Client Resources

As you can see, there’s not a lot here right now — but eventually I plan on having some tutorials, videos, and other resources for my clients posted here.

Check back sometime in the future!

Ian

Reaching the Websmithian

As a general rule I do not work weekends or stat holidays. Sorry.

I have email on my smartphone as well as my office computers and it’s always the best way to reach me if you’re not in a big hurry.

My home office telephone – 780.638.9777 – takes voicemail messages 24/7/365 and I’m informed by email of any pending messages.

The last resort is calling my cellphone – 780.915.1553. Know that I don’t always have it with me, nor is it always turned on. I refuse to be a slave to it and don’t consider myself important enough to warrant having it as a physical appendage.

Client's Pre-Website-Deployment Tasks

These tasks are arranged in the logical order I’d like you to accomplish them. Just contact me if you run into any problems.

Ah, for the days when building a website merely meant coding in HTML and uploading the site! For the current internet, there’s a heckuva lot more to do – and unfortunately some of that work has to fall onto your shoulders. Sorry ’bout that.

In addition to providing me with the obvious high-res pictures, logo files, text and articles for your website, you’re going to have to do a few things to make your site fully operational. I can do them for you if you want, which is why I’ve provided you with directions on how to give me authority and/or access to some online tools that are going to be invaluable to you in the long run. In all cases, you’ll have complete control over these accounts and tools and will be able to rescind my access to them very easily.

These tasks not only enable the website to work properly and give you some helpful information, but also allow it to be found by those searching for it. They also give you access to many tools to ensure your website is doing what it’s supposed to do and to give you insight into your site’s visitors and their habits.

The first thing you need to realize – although you probably do already – is that Google is the king of the internet and most everything regarding being found on the internet relies on something related to Google. Live with it. It’s the reality and you’re going to have to sign up for some Google accounts and tools.

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The first step is to get yourself a Google account. If you’ve got Gmail, you’ve already got one – although you might want to create a new account that’s specific to your business and not your personal life. If you’re good with using your present Gmail address, then jump to the next section of this accordion. (Yup! That’s what it’s called.)

Go here to create a new Google account.

Note that an email address needs to be associated with the account. The easiest thing to do here is simply create a Gmail account based on your business name. (I used because it was so unique and possible.) If you want to link your Google account to a non-Gmail address, that can be if you click on the “Use my current email address instead” link on the page referenced above.

When you’ve got your Google Account created for your new website, please email me with the username (typically the Gmail address) and password for the account.

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I’m going to embed some code in your new website that does some fantastic things, like keep track of how many visitors your website is getting, how they got there, what pages they viewed, etc. Even if you don’t care about any of this stuff now, almost certainly one day you will. So, getting yourself signed up at Google Analytics is a good idea. Use your Google account (business, if possible) credentials so that they’re linked.

Know that you’ll be given a Tracking ID that you’ll have to pass along to me to put into your site. It’ll almost certainly have a format like this: UA-XXXXX-X.

The primary point of GA is to have information about how visitors interact with your website: what page they landed on, what other pages they went to, how long they stayed, etc.

These are the steps you’ll have to go through:

  1. Create or sign into your GA account.
  2. Add a property to your account. (A property is your website.)
  3. Add me as an administrator of the property.

For further instructions for steps one and two, go here.

Instructions on adding me as an admin are here.

Note that you should be giving me authority to: edit, collaborate, read & analyze – but not to manage users.

The email address that you’ll be associating with me is . Note that this is not my regular email address! Google will inform me of your desire to add me as an admin and I’ll take things from there.

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If you’re a “local” type of business – your customers typically come to you because you’re near them – then signing up for this is a good idea. Operations like restaurants, retailers, auto body shops, website designers, bakeries, and massage therapists will benefit from the unique Google listings that come from being a part of Google My Business. Know that you’ll also be open to the advantage (or liability) of having your customers be capable of rating your enterprise and leaving comments, pro or con. Once again, linking your business’ Google account to this is a good idea by using the same credentials.

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Google My Business and Google Maps work hand-in-hand. Ever noticed how, when using Google Maps, various businesses (and other buildings or operations, like the post office or city hall) often pop up on the map? Your Google My Business listing is also going to be wanting to link to your address or physical location on earth.

If you don’t care about being found in the physical sense; if none of your customers is ever meant to darken your doors, then your business being a virtual pin on a Google Map is probably a nonstarter.

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Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, signing up for this online tool – which is a lot like Google Analytics – is also a good idea.

The primary purpose of GSC is to gain insight on how search engines interact with your website. So, it’ll help you maintain or raise your rankings in search engine results.

However, the primary reason for you to use GSC at this juncture and for the foreseeable future is that it makes it possible to submit new pages and posts for Google to crawl immediately. If you’ve just written and posted a new blog entry on your website, it might take days or even weeks for Google to get around to actually finding and indexing that page. Using Google Search Console in the way I instruct you below tool tells Google, “I’ve got a new page just created on my site. Please index it ASAP!”

The first step is to actually connect your website to GSC. To do so, follow this video tutorial which will show you how to do it using the SEOPress plugin that’s part of your website. You’ll need to access the Dashboard (back end) of your website to do this. If I haven’t provided you with a username and password for this, let me know!

If you’ve connected your website to GSC, here’s how you let Google know about your new website page:

Learn and clip (to your Windows or Mac clipboard) the name of the page (i.e. the URL) you want to register and have Google index.

If Websmithian is hosting your website, follow these instructions:

  1. Access the WordPress Dashboard (back end) of your website via the special access link I’ve provided to you.
  2. If it’s a blog post you want to index, choose Posts > All Posts from the left menu.
  3. If it’s a page you want to index (unlikely), choose Pages > All Pages from the left menu.
  4. Locate the post or page you want, place your mouse cursor on or near the page name so that the options appear, and click on the View link. This should take you to the page that you want to index.
  5. Look at the address bar in your browser. The address of the URL of the present page is shown (e.g. https://wordpress-451195-1413821.wordpress-475119-2113808.cloudwaysapps.com/client-resources/).
  6. Note that the page name is what is to the right of admin.hardypress.com/. In the example in the previous line, the page name would be client-resources. (Note that there are no spaces and that dashes replace them.)
  7. Either write this down this page name accurately or clip it to your computer’s clipboard.

If another company is hosting your website, follow these instructions:

  1. Access the WordPress Dashboard (back end) of your website (e.g. mywebsite.com/wp-admin).
  2. If it’s a blog post you want to index, choose Posts > All Posts from the left menu.
  3. If it’s a page you want to index (unlikely), choose Pages > All Pages from the left menu.
  4. Locate the post or page you want, place your mouse cursor on or near the page name so that the options appear, and click on the View link. You should now be at the page that you want to index.
  5. Look at the address bar in your browser. The address of the URL of the present page is shown (e.g. https://mywebsite.com/client-resources/).
  6. Note that the page name is what is to the right of your website’s domain name. In the example in the previous line, the page name would be client-resources. (Note that there are no spaces and that dashes replace them.)
  7. Either write this down this page name accurately or clip it to your computer’s clipboard.

Then do the following:

  1. Access your account on Google Search Console.
  2. Choose your website (there will probably only be one to choose from).
  3. On the left menu, click Crawl > Fetch as Google.
  4. Paste from the clipboard or write from your notes the page name you recorded in the previous step. Note that a forward slash “/” doesn’t need to be entered. Just the page name.
  5. Click the “Fetch and Render” button.
  6. Note that your page name is now added to the list below and that you might see a “Pending” message in the line as GSC does its work. If it’s your first submitted page name then it’ll be the only one listed.
  7. Wait until the Pending message clears and is replaced by “Redirected.” At this point, in the next column to the right, a button “Indexing requested” will appear.
  8. Click on the Indexing requested button.
  9. In the subsequent dialogue box, click on the “I am not a robot” button.
  10. Click the “Crawl only this URL” radio button.
  11. Click “Go” to submit the page to Google.
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Other Stuff You Might Want to Know About

Eventually, a font pair will need to be chosen for your new website. That is, two fonts that will become what’s used for headings and for body text.

Headings and body seldom employ the same font. It would look rather boring if that were the case. Some fonts are made to be headings and some are designed for easy reading and some of them are just meant to be paired up into a lovely typographical couple!

I can use most of the currently available Google Fonts. You can look through them here, one by one, and even type in some sample text to see how they look. You can also change their size and make them bold and italic.

A better tactic is to visit a few websites that display font pairs that designers have determined really go well together. Like a sommelier pairs the perfect wine with your expensive restaurant meal, so do these folks who really know what they’re doing.

The first rule of website colours is to repeat whatever’s in your company or enterprise’s logo. If that contains more than one colour, then you’re further ahead than those monochrome-logo folks!

Here are some resources for choosing colours. The first are some articles that dive deeply into the psychology of colour and how it should be used. The others are online tools for coming up with suitable colour combos.

In addition to the standard black and white, we typically want three or maybe four colours used on our website. The rule if there are three colours is to use them in a 60/30/10 proportion. That is, the primary one will be used more than half the time and the secondary one about a third. The tertiary colour is typically a more “pop-out colour” that’s used sparingly and will guide your website visitor’s eyes to important components – like call-to-action buttons.

Website Colour Info

Website Colour Tools

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You are welcome to have any service that supports WordPress websites hosting your website. There are, admittedly, some amazing and inexpensive deals out there. But, as with many things in life, you get what you pay for. Many of these businesses do not provide high-quality technical support and your website space could be shared with dozens of others, leading to low performance.

Sometime ago, I found a WordPress hosting service with a unique strategy that lightning-fast, unbreakable websites. By unbreakable I mean that they cannot be broken into by hackers because the technology essentially masks your real website. This makes ongoing website maintenance (updating themes and plugins to patch security holes) virtually non-existent.

The other primary benefit is that your website will load onto your visitors’ browsers faster than with even the best traditional hosting services. The reason isn’t as complicated as the underlying technology. In short, your website is automatically converted to a form that transfers to browsers faster (i.e. with fewer kilobytes). With fewer bytes in the pipeline, your site shows up at least 30% faster. In some cases, I’ve seen load times drop by 2/3 or more!

The only proviso is that your website cannot have any built-in e-commerce functionality. Unfortunately, this technology doesn’t support it.

Websmithian’s website hosting costs $30/month. I invoice quarterly ($90 + GST) for it.

If you’d like the speed gain proven before committing, I’m happy to create a copy of your finished (or current) website and post it on my service for a few days. No charge. You can then use tools like GTMetrix or Pingdom to compare loading speeds.

To be upfront on things at the outset, there is only one disadvantage to using Websmithian’s website hosting service over others:

Whenever you (or I) do any website editing – anything from creating a new blog post to fixing a spelling error – the entire “shadow” website must be “re-posted” to the live website. This involves clicking a button and waiting about a minute. Some folks occasionally forget to do this.

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Using “real” photos – those captured at your business or organization – are always preferred. They’re genuine and your website’s visitors will know that. However…

Acquiring professional-quality photographs can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. And the ones you took with your cellphone camera might not have come out looking as good as you’d hoped. So, you may have to opt for some “off-the-shelf” images to tell your story properly and engagingly on your website. Here are some resources…

Free

Yes, you can use Google image searches to find and easily download images that are free and usable – but you shouldn’t really be doing this! Many of these materials are copyrighted and you’ll get yourself in trouble (sometimes costly trouble) if you’ve appropriated something you don’t have the rights to. To learn how easy it is for photo rights-holders to find websites that have pilfered their intellectual property just have a look at Google’s free Search By Image tool. It uses AI to literally find any identical or nearly-identical graphic on the entire WWW!

These free photos and graphics sites will allow you to download pictures with just about any subject matter in them. Often, they’ll expect you to provide an acknowledgement of them. So ponder whether having the words “Photo supplied by Joe Blow” is going to devalue your website in any way before going along with this.

One more thing. There’s nothing more degrading than seeing the same photo or graphic used repeatedly over multiple websites. I see it all the time. While commercial sites will make you pay a lot for exclusive use of a photo, their paid-for non-exclusive photos are certainly less commonly used than the freebies.

  • https://www.pexels.com
  • https//www.reshot.com
  • http://librestock.com
  • https://pixabay.com
  • https://creativecommons.org
  • https://unsplash.com
  • https://www.freeimages.com
  • https://www.freepik.com

Commercial

Getty Images is the biggie in this world with a humungous catalogue of literally any image you could imagine. But you might pay a lot for the perfect image – but that’s probably considerably cheaper than hiring a commercial photographer.

I have an account with Deposit Photos and think they have an amazing selection of high-quality images. If you find something you like there, let me know. I’ll access it through my account and you’ll be charged $10 for each picture – a bargain, IMHO.

Other sources:

  • https://www.shutterstock.com/
  • https://stockphoto.com/
  • https://www.imagesource.com/
  • https://elements.envato.com/photos
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Some of these tutorials I’ve created myself, but many of them come from other online experts who are the “WordPress gurus.”

WP Crafter Videos

Adam’s voice might drive you crazy (it sure does with me!) but his content is excellent.

Editing With Gutenberg – As of late 2018, the primary editor (word processor) used by WordPress took a giant leap forward and became what’s known as “Gutenberg.” This video tutorial – which has about 15 minutes of good content in it – is about the best so far.

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And that's nothing compared to what I can do!