Web Development Resources + Wordpres Websites + Tools + Tips

Q: Glide Design

Glide Design , established in 2002, is based out of the beautiful Hill Country of Austin, Texas. They strive to create raving fans by making best-in-class websites, providing fanatical support and delivering quantifiable bottom-line results. Whether you’re starting from scratch, need a redesign, or just some refreshing on your current website, they design to meet your business goals online. They are real people who want the same thing you want: to make your product, service or organization a success. To them, it's more than just getting the job done. It's getting the job done right.

A Few of Our Favorite Things

A guide for those who want to know what’s possible.

Here are some of the tools and services we use and recommend to our clients.

One of Austin Web and Design's preferred hosting companies.

Website Designs

Start Here

There are exactly 1.345 gazillion website designs available at any given time. Whatever message you’re trying to convey, someone has probably built a nice looking website that expresses it. Here are our favorite WordPress template providers.

Astra Theme

Using the Astra Theme will not only make your website fast, but you will be able to make it look exactly how you want with our visual theme customizer, fast & easy!

Glide Design

Glide Design, established in 2002, is based out of the beautiful Hill Country of Austin, Texas. They strive to create raving fans by making best-in-class websites, providing fanatical support and delivering quantifiable bottom-line results. Whether you’re starting from scratch, need a redesign, or just some refreshing on your current website, they design to meet your business goals online. They are real people who want the same thing you want: to make your product, service or organization a success. To them, it’s more than just getting the job done. It’s getting the job done right.

SEO, SEM, & Analytics

Website Tools

How to get found, measure your results, and repeat and improve.

Google Keyword Selection Tool

No sense doing SEO or SEM for keywords nobody is searching for. This Keyword Search Tool will tell you how many searches there are for any given keyword or key phrase.

Google Analytics

You probably already know this, but Google’s free analytics tool will tell you exactly how many hits each page is getting, where they’re coming from (both geographically and referring website) even what search phrase sent them there if they’re coming from Google Search or Google Adwords.

Rank Checker

How do you know if your search engine rank has gone up or down? This Rank checker plugin for Firefox is just the thing. It’ll give you your position on Bing, Yahoo, and Google for any list of keywords you select. Save the results in a spreadsheet and rerun the report periodically to see if you’re going up or down.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Google will punish you for having broken links on your website. The easiest way to find broken links? Download Xenu Link Sleuth’s (alarmingly cheesy looking) little program. What it lacks in slick interface it makes up for in elegantly simple functionality. Surprisingly, this is the industry standard. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Google’s own blog and Matt Cutts’s blog

Accept no substitute. These are the one plus ultra source for current news regarding SEO. Whatever else you’re reading, the author of that is reading these, if they know what they’re doing. Check out the Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO blog.

Do It Yourself Maintenance

Austin Web & Design’s tips and tricks for website maintenance, WordPress updating, and backing up your website files and databases.

Do It Yourself Blog

Maintenance Plans

AWD Recommends

In No Particular Order

Hostinger.com

Hostinger.com provides Managed WordPress that offers a 1-click staging tool, automatic backups, a malware scanner to detect and remove malicious files, a web application firewall, and more with 24/7 world-class support.

Cloudways.com by Digital Ocean

Cloudways turbocharges your digital agency, ecommerce store, or online business with an incredibly fast, secure, and simple cloud hosting platform backed by 24/7 expert support.

GreenGeeks Web Hosting

As fast and affordable as the rest, but three times as green, we’ve recently signed on as affiliate partners of GreenGeeks.com. Use coupon TAKE20OFF to save an additional 20% off their already low prices. Unlike the competition, after the initial low-price period, the service only goes up $1/month. Most everyone else’s prices double at renewal time. This means GreenGeeks is not the greenest option, they’re the most affordable choice in the long run.

CodeCanyon

A solid collection of useful WordPress plugins for eCommerce, blogging, hero sliders, and more, at reasonable prices.

s2 Member Free and Pro

S2Member Pro is our favorite membership plugin. The free version is very powerful, and the paid one adds crucial functions like support for recurring payments. The one-time fee for lifetime access means this is a pretty great value as well.

jQuery Plugins

There’s a dizzying array of things you can do with JavaScript, and jQuery plugins make them accessible and therefore cheap to implement. Browsing this page won’t be very useful for the non-technical, but I’d be remiss not to include it.

Constant Contact

Probably the most popular broadcast e-mail tool out there. If you’re doing an e–mail newsletter or any other e–mail marketing, you won’t go wrong here.

Website Spellchecker

We use this religiously at the end of every project. Amazing the stuff you won’t notice is misspelled.

Google Properties

Google is like the web’s own kindly, wealthy aunt. For web building, their Calendar, Google Photos, YouTube, Google Docs (like Word), and Google Docs (Like Excel) Survey Form are incredibly easy to use and embed in any website.

HIPAA Compliant Hosting

The Rolls Royce of hosting solutions is necessary if you are building an application that touches Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in any way, sin a medical capacity. From my survey of the industry, LuxSci provides the lowest cost and a great, HIPAA-compliant solution.

iStockphoto & Stock.XCHNG

Stock photos and illustrations. Stock.XCHNG is free, but you get what you pay for.

WPEngine Hosting

More expensive hosting for when you expect to have lots of simultaneous website users and/or when page load speed is a priority. A great fit for traditional WordPress websites (like this one). Not appropriate for websites with complex functionality. Ask us if you’re not sure.

Website Resources