Category: Web Design

Installing IIS and PHP on Windows Server

October 5, 2021February 18, 2023 Andrew Comeau

Several years ago, I wrote an extensive article on creating a WIMP development stack (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) and it’s been quite popular here on the site. I’ve meant to do an update for awhile now and finally got around to it this week! This time around, I decided to do a video demonstration on…

How-to, Software, Web Design

Latest Mystery: Tracking Down the Archive

October 1, 2019November 18, 2022 Andrew Comeau

I installed The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe, Inc. on another site the other day so I could keep a community calendar of tech and business events. It seems like a pretty good WordPress plugin which is probably why it has over 700,000 installs. It’s not perfect – the free version doesn’t handle recurring events…

Web Design

Five WordPress Plugins That Will Enhance Your Website

September 14, 2019November 18, 2022 Andrew Comeau

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System, powering approximately a third of the world’s websites in September 2019 according to W3Techs.com. One of its advantages is the ability to quickly add almost any necessary features through the installation of plugins. The WordPress marketplace includes over 50,000 plugins, many of which are free to download with additional premium features available for paying users.

Most WordPress users who spend any time administering a site will hear about the most popular plugins such as Yoast SEO for optimizing search engine performance and Akismet which comes pre-installed with WordPress and reduces spam comments submitted to the site. The following list contains a few other useful types of plugins that you can help you maintain and enhance your site.

Software, Web Design

How To Create a Local WordPress site with XAMPP

November 26, 2018December 27, 2022 Andrew Comeau

XAMPP is one of many AMP software stacks (Apache – MySQL – PHP) that can be used to create a local web development environment for design and testing. It automatically installs and configures Apache as a web server so that you can view your pages through http://localhost, MySQL as a database server for website data…

Software, Web Design

Using JavaScript with ASP.NET

August 8, 2018April 23, 2024 Andrew Comeau

Why Use JavaScript?

There are a few technologies that you must be comfortable with if you want to do any serious web development. HTML for content, CSS for formatting and JavaScript for dynamic programming are recognized as the three foundation skills that any good web designer needs.

ASP.NET programmers might be tempted to do away with the last item given that .NET code can do virtually anything when combined with HTML and CSS but JavaScript is still very important and the reason lies in the different domains in which each language operates.

Programming, Web Design

A Complete Guide to Installing MySQL and PHP with IIS

September 26, 2015November 8, 2024 Andrew Comeau 14 Comments

Update: A video update to this article for Windows Server 2016 / 2019 is available on YouTube. I’m leaving this version up as a general guide for issues you might encounter in this type of installation. Please take this into consideration when downloading components.

One of my latest projects was setting up WordPress, the popular content management system, on a client’s web server which was running Windows Server 2008. WordPress requires installations of MySQL for the database back-end and the PHP scripting language in order to serve up the WordPress content. On a local Windows machine, I’d probably just use a pre-configured WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack package like XAMPP which is installed quickly and includes all the necessary components. That’s not quite an option in a professional environment, though. I was also working with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for the web server instead of Apache so the process is a little more involved.

Click here to read more about using XAMPP to create a local installation of WordPress.

How-to, Web Design

Importing Meta Descriptions to Yoast SEO

January 1, 2015December 27, 2022 Andrew Comeau 9 Comments

In a recent post, I talked about using the WordPress plugin Add Meta Tags for adding meta descriptions and titles to posts and pages within my WordPress sites. It’s a simple SEO tool but works well. Nevertheless, I decided to switch my sites over to Yoast SEO for all its extra features and guidance in constructing pages. I was anticipating quite a job as this blog alone has almost 100 posts and all of those descriptions needed to be transferred from the fields created by the old plugin to Yoast’s fields. Yoast does have some import tools of its own but they didn’t include the one I’d been using and my experience with a third-party converter had not been good so I was glad to find that I could do it so simply with one query in phpMyAdmin.

How-to, Web Design