We take a look and show you what we use behind the scenes to create our site. We want to help you create the best site that you can and we feel that the only way to do that is to be open about what we use. Keep checking back as this page will get updated when we add new tools, plugins and services to our site.
WordPress
We run our site using WordPress, simply the best content management system available for websites and the best bit is that it is totally FREE!
HostGator
We have been hosting our website on the HostGator servers since we started back in 2011. They have been really helpful whenever we have needed any assistance and plan on continuing to use them for a long time to come.
Genesis
We built our site using the Genesis framework for WordPress. This HTML5, mobile responsive framework by StudioPress lets us easily update our site and keep it up to date for everyone to use.
News Theme
We use a customised version of the Genesis News Theme for our site. We felt this helps us to present our content in the best way that we can for all our viewers.
AWeber
AWeber allows us to manage and grow our email list. We can design and email out great looking newsletters/emails to all our subscribers to keep them up-to-date with what we’ve been up to here on the site.
Premise
Premise helps us to create landing pages for our site that convert. We also use it to manage membership areas on some of our other sites – a really great plugin that every site should try out.
W3 Total Cache
The W3 Total Cache plugin allows us to speed up our site greatly by page caching, browser caching and also helps us to integrate MaxCDN. Site speed is VERY important these days!
Max CDN
To help speed up our website further we use MaxCDN, a Content Delivery Network that reduces server load. This helps to dramatically reduce the load time of images, CSS, javascript and more.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
We use this fantastic plugin to help us manage our SEO. Can’t recommend this plugin highly enough, simply the best that you can use for SEO on your site.
Disqus
Our site uses Disqus to manage all of our comments. Helping to encourage interaction, prevent spam and speed up our site, Disqus has been on our site since we started.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a vital tool that we use to monitor how our website is performing online. With that we can track our traffic numbers, referrers, where in the world our visitors are from and much, much more!
Webmaster Tools
This great tool helps us to monitor the health of our site. Crawl errors, malware, sitemap problems, etc. can all be monitored here and alerts sent out to us to help fix the issue.
SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
For any code that we need to add to our posts to show you, we use this fantastic plugin. This helps to highlight code to our users and make it stand out in our tutorial posts.
Contact Form 7
Every site needs a contact form. For ours, we use the brilliant Contact Form 7 plugin that enables us to setup custom contact forms for different pages.
Dropbox
To help us manage all our website files we use Dropbox cloud storage, both to backup our files and allow us to access them from multiple devices.