Practical, plain-English writing on SEO, GEO and the wider shift towards AI-powered search, plus the occasional note on design and development along the way.
After a run of articles about elements that carry meaning, header, nav, article, section and the rest, it is time to look at the one that deliberately carries none. The div is HTML’s all-purpose container. It says nothing about what it holds. It simply groups things together so you can style or script them as […]
Facts are correct as of 22 October 2026. This story is still developing, so check your host’s latest guidance as well. This week, the PHP team released emergency fixes for two critical security flaws, nicknamed PHP2Shell. PHP is the programming language WordPress runs on, so a serious flaw in PHP is a serious flaw in […]
A website has no idea, in advance, what it will be viewed on. It might be a large monitor, a phone held upright, a tablet on a kitchen table or a sheet of paper coming out of a printer. Media queries let CSS ask about the situation it finds itself in, then adjust accordingly. This […]
Of all the semantic elements in HTML, article and section cause the most head-scratching. They look nearly identical; both wrap chunks of content, and many experienced developers admit they guess which one to use. The previous entry in this series covered the layout elements that frame a whole page. This one goes inside the main […]
WordPress can connect to a database, and it can’t function without one. Every post, page, comment, user account and setting on a WordPress site lives in a database, and the files on your server are really just the machinery that reads from it and presents the result. Most people never need to think about this […]
An earlier article in this collection looked at whether SEO jobs will be replaced by AI, from the point of view of someone building a career. This one asks a different question, aimed at the business owner or manager. If AI can write copy, build adverts and analyse data in seconds, do you still need […]
If Flexbox is the tool for lining things up along a single line, CSS Grid is the one for laying out a whole surface. It lets you divide a space into rows and columns, then place content into the cells that result, in the way a designer would sketch a page on squared paper. This […]
Every year brings a fresh wave of claims that SEO has been rewritten from scratch. AI Overviews, AI Mode, answer engines and a pile of new acronyms have made 2026 feel especially unsettled, and it is fair to wonder what actually still applies. The reassuring answer is that the foundations are largely the same. The […]
Open the code behind many websites, and you will find the same thing repeated hundreds of times: one generic box nested inside another, none of them saying what they are for. The page may look perfectly organised on screen, but underneath it is a pile of unlabelled containers. Semantic layout elements fix that. They are […]
Think about how many different screens your website is viewed on. A large desktop monitor, a laptop, a tablet held upright, a phone held sideways, even a television. Each has a different width, and each visitor expects the site to look right on theirs without pinching, zooming or scrolling sideways. Responsive design makes this possible. […]
For years, laying out a web page meant bending tools to jobs they were never designed for. Floats, tables, and fiddly positioning tricks were pressed into service just to get a few boxes sitting side by side neatly. Flexbox arrived to fix exactly that, and it has quietly become one of the most useful layout […]
The short answer is yes and no, and the difference depends entirely on what you want to do with it. WordPress is software, and software has to run somewhere. If that somewhere is your own computer, you can use WordPress without paying anyone for hosting. If you want the public to visit your site, something […]
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