How To Make A Custom Website Expensive To Maintain

I’ve been building websites since 2002. As WordPress and other platforms have evolved, many businesses take their websites into the “Application Design” realm. These are websites where WordPress (or some other platform) is the starting point for programmers to implement custom code that transforms the website into a web application specific to particular business needs.…

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Success Strategies Website Offers Subscriptions for Dairy Farmers

Over the past few months I’ve been working with John Ellsworth of Success-Strategies.com to implement a subscription platform for monetizing access to a spreadsheet-based financial tool. The tool itself is called Dairy Cash Flow Analysis, and presents as a detailed, well-formatted spreadsheet for determining dairy farm financial health. This in turn helps dairy owners modify their spending based on what the analysis reveals.

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Animated Logo Lessons Learned

Recently I accepted a request from my client to animate her logo. You can see the result at the website https://minddivers.com. This is a WordPress website built with the Divi theme by someone else. My role is to maintain and improve it. Here are a few of the challenges I faced and how I solved them, from creation to display.

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Best WordPress Web Hosting Experiences

Many web hosting companies have innovated over the past few years in order to offer their customers a great technological and customer service experience. But even more have not put in such efforts, choosing instead to outsource overseas customer-facing aspects such as tech support. Here I’ll list out what I consider to be the best web hosting companies based on my direct experience. They are in no particular order. All are fantastic.

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What Does Good Customer Service Look Like?

Most people know lousy customer service when they encounter it. In the world of website ownership, where you are largely at the mercy of technologists such as web developers and web hosting providers, the question of good customer service becomes as important as the technology used. In fact, it should be the number one question…

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What Midjourney’s AI Can Already Do

Midjourney is an AI that focuses on generating images from text prompts. There are a few others out there that do this, but I’ve decided to spend some time with Midjourney simply based on its reputation. This AI, like all AI, is growing in capability as it continues to learn through human interaction. As I gain expertise at how to craft my text prompts to get the image I’m imagining, here’s what I’m learning.

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Designing Websites For Client Usability

Learning the technical steps for managing the content on your own website can be frustrating and tedious, even if you are a little technically inclined. Web designers can ease this pain by considering what their clients must learn to take control of content, including images and video. While a content management system (CMS) promises to make this as easy as possible, the web designer’s build approach ultimately makes all the difference.

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Do You Really Need To Worry About PHP 8.x?

Most WordPress website owners are business people and won’t know what “PHP 8.x” even means. That’s perfectly understandable, but when you choose self-hosted WordPress as your website platform, you are also choosing to deal with keeping PHP up to date along with all plugins and themes that run your website. PHP is a code library that WordPress relies on to run properly. Security support of PHP 7.4, which is still used by many WordPress websites as of this writing, ceased in November of 2022. The shiny new version of PHP is 8.1, and yes, it can break your WordPress website if your plugins and themes are not up to date.

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