We Build Websites
Hosting is the invisible infrastructure that makes a website work. It’s not the first thing we see, but it determines if we see anything at all.
This article by iThemes brings together some of my thought on hosting from my 2017/18 WordCamp presentation.
More than once I have received an email from a local restaurant or store and wanted only to click to visit their website. However, I found when I clicked on their logo or an image included in the post, I got a larger version of the image, not the link I expected. After, I had to search for the address or, more likely, forget about it. What a lost opportunity for business!
Here is an email marketing tip:
Most email marketing services offer ways to make business logos website links. Take time to find out how to do this. Adding a link to your website or a particular landing page is a straightforward way to make emails more useful to recipients.
Perhaps you have heard people saying, “Gutenberg is coming” but what the heck does it mean for me?
If you have a website running WordPress, Gutenberg is something you should know about. However, I think watching out for “Gutenberg” is a bit deceptive because it really is just an enhancement to the native WordPress editor.
The editor you have come to know for the last 10 years or so is finally getting an overhaul. It may seem drastic, but it is everything you’ve been asking for! Rather than all your page or post content in one block (the editor), it will now have individual blocks for every type of content. Images, text, videos and more will have their own “block” to work with. They all have different attributes, so this makes total sense!
I’m speaking as someone who tried to avoid this “new” way of working with content until it became inevitable. I initially resisted against learning something new. I felt everything was fine the way it is but I’m not the only type of user of WordPress.
I often build sites and leave them in the hands of their owners to add posts and content as needed. Adding HTML and CSS to manipulate content comes second nature to me. For many people though, it is just an obstacle to controlling the look they want.
The new text editor is expected to be included in the next major release of WordPress 5.0, which is expected to drop sometime in the next month or three, or four (no date has been announced.) However, you can try it now by installing the plugin. I would suggest not doing this on a live site. Instead, create a new install to play with.
If you don’t have access to a demo or staging site you can create a free WordPress install to play with at poopy.life no strings attached.
To follow the news on Gutenberg follow Gutenberg Times for news, updates, and information.
A comprehensive introduction tutorial of Gutenberg is offered by my friend and colleague Joe Casabona at Creative Courses.
Thursday, many users of Google Analytics received a notice about changes Google has made to comply with GDPR, the new data protection law coming into force on May 25, 2018, in the European Union.
The US does not have a law similar to GDPR in place. However, companies or people who market goods or services in the European Union will still need to comply with this law.
The law establishes baseline standards such as:
This law isn’t just for websites; it extends to social media, email marketing, apps and company databases.
A lot of what Google has done with its products allows for their users to easily comply with the anonymizing of data and removing of such data from Google’s servers. They have an extensive website detailing everything they are doing on their end to ensure compliance with the law and protect user privacy.
On May 25th, Google will activate a new feature called The Google Analytics Data Retention controls. The feature gives website owners the ability to set the amount of time before user-level and event-level data stored by Google Analytics is automatically deleted from Analytics’ servers. What this means is that the website owner can choose how long Google Analytics retains data before automatically deleting it.
When data reaches the end of the retention period, it is deleted automatically on a monthly basis.
The email that Google Analytics sent out to its users was basically an email telling users to set their controls.
However, this is only one piece of GDPR. In order to comply with the law, websites, apps, and marketers will need to do the following:
So why should you care about GDPR?
This is so overwhelming what do I do next?
If you have any questions regarding the use of cookies on your website or GDPR, please don’t hesitate to call us at 425.243.4176 or email us at help@tinystarscreative.com
Recently I went to do some editing on a clients site, we needed a photo from a past event, I tried to search for it but no luck… it seems the file was named this:
This file was also 4MB which in web speak is REALLY LARGE!
While WordPress can crop this it just uses up resources and space on our server. Uploading large images (right off your iPhone) can cause bulk and increase the maintenance time of your install.
So the Pro Tip is: Optimize an image BEFORE uploading to the website.
Give your image file a useful name so perhaps it can be searched for later 😉
That is all