often want to show on our sites. Whether it’s a map of business locations (a key feature of the best corporate website designs), major project sites, or member directories, there are always times we want to be able to create our own custom maps and display a list of notable locations … Read more
Explore the Power of WordPress and MySQL As a leading content management system, WordPress excels with its simple yet robust database structure. Utilizing MySQL, a widely-used query language, WordPress efficiently manages all users, posts, and comments within a well-organized database. While mastering MySQL is not necessary for basic WordPress site management, gaining a fundamental understanding … Read more
You may have noticed that WordPress is powering so many modern websites (23% of all websites to be exact). WordPress can be found running independent blogs written by your neighbor, to notable brands like The New Yorker or BBC America. But why is WordPress so popular? Easy To Use WordPress is user friendly and intuitive … Read more
I am often asked to display a set of data that is useful for the site visitor. This often means that the data is to be sortable by one or more fields and easily searchable. In addition, it should have an an aesthetic appeal to make it easier to read. Traditional methods to display data … Read more
Site load speed is one of those topics that rarely gets enough attention. In WordPress, there are about three zillion ways to improve load speed. We use some of these for our WordPress maintenance plans and have had dramatic results in some cases, so we thought we’d share the love. gZip compression gZip compression is … Read more
I have to admit I don’t like spam — not with breakfast, not in my Jello, and certainly not in my Google Analytics reports. Google has provided the interwebs with a really complex and useful tool for analyzing website traffic, and it’s totally free. But therein lies the problem. Anyone can sign up for Google … Read more
I’m a relatively new addition to the Watermelon Web Works team, and when they asked me to create blogging content, I was a bit under prepared. I’d never published content for a high end development company before! But I realized it was time to put my expertise down on paper (so to speak), and translate … Read more
It’s no secret that the setup for your website determines how easily people can find it online; in fact, it’s the core concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What is less commonly known is that a huge part of getting more traction on your website happens before anyone, from visitors to Google’s indexing bots, even … Read more
