If you’re like most business and personal brands, then you’ve likely heard and read numerous stories about the importance of securing a .com domain for your brand.

And while that is true, there have been a growing number of business and personal brands that have defied the “must be on .com to be successful” mantra to build successful and profitable companies.

From hosting a coming soon page for a website launch to a maintenance page for an under construction website, these two options are the most likely used although there are a number of reasons to temporarily disable a WordPress website.

For instance, I stumbled into the website design and development business in the early 2000’s. From design to hosting, I’ve amassed a good growing base of monthly subscriptions to our web hosting services.

While the web hosting was not intentionally marketed, it has been a steady flow of business amongst the web design and development, search marketing, and domain buying and selling.

In the early days, managing payments for web hosting services was a complete nightmare and laborious black hole at times. Fast forward to today, and there are a number of ways to manage monthly subscription payments.

However, associating website non-payment from a customer for a website can still send one down a rabbit hole if the right solutions are chosen.

Nevertheless, I’ve used a number of manual tools to suspend WordPress websites for non-payment, under construction, or maintenance mode sessions.

For almost two decades, I’ve road the rollercoaster of website design. From static HTML pages to harnessing the dynamic power of PHP/MySQL websites to content management systems, I finally settled into a groove of rapid website development using the same platform as nearly a third of the websites hosted online: WordPress.

Good, bad, or indifferent, WordPress has come a mighty long way (and likely still has a ways to go depending upon which side of the fence you stand having experienced operating or managing a WordPress website).

One of the most common questions raised — whether a new website development project or a redesign effort — about WordPress centers upon extensibility, flexibility, and the ease of migrating content from one website to another.

I’ve experience a number of WordPress-to-WordPress migrations as well as WordPress to 3rd-Party CMS’ and vice versa.

Often times customers want to preserve blog posts and pages when redesigning their websites, but shy away from preserving pages due to thinking it’s too laborious to perform and achieve such a feat. But that will no longer be your fear after this tutorial.

Not long ago, I set my sail towards mastering the use of video to grow my business, and digital presence and reach.

I’ll admit that it was rough starting out out, getting acclimated to a smooth and natural delivery of informed speaking with matching body posture.

Of course, most of you know that I started out recording screen captures of my desktop demonstrating a series of how-to tutorials for WordPress, search marketing, and domain name strategies to grow your business.

I progressed from screen capture tutorial videos to recording in-person question and answer interviews.

But what really changed the game for me as well as my website reaching and serving more people was including videos in my email campaigns.

If you have a website — which is nearly everyone and their grandmother — and have not implemented a newsletter or mailing list sign up form, then you are totally missing out on a good monetization opportunity.

And if you carelessly shrug your shoulders at the thought of possibly monetizing your website, then at least think about the opportunity of growing organic traffic.

Executing a sound popup form upon scroll, entry, or exit, or a sidebar, footer, or header sign up form is a MUST for every website I develop. Why?

Recently I was contacted by a customer inquiring about what steps they should take to improve their website speed.

This customer was adamant that their website ranking was greatly suffering because of it. While I don’t disagree with their assessment, let me be clear that ranking on page one of Google or any other search engine was not solely because of website performance, or lack of.

Website performance is a factor, but not in the case of this customer. In fact, this customer’s overall website performance and SEO health puts their competition to shame upon further review of keyword ranking, backlink profile and domain authority.

Nevertheless, I discussed and walked the customer through a step-by-step process for what to check for to determine how to improve website performance, checking the following:

Emoji domains burst onto the scene over a year or so ago with a handful of domain investors, speculators, and hobbyists registering nearly 21,000 .WS emoji domains and a few hundred .TO emoji domains.

While the emoji domain craze has subsided with just under 1,500 .WS domains registered (best guess) and mostly single-character, the market for emoji domains has started the journey towards emoji marketing education and usage.