Robert Lodi

Foundation issues can become a nightmare for homeowners, and also for WordPress site owners. 

Some website problems are easily repairable. A little spackle of SEO here, a fresh coat of paint on the whole plugin situation. Boom. 

But there can be some major issues that aren’t as easy as a trip to the Home Depot or an email to your web guy across town. Sometimes you just need to rebuild your site, from the foundation up. 

To help determine where exactly you are and what options you have to tackle your website improvement project, we have a few questions:

1. How old is your site? Was it built and launched before October 2018?

If your website is built on outdated technology or uses a non-responsive design that can’t be easily updated, starting fresh with modern tools and technologies may be the best choice. WordPress had big changes in November 2018 and not all older themes and builds still work well.

2. Have you had security or hacking problems?

Security isn’t something that can be glossed over or ignored without putting you or your customers at risk. If your site has been compromised or has serious security vulnerabilities, it may be safer for all of you to start fresh.

3. Do you want a new design anyway?

If you are looking to redesign, then also add on a rebuild. Because it is a lot cheaper and more efficient to rebuild in a new design than to try to keep the same design when rebuilding in a new platform.

4. How’s your SEO working for you?

If your website has been hit with severe SEO penalties and it is difficult to recover, starting a new site with a clean slate may be more effective than trying to get your site back on the map. New pages and urls can start fresh with proper SEO and Google indexing.

5. Can you scale up as needed?

Knowing your goals for the future and your site’s capabilities when it comes to meeting those goals is a must. If your site doesn’t allow for your business to grow, such as implementing e-commerce or adding complex features, starting new with a scalable platform can be a better choice.

6. Are you priced out of repairs?

If the cost of fixing your site is nearly as high as building a new one, it may make more sense to invest in a new site and take the opportunity to add updated security, fresh design, and any new features needed for your business and marketing.

7. Will your site meet your marketing and business needs?

If you have a well-defined vision for your marketing that significantly deviates from your current website, starting from scratch can often be a more efficient way to bring that to life. 

On the other hand, sometimes older sites can be fixed.

Welcome to Web Depot

There are a number of reasons why you might decide that a full rebuild wouldn’t be the best idea for your website at the moment, and often less severe issues can be managed by your friendly WordPress developer. 

Some areas to consider when looking at whether you can fix your website are the following:

1. If your content and SEO is in good shape

Updates to content and SEO are easily manageable without a full rebuild. Often SEO is a crucial part of your discoverability that takes time to build up in search engines, so to keep your results running it might be better to attempt to fix the site.

2. If your budget is limited

Budget constraints are often the biggest issue that website owners face when making a decision on keeping the existing website or starting from scratch. If you, like many others, have a budget that would not allow for a full rebuild of your older site, it is important to keep your website working and updated, and backed up, to help prolong its life.

3. If you have smaller issues that can be fixed. 

Broken links, outdated content, minor design flaws. All of these are minor fixes that a skilled developer can help you with, without a full rebuild.

4. If you have dedicated and established users

If you have an established user base who is already familiar with your site format and layout and you know might not be in favor of a drastic change in user experience (tip: most users are not in favor of drastic changes), it might be beneficial to keep the site you have, and also keep it maintained so it stays secure. 

5. If you want to keep your Historical Data*

If you have data, analytics, or content archived that you want to preserve, it is often better to fix your existing site and keep the data available.

6. If you need a brand refresh

If your brand changes or needs updating, it can often be implemented into your existing site, without a full rebuild. Colors, logos, and words/styles can live within the existing structure if the bones of the site are solid.

No matter where you are in your journey or your understanding of what goes into building a website, we are able to help look at all of the factors that will influence your site, your marketing budget, or your goals in the future. 

If you have an older site and you’d like to have it assessed for rebuild or update purposes, https://www.rockpixelscissors.com/free-site-evaluation/ we are happy to evaluate it for you and provide some recommendations and next steps.

*the Google update to G4 may already have removed your historical data if you haven’t archived it. 

Something happened to me the other day that was very unusual.

A few months ago, the old exhaust fan in the bathroom broke. Or, rather, died. It sure sounded like something dying, that’s for sure.

Standing on a ladder with a flashlight, I could make out the manufacturer and model number. I was even able to order a new one, same model, which I thought may make installation easier. Even a slight difference in size can mean making a new hole in the ceiling, or patching something, or some other nonsense. See my post about ceiling fans. I didn’t want to deal with it.

So I put it off, things got busy, and I didn’t want to go in the attic over the summer, so, it sat in the box for a while.

Last weekend it was cooler, and I thought I should get it over with and fix it. The first step in the installation instructions called for removing the fan module from the “can” that goes up recessed into the ceiling. 

Hmm, I thought. Maybe I can just pop that new motor in the old one… and not have to remove/reinstall the entire unit…

And I could. The size, screw holes, and wiring harness all matched the old one in the ceiling that was installed way back who knows when. High marks to NuTone.

What was looking like a day in the attic turned into minutes on the ladder.

This project was a lot easier than I had expected.

And that almost never happens.

Wait for it…

The same thing applies to your website.

You could have a problem or something isn’t doing what you want, and it’s annoying. You may think it’s complicated (read: expensive) to fix. And it may be. 

But it could also be not a big deal, and a web team with decades of experience could get it sorted out fairly efficiently.

It never hurts to ask – so – if you have some website weirdness that you’d like evaluated – let me know. Maybe it’s something we can fix and make the site better, without having to crawl through the attic.

Don’t you just hate it when… your quoted paragraphs look like this? 

Or have you ever even noticed?

The typographic problem here is – the punctuation isn’t “hanging.” That’s when, in this case, the first quotation mark isn’t moved off to the left creating a smooth left margin. 

This is big problem! 🙂

I saw it, and went to fix it. Happily, typographic controls in CSS continue to improve and evolve, and yesterday I was reminded of the ‘hanging-punctuation’ property.

The ‘hanging-punctuation’ property makes it super easy to clean up your quotation marks using 

{hanging-punctuation: first;} (or last, or first and last.)

Since there is limited browser support – only Safari 10+ desktop and mobile at the moment, it still may be easier to do it old-school and adjust as needed for each case with: 

{text-indent: -0.5em; /* Change number based on your font */}

Use whatever method works best for your typefaces and browser needs, as long as you do it! 

And if you need to tighten up more of your website’s typography? We can help – just let us know.

If you’ve recently launched a website and are wondering why you aren’t showing at up in Google after a few days, there is one setting you should make sure to check.

WordPress and other CMSs have a setting that blocks the site from being indexed. 

This is usually used during development so that you don’t have two sites getting indexed at the same time, or you are not getting indexed until you are ready.

But – if you forget to turn it off before launch – it can prevent your site from getting indexed when you want it to get indexed.

In WordPress it’s under Settings -> Reading – scroll to the bottom and you’ll see Search engine visibility and a checkbox. You want the box un-checked like below:

In Squarespace, it’s under Visibility. I know Wix has a similar setting somewhere, too.

If your visibility is turned on, and you are still not getting found – you may need further SEO help.

You can start here – https://www.rockpixelscissors.com/overly-simplified-seo-001/ – and if you need further assistance, please let me know.

Down the hill behind our deck is a – pond. Sort of. I think technically it’s a vernal pool, since in dry years it dries up. This time of year, if there is water, it is mostly green. 

Off to one side, sticking out in the water, is a rock.

Almost every afternoon there are turtles on the rock. But sometimes there are birds – ducks, geese, and very rarely a heron. This year we’ve seen a Green Heron and a Great Blue Heron on the rock. 

Which is fairly unusual. I think we’ve seen a heron here just 4 times in 5 years.

Rare things happen rarely, but they do still happen.

And you don’t see anything if you never look.

Which is why it is also important to check the back end of your WordPress site every so often. Don’t just add a post and close the window.

Because a rare thing like a bad plugin conflict can still happen. It happened to me just the other day, in fact.

To prevent this rarity from becoming common – you can make sure your plugins aren’t too out of date, especially these next few months as a bunch of updates are headed out way. 

Look for those red dots with white numbers. 

Back up the site, and update the plugins. 

Then go outside and see what is on your rock, whatever that may be. You never know- there could be something good today. 

Some days we simply have too much cache.

For better or worse, we live in the era of cache (pronounced like the money), with local cache, browser cache, server cache, Google cache, CDNs, and sometimes double secret cache all seemingly conspiring against us as we make website edits and updates.

Because what cache does is store copies of the site files, so they don’t have to load over the internet or download to your device. But this also means that sometimes when you make edits, they never show up on the site. Or they don’t show up for a while. 

What can we do about it?

The easiest way around this is to use what they call an incognito or private window when checking for your edits. 

This special browser window will load a new copy of whatever sites you are browsing, and not use any locally cached files. 

Another option is clearing your browser cache. This is either super easy or near impossible, depending on which browser you are using. Chrome in particular is adamant about caching everything while making it very hard to empty it out.

If that didn’t work…

If you have cleared your local cache or gone incognito, and still don’t see your edits, the problem could lie on the server or hosting end. WPEngine, my favorite hosting company, caches the @#*! out of everything, but they also make it easy to clear it. Other hosts may require more steps.

If you’ve cleared what you can and still don’t see your edits, then, well, take a break. Give it some time, and check again in a while.

And if you’d rather not deal with any of it at all – give us a call. We’ll happily handle your site issues and edits for you, so you can focus on your own business cash flow needs.