Notes from
the work.
Practical notes on WordPress, catalogs, and website operations.
2026-08-12 / SEO · Web Operations
Building a WordPress Event Website People Actually Use
How I built the Great Lakes Cigar Festival site in WordPress to hold tickets, vendors, schedules and sponsors, then used GA4 to check whether people used any of it.
2026-08-12 / WordPress & Web
Core Web Vitals on a Page-Builder Site
A page builder does not make a site slow — it makes it easy to do four or five specific things that do, without warning you. The hero image trap, the three sources of layout shift, widget sprawl, and the caching settings that break templates.
2026-07-28 / Content Writing
Writing 400 Product Descriptions Without Losing the Plot
Treat 400 product descriptions as a writing job and you get forty good pages and a lot of filler. Treat it as an editorial system — tiers, structural templates, guardrails, and a handover — and the whole catalogue reads as though somebody cared.
2026-07-22 / Process & Operations · Web Operations
What Managing Metro Detroit Small Business Sites Taught Me About Website Maintenance
Restaurants, wholesalers and retail shops around Metro Detroit taught me lessons about small business website maintenance that no tutorial covers.
2026-07-11 / Process & Operations · WordPress
The Backup Habit That Saved a Client's Store: Back Up Before Every Plugin Update
A plugin update took a client’s store down on a Friday afternoon. It was back in about twenty minutes because of one cheap habit: a backup before every update.
2026-07-09 / Process & Operations
What GA4 Actually Tells You About a Small Store
On a few thousand sessions a month most of the GA4 interface is noise wearing a percentage sign. The four numbers worth tracking, the two Search Console reports that beat any dashboard, and the one-page monthly note I actually send.
2026-06-23 / E-commerce Operations
Inventory and Price Sync: Where the Numbers Drift
Syncs between an ERP and a store are rarely broken — they drift. Timing windows, tiered schedules for fast movers, a one-page map of who owns each field, and the threshold alert that stops a bad feed from emptying the catalogue.
2026-06-12 / Web Operations · WordPress
Mobile Friendly Restaurant Websites That Work on a Phone: Firefly Burgers
What I focused on when building the Firefly Burgers WordPress site for someone already in the parking lot: menu, hours, location and branding that work on a phone.
2026-06-02 / Photoshop
Product Photography at Catalogue Scale
Image work on a large catalogue is a pipeline problem, not a design one. The four numbers to fix before opening a single file, why filenames belong to the SKU scheme, and the checks that catch inconsistency before the category grid does.
2026-05-23 / E-commerce Operations · Photoshop
Product Photos Without a Studio: How to Take Product Photos With Your Phone
A repeatable way to take product photos with your phone and clean them up in Photoshop, built from years of keeping big catalogs looking consistent without a studio.
2026-05-14 / E-commerce Operations
Filters Are the Real Search
On most stores the filter panel does the work the search box gets credit for — and it is a data problem, not a theme feature. Attribute coverage, controlled vocabularies, per-category filter sets, and the two failure states nobody designs.
2026-04-28 / E-commerce Operations
Category Trees That Don’t Collapse at 5,000 Products
Category structures do not break as a catalogue grows, they bloat — and the instinct to add more categories makes it worse. The rules I use for depth, size, naming, and planning a split before it becomes urgent.
2026-04-25 / Web Operations · WordPress
WordPress Contact Form Not Sending Email? How I Make Forms Reach the Inbox
The form says thank you, the message never shows up. Here is how I fix a WordPress contact form not sending email: SMTP, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, logging and test submissions.
2026-04-13 / Web Operations · WordPress
How to Speed Up a Slow WordPress Site Without a Rebuild
Most slow WordPress sites share the same handful of problems, and none of them require starting over. Here is the order I work in to speed up a slow WordPress site.
2026-04-07 / E-commerce Operations
Shopify or WooCommerce: The Questions That Actually Decide It
The platform comparison is almost never settled by features. Four questions about the business — who maintains it, how odd the pricing is, where product data comes from, and what else the site must do — settle it every time.
2026-03-19 / SEO
Redirects Are the Migration
On a replatforming project the redirect map is not a cleanup task at the end — it is the only artefact that carries the old site’s value across to the new one. Here is how I build one, and the verification pass most projects skip.
2026-03-04 / E-commerce Operations · Product Data
Inventory Sync Between Your Online Store and Warehouse: How I Stop Overselling
The site says in stock, the shelf says otherwise. How I handle inventory sync between an online store and the warehouse so customers stop ordering things that are not there.
2026-03-03 / Product Data
The SKU Is a Decision, Not a Label
A SKU looks like a formality until the catalogue passes a few thousand items and nobody can tell which variants belong together. Here is the structure I use, the two identifiers people confuse, and the habits that quietly destroy a scheme.
2026-02-24 / Catalog Data · Shopify
B2B Wholesale Collections That Match How Retailers Actually Shop
Retail buyers restock by season, use, pack size and their own aisle. How I build B2B wholesale collections in Shopify and WooCommerce around the way they reorder.
2026-02-13 / Process & Operations
Eleven Steps, and the Three Where Projects Actually Fail
Every web project workflow lists roughly the same eleven steps. They are not equally risky. Three of them absorb almost all the pressure when a deadline moves, and what happens to those three determines whether the launch was a success or just an event.
2026-02-07 / WordPress
How to Choose a WordPress Plugin: My Rules Before I Install Anything
I used to install plugins too casually and paid for it in slow pages and broken updates. Here is how I choose a WordPress plugin now, and the rules I follow before anything goes live.
2026-01-27 / SEO
On-Page SEO When You Have Thousands of Product Pages
Nobody hand-writes SEO for fourteen thousand products. The workable approach is to sort pages into three tiers — templated, written, and excluded — and spend real effort only where it changes anything. Here is how I decide the tiers and what goes into each.
2026-01-08 / WordPress & Web
Elementor Builds That Survive the Handoff
A build is finished when someone who was not there can change it without breaking it. This covers what to standardise before the first page, what to leave behind at handover, and a simple six-month test for whether the structure held.
2026-01-05 / SEO · Web Operations
Fixing 404 Errors After a Site Migration: The Redirect Cleanup
The new site is live and traffic is dropping because old URLs hit a wall. Here is how I find the broken pages and map each one to the right place.
2025-12-11 / WordPress & Web
Building a Menu Page the Client Can Actually Update
A menu page is not a design problem, it is a maintenance problem. Three ways to structure one in WordPress, what each costs the client after launch, and the questions that decide which is right for a given restaurant.
2025-12-09 / Catalog Data · Shopify
Shopify Wholesale Store Setup: Case Packs, Hidden Pricing, and Buyer Accounts
How I think about a B2B Shopify storefront: hiding prices from guests, approving buyer accounts, selling by the case and organizing for reorders.
2025-11-25 / Content Writing · Product Data
Writing Product Descriptions When the Supplier Gives You Nothing
A part number, a size and a blurry photo. How I turn thin supplier data into product pages that read like something, without making things up.
2025-11-24 / Product Data
Cleaning Product Data Before It Reaches the Store
A product CSV is not a transport format, it is the deliverable — and spreadsheets damage it in ways that stay invisible until import. Here is the prep sequence I run on supplier data, the validation column that replaces manual checking, and the point where a spreadsheet stops being the right tool.
2025-11-06 / E-commerce Operations
Field Mapping Is the Whole Migration
A catalog migration is decided before a single row is imported. This is the field-mapping method I use on large WooCommerce catalogs, the four decisions that have to be made per field, and the validation passes that catch problems while they are still cheap.
2025-11-05 / SEO
The Three Google Search Console Reports I Actually Open
Search Console has a lot of screens. These are the three reports I check on a regular basis and what I do with each one.
2025-10-13 / Process & Operations · Web Operations
What Does a Webmaster Do? A Real Week on the Job
Most of the work is smaller, quieter and more important than building sites. Here is what a webmaster’s week actually looks like.
2025-09-16 / E-commerce Operations · Product Data
How to Bulk Update Prices in WooCommerce Without Breaking the Store
Four hundred price changes at once is routine work, until one bad row goes live. Here is the order I follow so nothing hits the storefront wrong.
2025-08-25 / Catalog Data · WooCommerce
My WooCommerce CSV Import Checklist Before Anything Goes Live
Column mapping, duplicate SKUs, broken parent links and image URLs that never load. The checks I run before and after a WooCommerce CSV import.
2025-08-10 / E-commerce Operations · WooCommerce
The First 90 Minutes of a WooCommerce Store Audit on a Store I've Never Seen
When I open a WooCommerce store for the first time, I don’t fix anything. Here is what I check in the first ninety minutes and why I wait to touch it.
2025-08-05 / Catalog Data · Shopify
Product Variants vs Attributes: Why Messy SKU Data Costs Sales
Buyers stop when they can’t tell the size, pack or color they’re about to order. How I structure SKUs, variants and attributes so the catalog answers that before they ask.
2025-07-25 / Catalog Data · Web Operations
Why I Still Clean Product Data in Excel Myself
Most catalog problems start in a spreadsheet long before they show up on a product page. Why I still do that work myself, and how I clean product data in Excel before it hits a live store.
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