The top website and online marketing links of the week. Selling online? Check out this detailed post on how to write a good product description. A persuasive product description might be the very last chance you have to convince a potential customer to buy – just like high-quality photos are critical for ecommerce sites, so are well-written product descriptions. Here’s an interesting post about button design that I found when working on a new theme this week. Have you ever thought about the differences between rounded vs. sharp-angled buttons – especially if you use a plugin for creating lots of… Continue Reading
Web Design
Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress History, Domain Names, Tracking Clicks, Product Photos
The top website and online marketing links of the week. I know it’s been a long time (about 6 weeks!) since the last post. Today’s post I hope brings an end to that unplanned break. It’s been a crazy summer that included a death in the family, a broken elbow and hand, a sad lack of paddle boarding, and a badly-needed vacation. But now that things have settled down, I plan to get back to weekly blogging (or thereabouts). Just for fun – here is the history of WordPress in 4 minutes. If you’re a long-time WordPress user, you’ll get… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Content First, Free Plugins, FAQ Plugins, Gallery Comparison
The top website and online marketing links of the week. One thing that often surprises my design clients is the immediately request for their content when their website project starts. Often, especially for a first website, they have no clue what content they’re going to have. This makes my job as a designer much, much harder. Having all the different types of content that will be on the site up front (at least the types, if not the actual content) is absolutely necessary, as the content drives the design. A site that is all about news articles on the home… Continue Reading
Making a Custom Slideout Menu for Genesis
I’ve been designing and building custom WordPress themes from scratch since 2009. Back on January 1 I switched to custom theming using the Genesis framework – not a huge transition but still something of a learning curve! A few months ago I needed to create a sliding toggle menu for mobile browsers for a client’s site (see the final version to the right). I’d done this for other frameworks numerous times and had the code snippets for it. But getting it working in Genesis took some extra steps. Here we go… I’m assuming here you’re already familiar with the Genesis… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Old Redirects, Nonprofit Sites, Calls to Action, Hacked Sites
The top website and online marketing links of the week. When is it safe to remove old redirects within your site? The answer may surprise you – it could be ‘never.’ Learn how to judge if it’s okay to remove that old redirect or not. Do you have a nonprofit website? If you do, this post is for you! Read about the 10 features every nonprofit site should have, including: Ways to donate or become a supporting member Members-only content Clear calls-to-action to get people to join or donate If you recruit volunteers, easy access to volunteer info Check out… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Site Speed, Product Pages, Contact Pages, WordPress Security Myths
The top website and online marketing links of the week. You know your website is slow. It’s always been like that. But do you really understand what that slow site could be costing you in terms of customers and conversions? A recent report shows that 70% of buyers are influence by a site’s page loading time. The average site loads in about 15 seconds – but a number of studies show that the majority of online shoppers will leave a site if they have to wait more than 3 seconds. If you need help making your site faster, check out… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Ashburn VA, Adobe Apps, Forms, Remarketing
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Ever noticed, if you’re like most Google Analytics users, how much traffic you get from Ashburn, VA? Turns out Ashburn is a big technology center – 70% of the world’s Internet traffic flows through there; about 2.2 trillion Google searches per day. Adobe’s app subscriptions are undeniably expensive. Photoshop by itself is $33.99/mo for businesses (right now). The first time I bought Photoshop it was in a box with a bunch of other Creative Suite apps for around $600. But anyway, there are alternatives for everything. Here’s a post on… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Better Signup Forms, SEO Plugins, 2019 Holidays, Logo Trends
The top website and online marketing links of the week. First post of 2019! Let’s begin with something that affects most business websites – signup forms. Read about 12 tips for creating better signup forms for your site, including: How many fields to include; Whether to offer some kind of incentive for signing up; How to prevent spam without using a traditional, hard-to-read Captcha. Next… As a new-ish user of the Genesis Framework, I was interested to see this smackdown between Genesis SEO and Yoast SEO, two of the top SEO solutions for WordPress. I must admit I’m a Yoast… Continue Reading