How we built The Garage

How we built
The Garage

Take a peek under the hood.

Hosting

We host the Garage on our own GoDaddy Managed WordPress service. It’s a great chance to eat our own dogfood and make sure that what we are offering externally is the good stuff. Here’s what some other folks have said about it.

Design

The overall mission at GoDaddy is to help small businesses kick ass. To this end, we worked with local design shop Drawbackwards. Their chops for both visual design and implementation have been solid. Plus they’re cool.

Commenting

We use Disqus for commenting. We tried a couple of other things previously, but Disqus seems to be holding up. We’ll stick with it for a while and see how it performs.

Spam

Spam sucks. We’re using Akismet for getting rid of it. Due to the visibility of the Garage, bad actors really like spamming it. Overall, we seem to be keeping the tide at bay.

SEO

We love Yoast. All of the SEO for the site is handled with the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast.

Caching

Caching is built into our Managed WordPress infrastructure, so we’re not using a caching plugin. Our Managed WordPress infrastructure uses Varnish; that’s what we’re using.

Social Sharing

The linky linky goodness on our article pages is coming courtesy of the Easy Social Icons plugin.

Analytics

Google Analytics is the big dog here, so that’s what we’re using. We’ve got a number of custom reports set up that we keep a close eye on.

We’ll keep this page updated as configurations change.

Have questions about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it? Feel free to comment below.