Robert Lodi

All your links and passwords, too.

Guess how many clients don’t have access to their own websites?

More than you’d think.

And even if you never log in, this is important information for every website owner to have, because sometimes this happens:

Whether it’s a WordPress issue, a misplaced semicolon, a plugin incompatibility, or simply the phase of the moon, sometimes a website will cough up an error like that. 

If we have the logins – and we usually ask for them before starting any work, it can very often be fixed quickly and easily.

If we do not have access to those services – well – then – sometimes we can’t do anything. Then the client has to get involved, time passes, and the issue lingers, the site stays down, and usually someone (sometimes me, if you can believe it) gets annoyed.

This is why we recommend that you – the site owner – have this login information. 

You should have logins and access to your web hosting account and site administrator account. If only so you can easily share them with your developer team, instead of going back to the former developer, who has to send out to his contact somewhere, who has to contact his guy overseas, to get the server logins we need to do the job you hired us to do.

So – if you don’t have your logins, go get them right now from wherever they may be, and hang on to them just in case. That way my next post won’t be about you. 🙂

Maybe you can use a tip from some hawks.

For the last several years, we’ve had Red-Shouldered hawks around (see photos – these are the actual hawks living here this year.)

This year they are building a nest in our yard. We can see it from our living room – I can also see it from my desk – which means we can watch the hawks without annoying them.

In March they work on the nest most mornings. We can see them arrive with sticks and bits of green – pine branches or moss or something. Then they adjust the sticks. One day they had a big stick and they’d move one end and the other end would get out of line so they’d move it back. 

Hawk theater can be very entertaining.

They simply iterate and adjust things over time until they make the nest do what they need.

Which is one way to look at your SEO. (See, there is a point.)

When your site launched you may have gone in and added page titles and meta information. (At least I hope you did. If not, call me now.) If it’s been some time since you edited your info – are those terms and meta details still doing what you need? Is your company or product exactly the same? Or do you need to go move your SEO sticks around and adjust a few things to get better performance and traffic?

We can’t build you a nest, but we can help with your SEO. Let me know if we can give you a stick. Or a hand.

Heads up – Google Analytics is changing, and we all need to change with it.

If you are already using Google Analytics on your site, you may need to make some adjustments so your site keeps tracking after July 1, 2023. I have seen things that say if you didn’t do this in March 2023, they’d do it automatically. I have also still seen the “update to G4” message in Google Analytics today, so, it’s worth checking to make sure your account is updated and using the new G4.

This explains it further, but in Google-ese:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9744165?sjid=13688988354405926353-NA#zippy=%2Cin-this-article

Basically – there is a setup wizard to run in Google Analytics that should create the new G4 “property” and activate it to start collecting data.

However – it will not – the new G4 property – will not show any historical data. Such as from a month or a year ago. That information will still be available for a while, they say. But – it may also make sense to export it so you don’t lose it. You can export reports in a variety of formats: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1038573?sjid=13688988354405926353-NA

As always, if you need help and want to make sure your Google Analytics is and will be still working come July – let me know.

It’s quite a ‘site’ to behold. 

Quick poll:

Which version of PHP is your WordPress site using?

__ What’s PHP?

__ Huh?

PHP is the scripting language that lives behind the scenes in WordPress (and other) website platforms.

It’s software, and, like any other software, there are updates and patches and security releases over time. 

Which is great and all, and helps keep everything secure. But it can also mean trouble, if your site is out of sync with the latest versions. (If you’ve ever had an older phone or computer that updated to a new operating system, and things went a little wonky – that’s very similar to what I am talking about here.)

So if you have an older WordPress site, and by “older” in this case I mean “built or launched before 2020,” now’s the time to check your PHP version, especially because in just the last couple weeks, I’ve run into two different sites that, well, died, when the server updated to PHP 8.

You can check your version by going to the Site Health screen in WordPress (under Tools) and clicking the ‘Info’ tab at the top and going to the ‘Server’ accordion item.

If you don’t see a PHP version that starts with 8, then the next step is to see if your hosting company lets you test an update. If not – then – the next best thing is to make sure everything on your site – plugins, themes, WordPress version, is relatively current.

Because: PHP 7.x hit ‘end of life’ last year. 

Which means, at some point, web hosting companies will be forcing every site to PHP 8. The hosting companies already did this years ago, when PHP 5.6 hit end of life and they forced everyone to PHP 7. 

Now – this doesn’t mean your site will automatically break.

But this is something to check, and be aware of before it becomes a problem. 

And as always, if you’d like help figuring out what your site is doing and making sure it will keep running as the hosting companies update their software, we’re here to help. 

Day after day I’m more confused
Yet I look for the light through the pouring rain…

So this song came up on the radio the other day and it reminded me –

It doesn’t matter what it is, or how easy anyone else says it is, or how easy it’s supposed to be, if you don’t know what you’re doing, for whatever reason, stuff – any stuff – can be confusing.

Beginning to think that I’m wastin’ time
I don’t understand the things I do…

Which is why we try to make websites that our clients can work with. But even so – that isn’t always perfect. Which is why we also offer training. 

And I’m countin’ on you
To carry me through…*

For any site we build, if you want, we’ll jump in a Zoom, sometimes even meet in person, and show you how to use it to do the day-to-day website tasks that you need to do.

That way, you’ll know how things work, you’ll have seen the various fields and interfaces, and be familiar with updating a page, changing a picture, making a new press release, adding a form—whatever it may be that you need to do with your site. 

We’ll make sure you know what you want to know about your site with this customized training.

So while we can’t possibly give you the beat, boys (and girls), we can at least help with your site and make sure that it does what you need, and also help ensure that you know how to work with it.

Even if we didn’t build it, if you have a website that’s giving you trouble – let us know and we can talk about how to make things work better.

* From Mentor Williams’ “Drift Away”, sung by Dobie Gray, 1973

I meant to post this yesterday, but I couldn’t bring myself to post something on 3/1 with a 1973 song that wasn’t from Dark Side of the Moon.

Have you ever needed a pizza form? 

Last month I was asked to help out with streamlining a school lunch pizza ordering system, that seemed to rely on a series of spreadsheets and PDFs and Google docs and abaci. As part of the solution, I was looking at forms and ways to have the web site do the math for us.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t do my job alone. I have help from many people, near and far, some regularly and some only as needed, depending on the project or problem.

But an entire group I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet are plugin developers. 

Like any WordPress dev, I use some plugins. And while I try not to overdo it, there are some that I rely on to help build the functionality that clients want.

Lately however, I’ve had some issues. Questions. Tech support needs.

And just in the last month – these people rose above and beyond to help out and sometimes even write plugin feature updates to do what we needed.

• Liam at Gravity Wiz/Perks – I sent in a ticket to Gravity Perks asking if one of their Perks would do what I needed. Instead, Liam recommended a competitor’s product that had exactly the features needed to make that crazy pizza form work. I’ve used (and totally recommend) their Perks for other projects, so they were my first stop for pizza help. I really appreciate them making a recommendation instead of just saying “no.”

• Tech support at at Search & Filter –my favorite, well, searching and filtering tool, answered all my support tickets with patience and professionalism even when I asked what ended up being obvious questions. D’oh.

• Support at at PickPlugins – makers of Post Grid Combo, actually got a feature I needed added to a special plugin update. Like, almost immediately. Just for me. Well, for my client’s site.

• The team at Facet WP  – this plugin was installed on a site I took over. I don’t have my own license and had never used them before (see above for Search & Filter), but they were great, and helped get the weird duplicate listing problem solved anyway.

• Rafael at Gravity Kit – this is the company recommended by Liam, and he has been helping with pizza math for days now. Who knew this needed to be so complicated! Their Gravity Math plugin lets you do exactly what you need to do to count pizza slices with different toppings and turn that into an actionable pizza order for different weeks and classrooms.

If you’ve encountered any great tech support, feel free to tag them here too and or add your favorite plugin, and let’s make this a resource of great tools that we can add to and grow.