Digital

This section is about the practical business of being online: building the site, getting people to it, and selling something once they arrive.

The bulk of it is hands-on. Hosting is covered through use rather than affiliate summary, including a long-run Hostinger review and the mechanics of getting WordPress installed when you are doing it for the first time. Then there is what to do with the site once it exists: what actually makes a business website work, email programmes and where they quietly lose money, and SEO covered with its risks attached rather than as a list of tricks, including an honest look at where the line sits.

Two subjects carry most of the weight. Search is the biggest: not tricks, but the durable part — what a page has to do to deserve a ranking, the mistakes that cost you one, and how to tell an agency’s promise from an outcome. Social media is close behind, covered as distribution rather than as a personality contest. Underneath both sits the infrastructure: hosting compared through use rather than affiliate tables, including managed cloud hosting, WordPress itself, and a smaller ecommerce thread about the mechanics of taking money online.

A word about the age of this archive. Digital marketing dates faster than anything else on the site, and some pieces here are plainly of their time – hosting coupons from 2015, themes that have since changed hands. They are left in place as a record rather than passed off as current recommendations. Where a guide is still followed, the technique usually outlasted the interface.

It is written for the person doing the work themselves: a blogger, a freelancer, or someone running a small company’s website without a marketing department behind them.

The through-line is that most of this work is unglamorous and sequential. Traffic follows from a site that loads and says something clearly; sales follow from traffic that was the right traffic. Articles that promise to skip those steps tend not to survive contact with a real site, and the section is sceptical of them by default.

You will not find growth-hacking claims or promises about ranking in a fortnight. Where a tactic carries risk, the risk is stated rather than left for you to discover; where results depend on a budget most readers do not have, the article says so.

Adjacent reading: Business for founders and running a team, Tech for the software itself, and the free tools for the everyday conversions and checks.