In order to serve you better and improve my services I am creating and sending you a check-box survey in the next week. I hope that you can find time to answer a few questions and add a comment. Perhaps I can offer a new service that you need or more options. Your input will be very valuable and I welcome your suggestions. Again, thanks for your trust in Perugi Design and have a Healthy and Happy New Year!

Websites built with WordPress start off with free software. WordPress is open source. Many, many people have built careers on that fact. All web software requires a host company such as Bluehost or GoDaddy that will rent you space on a hard drive somewhere in the cloud for as little as $5 per month. That’s great. You also have to buy the domain that represents the IP address for your server space. That can cost roughly $15 per year. Also great. So, for as little as $75 per year, you can run your website.

People find out by trying to making a site themselves that it can be complex. I built a website for a restaurant in Boston over four years ago that was recently bought by a hotelier in Oregon. The message I first got from the rep of the new company was that they would not need my services anymore. He was going to build one. The next message said the plan had changed and he wanted to continue the website with my help. My guess is that he realized pretty quickly that making a website involves a lot of experience and a long learning curve.

Your goals and requirements for the website will make a difference in the price. Fewer hours, obviously, will result in a lower price. A base price for even a few pages may take more time than you think. Consider that several meetings at 1 to 2 hours each add up to 4 hours minimum. Researching and sizing photographs, another 2. Building a home page with design styling, 4 to 6; Editing text, organizing the information, establishing a flow, and populating each page; Building forms, adjusting code settings for added functionality; setting up search engine optimization and sizing for mobile; trouble shooting, client training. Whew! Thirty hours +… For larger sites, multiply it 3 or 4 times. You also receive the designer’s artistic craft and the developer’s code craft, which is taken from years of experience.

But in the end, you own a unique website. Know that the ever changing internet demands that your site needs to be updated, watched over, backed up, improved, etc. Consider your website as a refection of your business, your brand, which grows and changes as you do. Also, that your webmaster is intimate with the workings of your website and that they will continue to offer you their services to keep that site viable and useful.

The article “How Much Does a Website Cost?” in Forbes by Ilya Pozin was used in researching this topic.

How to Get 100 Content Ideas in 1 Hour by Nicole Kohler was a bit meatier in content and one that I can share with clients. So many people need help with writing their blogs or even generating ideas for them. With tools that Nicole shared you can generate ideas with keywords, test their popularity and even figure out if your competitors are using them too. If they turn out to be well liked but not overused, you have a winning topic!

One of my favorites, From Blog to Business Running a WordPress Membership Site, by Brian Krogsgard, will be helpful for anyone wanting to monetize a membership site. After you identify your goal, verify that it is marketable. Start with a great website, write a blog and make it good. There are different types of memberships sites: monthly, yearly or one workshop at a time. Definitely include bracketing, which will give your customer a choice in services. Also, engage with your group by email and surveys.

The Business Panel featured Amanda Giles, Jared Novack, Kate Gilbert, Kristina Romero and Sam Hotchkiss and was hosted by Annie Schmidt. I was surprised to learn the range of fees for web design and development:  $7-$15,000 per site on the low end and $30k to $70k on the high end. It’s all about what the added value is to the client. Will the website bring in 20% more customers? What is that worth? They also discussed website maintenance plans.

Power SEO for Your WordPress Website was delivered by Tom Shapiro, a very experienced SEO web developer. First things first, says Tom. It’s all about your marketing strategy. The company’s focus may be wrong or just boring. Find a niche that your competitors have not. Then Yom gave us a quick history lesson on Google and its many algorythm changes. Basically, Google just wants to bring a good, relevant customer experience. So it’s not just about adding keywords, it’s adding value to the website. And use visuals!

Setting Up Care Plans for Predictable Incomes by Kristina Romero included a lot of practical advice for the web designer who need residual income to stay in business. Today, websites need updating every week to perform well. The tools are out there to help the website providers stay on top of that. Web maintenance involves updating software on a weekly basis, backing up the site on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, doing performance tests, creating reports and being available for support calls. You can monetize these tasks by letting your clients choose the plan they want or need. It’s a wise investment.

I arrived at 8:15 or so and found a nearby parking lot for only $12, despite being warned it could cost $30 due to a Red Sox game held today…. making up for the $75 parking ticket I got last month at a meter during a Red Sox game! But, that’s another story. If you’d like to skip this first hand account and read real transcripts, go to the WordCamp website.

I found out from the first talk, Intuitive Editing Workflows by Erik Bernskiold, that Structured Data Input is an important feature to offer clients, so they can keep their web sites fresh. Problem is, there isn’t a plugin or theme that does this very well yet. We have two options: Create Custom Post Types for the client to write in updates or use a Builder type plugin or theme. The second option can be dangerous as the design can get destroyed without the client realizing it. Some themes, such as Divi by Elegant Themes allow editor roles, thus limiting the ability to change the format.

Next that morning was, The Frustration with Website Security, hosted by Surcuri software. It was labeled WordPress 101, which I took to mean it was for “beginners”. I picked up a few tips, but basically it reinforced what I already knew. 1. Back up your site, not on the server, for instance with Amazon SImple Storage, Dropbox or on your hard drive. Do not rely on the hosting to do it for you. Their backup may also get infected. 2. Attacks are highly automated. which make money for the hackers, even with your small family website, as it can act as a jumping off point to infect other sites. 3. Use a password manager, such as Evernote, so you can have a different password for everything. 4. You can get malware from many places, even plugins!

Designing and Theming for Performance by Matt Dorman was really nerdy, so I won’t go much into it. In a nutshell, Performance of your website, i.e. speed, is important. And there are various tools to determine and help you fix that problem. Obviously, you don’t want your site to load in more than two seconds or you’ve lost the smart phone customer. Sometimes it’s the size of your imagery, or its a plugin or the theme or even the hosting. Test your site on Pingdom, Yahoo’s YSlow, or Google’s Page Speed Insights and then let your web designer/developer know there is a problem so they can help you.

Designer’s Panel with four designers/developers of various backgrounds was next. A lot of chatting, but the important points were: Sliders are on the way out… too much movement especially for phones, which is where all the design is focused now. Give reasons for your design decisions and back it up with information. Quote data and anecdotes. Clients don’t always know what is best for their websites. Consider that what is fast for you and the client, because we have good wifi, is not necessarily the case with many of our users. Someone said the next iteration of WordPress, REST API, will focus on design components and not just the whole page.

Page Builder Showdown given by Gina Deaton rated six or so page builder themes (such as Divi) for creating web page design. A couple came out at the bottom, a few in the acceptable range and two on top. Surprisingly, Divi got knocked down a few points because Gina felt there was a learning curve and the theme only builds out to four columns. She acknowledged that it is a powerful theme, but that in order to use it at it’s full potential, you need to know css coding. The winner was Beaver Builder and a simpler free new theme called Elementor.

Why Good Design Matters was given by a young designer, Andrea Trew,  from the agency Fly Wheel. She mentioned a few books on design or design philosophy including As Little Design As Possible by Dieter Rams. She designed a clever intern campaign based on the Wes Anderson movie, Moonrise Kingdom. New interns were given notebooks backed with fake fur. The take home was “It’s not how it looks, it’s how you make people feel.”

Organizing Your First Website Usability Test by Anthony D Paul, was all about testing web design prototypes. Some results can be “too much content” which can be determined early in a testing environment and problems with Brand Perception, which usually takes some time to uncover and shopping cart abandonment. His favorite quote is “The Price of Light is less than the cost of darkness, by Arthur C.Nielson, market researcher.

Intro to Wireframing, by Karalyn Thayer pointed out that wireframing saves time and money, because you can easily make changes early on. A wireframe, either low fidelity such as a sketch on a napkin, or high fidelity made with software,does not contain any color, fonts, or other stylish elements. The client can more easily understand the hierarchy of content, layout and path of the user.

Are we having fun yet? That’s it for Day one!