Your website could be your business’s biggest asset in 2022. How?

55 percent of people search for online reviews and recommendations before making a purchase, reports WPForms, with 47 percent visiting the company website (for impressions and information).  Essentially, it’s a given that people will scout you out online before doing business with you. By tweaking and optimizing your website, you can put your best foot forward, make a good impression, and generally drum up more business.

Building a good website is easier said than done. Not only do you have to make it stand out, but you have to feature useful content and maybe include relevant functionality – like online purchases. In this mini-guide, N77 Design offers some critical considerations to make to create a website that can ably support present and future growth:        

Consider your present and future needs carefully 

First and foremost, consider your business needs. Your business model will determine the type of website that would best suit you. A service-based business doesn’t need e-commerce store functionality, for instance. It’s a good idea to consult with an expert when in doubt. Some top considerations: 

• Do you want an interactive site or an informational one? If it’s an interactive one (such as an online dating site), you may want to look into making a web application (or include web app functionality). 
• What kind of investment are you looking to make? DIY website builders let you make a website in 20 minutes for free, but such sites tend to be simple and don’t come with advanced features businesses need. Hiring professional developers is expensive but can get you a more suitable site.  
• How can you monetize your site? You can do this directly or indirectly. For instance, adding an e-store or using Google AdSense to make money from a niche authority blog. 
• Who is going to maintain the site? Do you have an internal team who can do it or will you need to outsource the work?

Integrate ERP and CRM systems with your site

If you’re an established business, you likely already utilize an ERP and CRM system of some kind. Integrating these systems with your site can offer multiple benefits. You can make these systems “talk” to each other, and then share that information internally with your organization and externally with your clients, customers, and site visitors. ArganoArbela sums up the benefits of this approach nicely: quoting of inventory (and prices) in real-time, a better understanding of buyer behavior, better budgeting, more sales opportunities, faster invoicing, and a personalized customer experience. 

Make sure it’s visually engaging 

Beauty can be just as important as functionality. A well-designed website makes your business appear professional, credible, and trustworthy. Furthermore, it heavily influences your visitor’s user experience. A clean design, well-thought-out menus, and clutter-free distribution are some of the hallmarks of a visually-appealing site. You can partner up with N77Design to create a stunning, beautiful site that both you and your customers will love.   

A clean design, well-thought-out menus, and clutter-free distribution are some of the hallmarks of a visually-appealing site.

Optimize your site for conversions 

Having a beautiful, useful site isn’t enough – it should be optimized for conversions. That means designing your site in a way that encourages people to do business with you. Some ways to do so are adding site search, adding CTAs, user testing, adding FAQs, adding live chat, and featuring reviews and testimonials. 

Consider the search engine friendliness 

Search engine optimization (SEO) makes your site search-engine friendly. You want to, ideally, rank up at the top of the first page for search queries related to your niche. Getting there is a long-term endeavor and requires a good SEO strategy, backed by quality content. Some suggestions are using appropriate keywords, capturing search intent, having relevant content, and creating an SEO-friendly site structure.  

Make sure to speed it up and use a good host

Speed and performance are two other factors to consider. You want your site to load fast – most visitors will abandon slow-loading sites. This means you should use a good platform (and have a team who can make necessary technical decisions). Furthermore, this also involves using an appropriate host with a powerful (and secure) server. 

Create a recovery plan to safeguard against cyber threats

Last, but not least, consider the security angle. What is a cyber threat? It’s any malicious person or thing that could cause damage to your site electronically. Sites are commonly attacked and taken down by a hacker. Even if you think it’s not going to happen to you, it’s best to be prepared. A recovery plan allows you to deal with threats decisively and also get back up and running again in the event of an attack. This plan identifies the applications that need to recover first, time objectives, and the individuals involved in the recovery efforts. 

Conclusion 

You don’t necessarily have to make a perfect site on your first attempt. All good websites are a work in progress. They improve and change, adding new features, optimizations, and design elements over time. Focus on the critical bits now and then optimize slowly. In time, your site will become a worthy representation of your company, not to mention be a big benefit to your bottom line.

Soon after the WordPress 5.5 update, can the errors. A conflict here and there and missing functionality on more than one of my client’s templates.

After some Googling and quick research I found a few discussion referencing the jQuery Migrate Helper Plugin that’s available for download from the wordpress.org plugin downloads.

This guy, Enable jQuery Migrate Helper has saved the day for me twice now and I don’t doubt a third is on the horizon.

Remember, this plugin is a Band-Aid, quick fix, to any issues or conflicts that you may be experiencing with your JavaScript and jQuery coding. Ideally, you’ll find the actual root of the current conflict and resolve it there. Although that may be an even trickier and deep endeavor, it’s better for your site, server and visitors in the long run.

The plugin is a huge help. It gives you real-time updates on what’s going on with your pages and if they may have any issues to address.

This first example is what you may see while viewing your WordPress Dashboard.

This is the default plugin notification that guide you on what’s going on and what you may need to address.

One more feature of this plugin that’s huge for me, is the update emails.

Once a week you’ll get a hand update on what’s going on with your WordPress theme and what’s up with jQuery Migrate as seen here:

Enable jQuery Migrate Helper is a great solution to resolve some of those maddening error that seem to arise out of nowhere.

Installation
Upload to your plugins folder, usually wp-content/plugins/.
Activate the plugin on the plugin screen.
That’s it! The plugin handles the rest automatically for you.

Below is a screen shot of how my most recent build was rendering the page builder code. Look familiar?

I have your answer. I’ve run into this issue more than once and it’s been maddening every time until I finally found this simple fix.

This issue typically happens with various page builder plugins web designer use to expand the functionality of their WordPress template design.

In the world of constant updates and new code, plugin conflicts are a daily occurrence, this is a simple plugin conflict where your page builder plugins are missing some backward compatibility with the WP editor.

Classic Editor Plugin • Download Classic Editor Here

This is a SAVIOR!

And look now! Your ability to use the template page builder is back!

I hope this helps you out as much as it did me. Again, Classic Editor Plugin saved my client’s new WordPress template and I haven’t ran into any more page builder plugin errors or conflicts.

I’ve been doing quite a few WordPress sites for clients lately and I use a lot of premium templates from templateforest.net. These templates are great but you can run into php errors with them from time to time dependent on your server’s settings for php. Sooner or later you’re going to run into some kinds of php error and that brings your site to a screeching halt. The most recent error that I encountered was this:

1.Maximum Execution Time (max_execution_time) : 30

I ran into several solutions, or so I thought, to correct this error. Again, dependent on your server’s php settings and where you host your site, this can turn into a giant headache in a hurry. I’m going to give you two methods that work and the one method that worked for me. It saved me so much time and got my project back on track with the client.

Method 1: Editing the .htaccess file

Using your favorite FTP clinet (mine’s Filezilla), edit your .htaccess file that’s located in your site’s root folder, where all of your main WordPress files reside as well.

Right click on the file (in Filezilla) and choose View/Edit and edit the .htaccess file in your text editor of choice. I prefer Notepad++.

At the end of the .htaccess file, paste this snippet of code.

1.php_value max_execution_time 300

This code sets the value for maximum execution time to 30 seconds. Some WordPress templates may require 60 seconds or more, if so, simply change the value to 600 or more dependent on your template’s needs.

Method 2: Editing the wp-config.php file (method that worked for me)

Again, using Filezilla (FTP) to connect to your server, in the root folder of your site, edit the wp-config.php file.

Scroll to the bottom of the file and above the commented out code that reads:

1.“/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */”

Paste this snippet of code:

1.set_time_limit(60);

I hope that one of the above methods works for you, the wp-config.php file edit method is what worked for me. Happy coding.

This is by far the best way to cut out anything that you may come across in Photoshop. I do this almost every single day when cutting out people, shapes, buttons, you name it. It is clearly and by far the best method for your intended results.

I see so many people try to use the magnetic lasso or the polygonal lasso and this is just a mistake. I’m even guilty of trying to shortcut with the lassos when I was a junior designer.

Bottom line, the pen tool will out perform the array of lassos any day of the week. You have control of each point, line and curve. God forbid if you make a mistake with one of the lassos… BOOM, you have to start all over again.

With the pen tool, you can even close the document you’re working on and pick up that exact path at a later time with no consequence.

So the lesson here, PEN TOOL for CUT-OUTS  in Photoshop.

This is a great tutorial I’ve used to fight back again spam on some of the website that I design. Most site use a captcha system to deter spam but that can kill your conversions sometimes. With the method in this tutorial, you can set up a spam-free contact for without captchas. It uses simple css, javascript and html. You’ll need to have a basic understanding of all three of these to complete this tutorial.

How to build a spam-free contact form without captchas: Read More…

javascript window.open function

Thewindow.open()function creates a new browser window, customized to your specifications, without the use of an HTML anchor tag. In this example, we will be making a function that utilizes thewindow.open()function.

<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function myPopup() {
window.open( "http://www.google.com/" )
}
//-->
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<input type="button" onClick="myPopup()" value="POP!">
</form>
<p onClick="myPopup()">CLICK ME TOO!</p>
</body>

Display:

This works with pretty much any tag that can be clicked on, so please go ahead and experiment with this fun little tool. Afterwards, read on to learn more about the different ways you can customize the JavaScript window thatpopsup.

javascript window.open arguments

There are three arguments that thewindow.openfunction takes:

1. The relative or absolute URL of the webpage to be opened.
2. The text name for the window.
3. A long string that contains all the different properties of the window.

Naming a window is very useful if you want to manipulate it later with JavaScript. However, this is beyond the scope of this lesson, and we will instead be focusing on the different properties you can set with your brand spanking new JavaScript window. Below are some of the more important properties:

• dependent– Subwindow closes if the parent window (the window that opened it) closes
• fullscreen– Display browser in fullscreen mode
• height– The height of the new window, in pixels
• width– The width of the new window, in pixels
• left– Pixel offset from the left side of the screen
• top– Pixel offset from the top of the screen
• resizable– Allow the user to resize the window or prevent the user from resizing, currently broken in Firefox.
• status– Display or don’t display the status bar

Dependent, fullscreen, resizable, and status are all examples of ON/OFF properties. You can either set them equal to zero to turn them off, or set them to one to turn them ON. There is no inbetween setting for these types of properties.

upgraded javascript popup window!

Now that we have the tools, let’s make a sophisticated JavaScript popup window that we can be proud of!

<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function myPopup2() {
window.open( "http://www.google.com/", "myWindow", 
"status = 1, height = 300, width = 300, resizable = 0" )
}
//-->
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<input type="button" onClick="myPopup2()" value="POP2!">
</form>
<p onClick="myPopup2()">CLICK ME TOO!</p>
</body>

Display:

Now, that is a prime example of a worthless popup! When you make your own, try to have them relate to your content, like a small popup with no navigation that just gives the definition or explanation of a word, sentence, or picture!