But right here, in this blog post, I’m going to share the most important secret of increasing your readership. You don’t even need to know what HTML stands for.

Are you ready?

Are you seated?

Okay. Prepare yourself.

The most effective and important method to increasing your online business is to regularly write content that your customers want to read.

Obvious, right? But it’s such an important and overlooked concept, I’m going to say it again.

Write content that your customers want to read.

Interacting with people online is like interacting with people in the real world. In order to understand others, you have to imagine yourself in their shoes. So, let’s take that same empathetic approach to planning our content. Let’s ask ourselves: what would I want to read about, if I was one of my customers?

Let’s think through an example.

Let’s say that you own a coffee shop, and are planning a shiny new website for your business. What would visitors to a coffee shop website want to read about? What would inspire them to want to read more?

Let’s consider those questions.

When I was a boy, my father taught me two things about good communication: talk about what you have in common, and stick with what you know. Our first step should be to figure out our “common ground”, that is, the topic that is most important to both the authors and the audience.

People come to new websites for one of three reasons.

1. For information.
2. To connect with others socially.
3. To buy a product.

Every bit of content we post should satisfy one of these three desires. Any other content is irrelevant to a reader, and will slow them in getting to what they want.

The only way to get people to come to your website is to make them want to do it. This simple idea is too important to overlook. Your content should reflect what visitors want to hear about. If you want to talk about yourself and your desires, a personal blog or private journal is the perfect place for that. When you want to get other people interested, you have to write about what they want.

This basic approach to creating content comes back to one of Epic Websites’ core philosophies on creating websites. The internet is a tool used by people to connect and share information with other people. We always think about our websites with the people that use them as our primary concern. We apply the same thought process described in this article to every website that we author content for.

The whole idea of the world wide web – the whole idea of creating a website in the first place – is to bring people with a common interest together. The SEO “magic bullet”, the trick that others pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for, the secret method to get people interested in you and your business, is to be interesting.

Heard about SEO? We suggest a change in perspective.

Introducing PHO, short for People-Helping Optimization. It’s a little thing we do at Epic Websites to optimize websites to help them help people. It uses all proprietary software, involving a very complex algorithm (which we call Empathy) running on the most sophisticated computer available to date: the human mind. Patent pending.

Thanks for reading! Remember: put yourself in your audience’s shoes, and be interesting!

Just let us know when you refer a client and we’ll add three months of free service to an existing subscription; or set you up with a new hosting account, totally free of charge.

Make sure you’re on the latest version of Chrome before you test these.

This one shows how you can feed Audio straight into a visualization. Before this you needed to preprocess the audio and then load it with JS, now you can analyze the input directly.

This one is an impressive 3d visualization using Three.js among other frameworks.

Embed YouTube in WordPress

I have this silly little video from my recent trip to California in January that I’ll use as an example. I’ve uploaded the video to YouTube.

Step 1. Copy the URL

The first step is to find your video on YouTube. You’ll want to Copy the URL of the video from the address bar of the browser window.

Step 2. Paste the URL into a WordPress Page or Post

Make a new line in your WordPress page or post by clicking Enter in the Visual Editor, and then right-click to Paste your video URL into the box.

Step 3. Click Update.

That’s it! Click update and you should see your video appear on the page like so:

(If you have any trouble, make sure that the URL has the prefix http:// and NOT https://)

Learn More about How to Embed a Video In WordPress

Learn more: Embed YouTube videos in WordPress

These screenies were taken on my three-year old midrange laptop. Yes, this is running in a browser window. I am amazed.

Try it out yourself: Unreal in Flash

Are you having a problem with your website? Is it not loading or displaying correctly?

Epic Websites will repair the error – and we can also set up measures to dramatically reduce the risk of loss of data on your website for the future.

However, it is inevitable that if you work with WordPress, or any piece of software, for long enough, something eventually will break, and the solution to the problem won’t always be obvious.

Problems with WordPress are Often Caused By Software Updates

Nine times out of ten, if something terrible happens and WordPress ceases to function entirely, it happens because of a software update. Usually, it’s because a plugin or theme is incompatible with the current version of the WordPress platform. The way that WordPress itself functions changes from update to update, so software written for the platform must be continually updated to change with the tide.

Which brings me to the topic of discussion:

Fatal WordPress Errors, or WSOD (White Screen of Death)

If you have a fatal error, you will usually be presented with a White Screen of Death. Sometimes, a White Screen of Death is a blank document with no text. Sometimes, it has a line or several lines or a screen full of lines  describing the kinds of errors that are happening. Most likely, you won’t be able to log in to your wp-admin WordPress administration panel either.

You’re stuck, right? You’ve broken your website irrevocably with no hope of repair.

Wrong.

A good website developer can identify and get you your site back in an hour or less. Here’s how you can do it yourself:

Steps to Solving a Fatal WordPress Error – Repairing a Database after Bad Update

Disclaimer: Incorrectly following the steps in this article could damage your website, WordPress installation, or any of the other websites that might be hosted on the same account. I take no liability for any damage you might inflict upon your or anyone else’s property. If you are in doubt about your technical ability, hire a professional.

Solving a White Screen of Death fatal WordPress error takes some sly behind-the-scenes technical work, but once you master the basic skills, will give you power over Death. Or at least over all white screens thereof.

Research the Error

If you have lines of text on your screen (which you really shouldn’t, but we’ll save that for another day), you already have a hint at which plugin or theme might be causing the error. Google the error code, along with your WordPress version (if you know it). Try and remember which active plugins and theme you have installed so you can filter out irrelevant results.

Set your theme back to default manually

Okay, this step is going to take some work. If you’re with a good hosting provider, they will provide you with a cPanel Control Panel that helps you administer your site. Try http://cpanel.your-domain.com/, or http://your-domain.com/cpanel. Your username and log in information should have been provided by your hosting provider – hopefully you saved the email!

Once you’re in to the cPanel, scroll down until you find the icon for “phpMyAdmin”. There, click that little icon. Should look a bit like this:

If you don’t have a good hosting provider, you should get one. You can email me about hosting with me or about where you should look for a quality web host.

Depending on your hosting provider, the steps you might have to take to get to your phpMyAdmin might be different. Some (GoDaddy) can be a real headache, especially if they don’t have a default administrator account for all hosting services (GoDaddy) or use a password policy that changes depending on what area of the hosting account services you are trying to access (GoDaddy).

1. Once you’re at the phpMyAdmin screen, you want to navigate to the database associated with your WordPress website. They will be listed on the left-hand sidebar.
2. Next, in that same bar, select wp_options. “wp_options” is the database table where all the options and settings for your specific WordPress configuration are stored.
3. On the navigation bar across the top of the phpMyAdmin screen, select “Search”
4. On this page, there will be a bunch of different things that you can search by. In the text box next to “option_name”, type exactly: “template”, minus the quotation marks. No need to worry about the other settings at this stage.
5. Click “Go” at the bottom of the screen.
6. There should be only one search result. Next to that one result, click the “Edit” button.
7. In the big text box that has the name of your theme, cut the text in the box and type exactly: “default”, only without the quotation marks.
8. Click “Go” at the bottom of the screen.
9. Test your website to see if that repaired the problem.

Deactivate all of your Plugins manually.

1. Repeat steps 1 thru 4 above.
2. Instead of searching for “template”, we’re going to be searching for “active_plugins”. Remember to type exactly and omit the quotes.
3. Instead of changing the text in “option_value” to “default”, we’re going to delete the list of active plugins entirely. Make sure to copy that code down somewhere so you can repair the database easily if this diagnostic doesn’t reveal the problem.
4. Check your WordPress website again to see if these changes fixed anything. If not, try and remember to set things back the way they were. This will help a professional diagnose the problem if it ends up that you can’t fix it yourself.

Can’t figure it out? Hire a WordPress professional. Contact me and I’ll fix the problem with no hassle.

Not strictly related to web design, but important tool to have nonetheless. I was downloading Creative Commons video for a WordPress theme I’m going to release soon and needed to have this ability.

How to Download HD Video from YouTube with Firefox

1. Install the GreaseMonkey extension for FireFox. 
2. Install the UserScripts YouTube Video Downloader for GreaseMonkey

Once that’s active, there will be a “Download” button next to the “Share” button on all Youtube videos that allows you to easily save multiple versions of the video file to your computer.

Most of Epic Websites clients are small businesses and interests local to Silver Spring, Maryland. We’ve worked with lots of small businesses in the area, and we focus on developing long-standing relationships with clients, continuing to offer them technical support and advice long after our contract has been terminated.

We’re the best web design company in Montgomery County, Maryland!

Epic Websites was founded in 2008 by Alex Stek, who was born in Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring and has lived, studied and worked in Maryland for all of his life. He has an intimate understanding of the local economy, target audiences for different sorts of businesses, local culture, and more. If you’re looking to establish yourself as a local start up or small business, working with a web designer local to Silver Spring or Bethesda who has a long history working with Maryland businesses might have unforeseen local business development and networking benefits.

If you have a small business located in Maryland, Epic Websites are the website designers for you!

How to do a Full-Bleed fill with Video or Images using jQuery

The code I’m going to link to is the updated code – just give any element the class “.fill” and it will automagically scale that item to fit its container. IMPORTANT NOTE, however. You must specify the starting height and width of the element in the HTML. Here’s an example with an image:

<img src="path/to/image.png" alt="" width="800" height="600" class="fill" />

Here’s that same one with video:

<video width="1280" height="720" autoplay loop class="fill" muted="muted">
<source src="path/to/mp4video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="path/to/webmvideo.webm" type="video/webm" />
Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

In firefox, the video will start playing with sound even with the muted tag set. It’s a bug caused by firefox not supporting that particular HTML5 property. Here’s how to turn off sound. Add this code after the above.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
$("video").prop('muted', true);
</script>

Here’s where the magic happens, with a quick modification of the code on the other post.


var sxsw = {

full_bleed: function(boxWidth, boxHeight, imgWidth, imgHeight) {

// Calculate new height and width…
var initW = imgWidth;
var initH = imgHeight;
var ratio = initH / initW;

imgWidth = boxWidth;
imgHeight = boxWidth * ratio;

// If the video is not the right height, then make it so…

if(imgHeight < boxHeight){
imgHeight = boxHeight;
imgWidth = imgHeight / ratio;
}

//  Return new size for video
return {
width: imgWidth,
height: imgHeight
};

},

};

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {

/*
* Full bleed background
*/

function recalculateFills() {

//get pixel size of browser window.
var browserHeight = Math.round($(window).height());
var browserWidth = Math.round($(window).width());

//jquery all items on page with fill tag
var fills = $(‘.fill’);

//for each fill, recalculate size and position and apply using jQuery
fills.each(function () {

//height of element. not neccessarily video
var videoHeight = $(this).height();
var videoWidth = $(this).width();

//calculate new size
var new_size = sxsw.full_bleed(browserWidth, browserHeight, videoWidth, videoHeight);

//distance from top and left is half of the difference between the browser width and the size of the element
$(this)
.width(new_size.width)
.height(new_size.height)
.css(“margin-left”, ((browserWidth – new_size.width)/2))
.css(“margin-top”, ((browserHeight – new_size.height)/2));

});
}

recalculateFills();

//we also have to recalculate if the window rectangle changes.
$(window).resize(function() {
recalculateFills();

});

})

Example of scaling code in use on an image

Download the code example