Design

You are not Done

May 26, 2015 by John

or even Finished

When my kids were younger they spent a lot of time with their Grandma. She was a retired school teacher and helped us avoid day care costs by staying home with the kids while my wife and I worked. As she did with her second grade class, she was a stickler for proper grammar. As they began to speak more and learn to talk, she would give them activities to occupy their time, in the vain of pre-school. As I worked from home, I would hear them yell “Grandma, I’m done!”. Typically, the reply would come, “Food is done, you’re finished.”

So what are You?

Is your site done or finished? Whether you agree with my Mother in Law or not, when it comes to websites, you should never be “done” or “finished”. If your site is utilizing WordPress and you don’t have a regular maintenance schedule, you could be leaving your site vulnerable to hackers. Even if you don’t update pages or information, you should be checking the Admin section of your site for plugin and core updates. The WordPress core has been on a quarterly update schedule for adding features and bug fixes for about a year. As they correct some of the minor bugs and security holes, they may feel an intermittent release is necessary. If you’re not checking your site or have a host that does this for you, you could miss the notice and be leaving your site vulnerable to attacks.

You’re plugins too

As I said, it’s not just WordPress core you need to worry about, plugin developers add features and find issues on a regular basis. Some plugins update as much as once a week, for example, Yoast’s WordPress SEO. This is an essential tool for your website, giving your site SEO a shot in the arm. They change this plugin as Google’s algorithm changes or they find ways to improve your site SEO for other search engines. That’s just one of the plugins I know makes regular updates and one that I install on most websites I create. There are plenty of other plugins that need updating, some on a schedule and others as there’s a need.

Get on a Schedule

I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve inherited from other developers or owners where there were no updates. Whether you maintain your site yourself or you have someone do it for you, make sure it’s on a regular schedule. If it’s once a week or once a month, don’t leave your site’s health to chance. While it’s only one piece of securing your site, it’s one of the easiest. If you work with me, I’ll be sure to give you all the options for maintenance and help with keeping your site up to date.

Ready to work together on improving your marketing funnel? Contact me today!

Responsive Design – A Discussion

January 17, 2015 by John

Last year, I participated in a Google Hangout with my friends from the Chester County Marketing Group, Jeff Tincher and Carla Wilson talking about responsive design. This is a great small group meetup about digital marketing and social media that meets once a month. They also have the hangouts, like this video, every other week online. Go check them out.

For some reason, I forgot to share the video here at the time. It’s about 30 minutes. Go grab some popcorn, sit back and enjoy the discussion.

Feel free to Contact Me with any questions regarding your website and making it responsive.

New Year, New Site Design

December 31, 2014 by John

Something New

It’s a new year and a new site design for 2015. Even though my site had a decent design, I didn’t think it really reflected myself or the sites I was creating for my clients. My original design came straight from my favorite framework, Genesis by Studiopress. I have access to any of their themes, and on my last design I went with their popular Minimum Pro theme. I found a decent picture to put in the big “space”, but I wasn’t completely thrilled with it.

Most of the pre-built themes from Genesis are pretty complete. While it’s certainly simple to just grab and go in that regard, I feIt when I chose one of those for clients I wasn’t really giving them a truly custom theme, even with their necessary modifications. Don’t get me wrong, their developer pack is a great investment. You can certainly borrow some great ideas from these themes.

My Tools Changed

As my 2014 played out, however, I started to move towards tools like SASS, Grunt, and Varying Vagrant Vagrants. These tools don’t necessarily play well with above mentioned pre-built themes. So, I decided I needed to utilize the Genesis Sample theme with SASS modifications. I found one via GitHub by Matt Banks and decided to fork it. I’ve made my modifications, adding and changing things for my clients needs and switching to the Bourbon.io library to create Genesis with Bourbon theme.

So, when I was thinking about my site’s design, I thought it made sense to utilize the theme I start all my client projects.

What Changed?

So what did I add and change?

One of the first things I decided was to get rid of the big image in the middle. I never utilized that image the way I originally intended, so I decide to make the content more up front.
A sticky menu. I’m a big fan menus that are available. With all the scrolling on some blog posts, it’s nice to have a way to quickly go to another page, without having to scroll back up from page or post.
Updated Portfolio view. I was able to keep the portfolio code from my old theme, but wrote some new CSS for the display. Now, hovering over a portfolio image gives you a preview but shows more on smaller screens.
A bunch of items that you won’t notice, like compressed CSS and lazy loading Javascript to speed up site load, unless you’re a developer.

It’s Never Finished

A site is never “finished”. Luckily, we don’t put those silly “under construction” animated gifs on sites anymore. So, while I pushed out this new design, I know everything is not complete. When you’re working on your own site, it’s never as easy as doing work for someone else. I still want to add my testimonials, along with making some more graphic changes. For now, I’m happy with how things turned out though and I look forward to hearing what others think of the changes.

Happy New Year!

Yay! Your site launched…

December 29, 2014 by John

…but you forgot something

I love when I launch another site! Whether it’s a redesign or a brand new site for a customer, it’s exciting to me. It’s exciting for the client and I can gloat a bit to myself.

However, after I’ve copied, pasted, coded, uploaded, deleted, etc. there’s still a finishing touch that I think everyone should take the time to complete. It’s very minor in the whole website scheme of things, but it bothers me a bit when I visit a site and I see this little item left out.

What is this mysterious and not always obvious item? The Favicon. That’s right, that little icon you probably don’t even notice in your browser tabs. Most websites and browsers display this little icon, but very few small businesses (or their website person) add this small finishing touch.

You took the time to analyze where everything goes, possibly came up with a cool new logo and now it’s time to complete the look. This little icon isn’t just for your desktop browser though. There are icon sizes, image types based on various devices. If someone saves your website to their iPhone (or other device) as an “app”, this icon will help them remember what they saved. It’s fairly easy to fix this, if you so choose.

My method

I like to use a site called Realfavicongenerator.net. All you need is a square version of your logo with a minimum of 70×70 pixels (I try to go a bit bigger, as suggested, at 260×260). Use your favorite editor to add whitespace to make the square, if your logo isn’t square yet. Then go the Realfavicongenerator and click the button for upload.

Then let it do it’s thing and it will ask you a few questions about colors. Giving you examples for Apple and Windows phones. You can set the default path (where you’ll store these files), compression, scaling and even app name. Then click the big blue Generate button. At the end, you’ll have a download link along with the code you can paste in your website, as in the picture below. You will copy the zipped icons to the page you selected (in this case it’s the root) and then copy the code given to header section of your html or WordPress theme.

If you’re like me and use Genesis for your themes, then you can simply paste the code in the Header Script section of the theme options (pictured below).

Some caveats to this. Some themes allow you to add this through their options panel, so you may just need the main favicon.ico file in the package. In some cases, you may need to ask your web developer/it person to do this for you, as it requires accessing your host to copy these icon files to your theme directory. If you’re a developer yourself, follow these steps for your clients.

What? You don’t have a web developer? Feel free to contact me and let’s see if we can work together on your website.