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Web Development

Why Cheap Web Designers Often Disappear

Cheap web designer disappearingEveryone loves cheap web design — until they learn that it takes far more than low prices and fancy graphics to build a business website that works. That can be a hard lesson about cheap web design risks, but it often gets worse. Because cheap web designers often disappear.

This can be a touchy subject though, so let’s be clear: most exper­i­enced web designers I know are tal­ented people who only want to help. That said, exper­i­enced web designers are rarely cheap web designers.

Still, I have just spoken to yet another dis­tressed small business owner. His cheap web designer had left him in the lurch with a broken website and no access to fix it.

Other business owners had told him this was “typical” of “flaky” designers.… Read the rest 

Google Web Vitals – What’s The Fuss?

In case you haven’t heard, Google’s latest search algorithm update focuses on your website’s tech­nical per­formance. Specifically, on a group of metrics that Google calls “Core Web Vitals”. So what are these Google Web Vitals, and what’s all the fuss about them for?

What Are Google Web Vitals?

Google’s Core Web Vitals are a small set of key metrics focused on page speed and user exper­ience. Check these three impactful metrics first before under­taking deeper optimizations.

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the largest content element (e.g. a hero image or heading text) on your page to become visible. Aim for an LCP of 1.2 seconds or less.
  • Total Blocking Time (TBT) tells you how much time is blocked by scripts during your page loading process.
Read the rest 

Automatic WordPress Updates — The Pitfalls

WordPress updates and website maintenanceHere’s a great example of why auto­mating updates in WordPress is only smart for non-business web­sites. As I write this, one of the WP plugins pub­lished by Facebook just released an update with invalid code.

Not just a bug — code so wrong that it crashes sites. Code that wouldn’t have passed basic testing.

I’m sure “Facebook for WooCommerce” will be fixed promptly. However, over 900,000 online shops use it. If they were all running auto­matic updates, almost a million shops would be offline right now.

Other WordPress Update Problems

This comes on top of the GADWP fiasco earlier this year, too. In that, ExactMetrics changed the nature of their popular plugin without warning, through an “update”.

Version 6 of the “Google Analytics Dashboard for WP” plugin was “redesigned from the ground up”.… Read the rest 

Why Do Website Prices Vary So Much?

Small busi­nesses often want simple, affordable web design packages. That’s fine, we can do that — but then some call pro­fes­sional web design “expensive” and “over­com­plicated”. So why do website prices vary so much?

Because web design can mean several very dif­ferent things.

Business web­sites serve a wide range of pur­poses. Some of those pur­poses are common, others less so. So there are at least three levels of web design to consider.

Affordable Web Design Packages

Common require­ments can some­times be stand­ardised, and pro­cesses stream­lined, to keep costs down. However, flex­ib­ility creates com­plexity, so in practice, “stream­lining pro­cesses” always means “restricting choices”.

For some people, and some pur­poses, that makes little dif­ference — and cash flow is often a bigger concern for small busi­nesses.… Read the rest 

Web Designer? Web Developer? Which Do I Need?

web designThere’s a lot of con­fusion about the dif­ference between a web designer and a web developer. That’s a problem when you’re trying to decide which to hire. However, assuming they’re both the same can cause even bigger problems.

It often helps to think of your website as a mar­keting vehicle. In that sense, web designers build a chassis and dash­board around an engine and tweak things so that they all work together. Developers build the engine and other working parts. Of course, there’s a bit more to than that.

What’s a Web Designer?

Web designers are cre­atives — but the job goes far beyond just making things look pretty. A designer is an artist who knows how to make things work. For web designers, that means under­standing at least three types of code:

  • HTML is the code that glues the web together.
Read the rest