Design Archives - Therapist Web Design

It’s 2022: These Are Seven “Features” That Shouldn’t Cost Extra

Web 321 — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:28:42 +0000

When it comes to web design, there are many designers and packages available. Various players in the web industry have tried to differentiate themselves with new features and buzzwords – but how many of these “premium features” are actually standard? In many cases, your provider may be artificially throttling a feature they get for free, or in unlimited supply, just to turn around and sell it to you as something special.

When looking for your next website design, make sure that you are not paying a premium for the following features:

1. WordPress Website

WordPress websites are fast, powerful, and secure – but they are built using open-source software which, on its own, is free. Web developers may use WordPress as a foundation to build great websites, but they aren’t paying anything for the tool they’re using. Granted, it does take a small amount of effort for a developer to install WordPress and connect it to a database, but that’s true of any website content management system. WordPress should be marketed as a feature – because it’s definitely one of the better platforms out there – but if a package charges you a premium for WordPress, look out!

2. Mobile-Ready

In a time where almost everything is digitally driven, 45-55% of website audiences are viewing sites using mobile devices. In fact, having a mobile-ready (“responsive”) website is more important than ever! 57% of users visiting a non-responsive website on their mobile device won’t recommend that business. A good web designer should make every site they build responsive by default, without a premium charge. If your designer is trying to tack on extra fees for this “feature”, look elsewhere!

3. 99% Uptime

Website uptime is the time that a website or web service is available to the users (“up”) over a given period. Optimal website uptime is 99.9%, which guarantees your website is up and running with only 43 minutes of downtime out of the 720 hours in a month.

If your website has an uptime of 99%, out of the 720 hours in a month, your website will have a downtime of 7.2 hours per month. That difference is huge!

A 99% uptime guarantee is nothing special and falls far short of the minimum 99.9% uptime you should be looking for. If you’re being charged a premium for 99% uptime, in our opinion, you’re getting fleeced.

4. Unlimited Email Addresses

Hearing “unlimited” always sounds like a win and mentally justifies a premium price. However, you may not know that most hosting comes with unlimited email addresses for your domain – all your web designer has to do is activate them for you. What’s actually limited is the drive space available on the server – and most providers will cap the size of each email account to prevent hitting the drive space limit. Essentially, if your web designer is charging you extra for more email addresses, they are charging you a premium for something they get for free.

To put this in perspective, imagine a pizza parlour offering you a pizza that has 20 slices. This sounds like a great deal, however, is the pizza really any bigger than if they cut the same pizza into 10 slices? Be careful you aren’t paying more money for the same thing just because there’s a more impressive number attached.

5. Unlimited Blogging

Here’s another example of how packages use the word “unlimited” to create the illusion of a juicy deal. The space available on your server, or server farm will reach a cap at some point. However, this cap is usually very large and isn’t a problem for most businesses (unless you’re an extremely large firm such as Facebook).

When it comes to blogging, you shouldn’t have a limit to how much you can publish. Blogging as a tool on your platform helps create viewership on your website and demonstrates your thought leadership. It gives you the opportunity to drive search traffic, generates leads, and acts as content for email newsletters.

If you’re given a limit of how many blogs you can post on your website, your provider is artificially throttling your growth simply so they can ask you for more money. The only limit on how much you blog isn’t server space – it’s subject matter and time. (We can actually help with that, too.)

6. Unlimited Form Submissions

Forms on your website allow your future clients to contact you about purchasing your services, request quotes, or inquire about your company. Form submissions are the key to successful conversion on your website.

Some providers are stingy with their bandwidth, and will actually throttle the number of form submissions you’re allowed – even though their capacity to handle form submissions is huge! This means that at some point, you’ll reach a limit of form submissions for a given time frame. If you want more, you’ll have to shell out extra money for this “feature”. Not cool.

7. Content Editors

As your business grows, you’ll probably look towards hiring talent to contribute or edit the content on your website. A hidden element of some packages is artificial “limits” to how many content editors you are allowed on your website. On WordPress websites, for example, there are no practical limits to how many editors you can add to the site – unless your web developer imposes one.

When it comes to your website, you may want to limit the number of content contributors for administrative or tracking purposes, but your web provider should never impose a technical limit on this number. If they do, they’re likely looking to make an extra buck off you.

Web321 is Different

At Web321, we know you don’t have money to waste. You shouldn’t need to bribe your web design, web management or hosting company for features that should come standard. Our pricing structure is simple – $321 for everything you need, no artificial limits imposed. That means if we don’t pay for it, neither do you.

So if you want an all-in-one web design, hosting, and management experience that includes standard in every build:

WordPress website platform
mobile responsiveness for every screen size
free premium plugins
99.9% uptime guarantee
unlimited email addresses
unlimited blogging
unlimited form submissions
unlimited content editors
unlimited done-for-you content updates
and a lot more…

…visit our website at https://web321.co or email us at contact@web321.co for info.

The post It’s 2022: These Are Seven “Features” That Shouldn’t Cost Extra appeared first on Therapist Web Design.

Website Page Speed – Why It Became Even More Important in 2022

Shawn DeWolfe — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 07:58:41 +0000

Three factors figured heavily into your search engine positioning:

Technical SEO
Backlinks to your web pages
Website speed

Performance or Page Speed is a factor Google and other search engines use to deliver the best content to the end user. If a site takes a long time to load, it reflects poorly on the search engine. Page speeds comes from two elements: the download of the webpage content; and the how hard it is for your web browser to interpret the content and turn it into a sensible looking webpage.

These are some of the issues and ways to improve performance. Some are things that a website owner can directly affect. Some of topics best left up to the pros.

Image Issues

Images can be too big.a 72×72 pixel icon could actually use a 1400×800 image. Maybe, a plugin failed you and request an image that is too big to be optimal. The GTMetrix report will generate optimized images for you.

Image format choices. Know the difference between GIFs (or is that GIF?), JPEGs, PNGs, SVGs and bitmaps. Use the ideal image for the role in the presentation.

JavaScript Placement

The header is the best (except when it isn’t). When Javascript code goes into the header, that code executes first. It will block the display of content until the Javascript fully executes. This is called “render blocking.” From an end-user perspective, this is horrible. They will be left with a white screen for much long than is ideal.

Put some stuff into the Footer. Some code can always go into the footer: analytics code, helper code, code relevant to the lower sections of the page (eg. a dynamic footer).

Client side Caching

Make content cacheable. WordPress will put query strings onto the tail end of some URLs and change that string with each load to give you a new and fresh load of that image, script or styling. From an end user perspective, that takes a lot of time.

Change the Expiry date (it’s a meta data setting in the served assets) to push it days or even months into the future. That let’s a web browser shoulder some of the load and keep copies of those elements on their computer instead of downloading them new with each page load.

Third Party Assets

Easy to deploy third party code almost always kill performance. While it’s handy to drop in a snippet from Instagram, Facebook, Google, Click-to-chat, CRM tools, those can kill performance.

Pull as much as possible into your control. Download Google fonts and serve them from your site or your CDN.

Deliver the content from server side generated HTML, not Javascript delivered / built code.

Elect to leave out some of the third party assets on some pages. If performance is really important, be cautious of third party apps.

Compression

File downloads are a big time suck. Fewer files to request and smaller files are key.

Each plugin and theme is likely to introduce several CSS and JS files apiece. This can quickly add to up to 20+ CSS and 20+ Javascript file requests.

Plugins like AutoOptimize can consolidate the CSS into fewer files and it can do the same with JavaScript.

Almost every web server is capable of serving out files compressed with GZip. Almost every web browser is capable of decoding GZipped files.

Server Caching

Store static copies of complex output (eg. leaderboards, lists of recent posts, stats).

Optimize code on the server before it is shipped to the client.

Deploy a plugin like W3 Total Cache, WP Cache, etc.

Keep-Alive: Time is lost when some browsers reacquire the path to your server with each file request. By tweaking the server’s Keep Alive, you can keep that connection active.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs):

Use a CDN to stow and deliver some of the content.
A CDN can take the pressure off of the server.
It can deliver content from a server closer to the end client.

Flush Your Output

Hang time is a killer when you’re waiting for a web page. By default, PHP can wait for a good length of time before delivery. It is possible to urge it to begin earlier than otherwise. That sends content back to your audience faster. I do this by putting the flush() call at the top of the page.tpl.php file. If you’re about to output the themed data, you’re ready to deliver content, so I say push it out as soon as you can, even starting the process before the page.tpl.php is populated and served. One thing to note: flushing content may not be a tactic that plays well with GZip.

Aggregate CSS and Javascript

You should collapse all of your Javascript and CSS into one file each (all CSS in one; all Javascript in the other). While Drupal does ask for a lot supporting files, it compensates by allowing for the aggregation of Javascript and CSS into collected files. In extreme cases, this knocks down the number of files from 30+ files down to two to four files. If you’re using a CMS make sure it can aggregate these supporting files. If you’re doing a manual web design, make sure you follow this rule as closely as possible.

CSS Sprites

CSS sprites use portions of a larger image to fulfill some graphical need on your web page. Spriting isn’t a new concept– I probably built my first sprite for a video game over 25 years ago. But its role in web design is comparatively new.In pursuit of fewer file downloads, you can lump multiple elements into a single image and then use CSS to slice that image for use. There is a lot of finesse to how you slice up an image with CSS. You need to pay attention to how the image will be used and you need to be comfortable using CSS backgrounds with cropping and the repeat concepts figured out.

Too Much?

If these performance tips are too much for you to implement, that’s okay. The good news: we deploy these techniques on every site we deploy. Web321 sites get all of the improvements possible to let the site out-perform the competition.

The post Website Page Speed – Why It Became Even More Important in 2022 appeared first on Therapist Web Design.