websites

June 25, 2014 By Tom Gimer

New service: Web hosting

Our clients value “comfort”. When they choose us for a project, it’s often because they’ve worked with us in the past and are confident their jobs are going to be completed on time and the finished product will turn out better than expected. Our clients factor their comfort level into the price they are willing to pay to work with us. It’s understandable; everybody values peace of mind.

At KKPDC we too factor comfort level into things when we consider vendor relationships. Saving a few dollars here and there is hardly worth it if orders come late or are of poor quality. The same thing applies to service providers like web hosting companies. Having been through several web hosts over the past 20+ years, we discovered that many of the problems with web hosting companies stem from a lack of communication and poor support when a problem arises. With web hosting, you rarely hear about problems directly from the host. More often than not you find out about problems with your website directly from your customers, which can come as a rude awakening. Think about it — have you heard things like this from your clients?

“Hey, your website is down!”
“Your site looks like it has been hacked. Something isn’t right.”
“I tried to submit a form on your site but it didn’t work.”

When your business website is down or not functioning correctly, helpless is how you feel. And dealing with tech support in cyberspace is a crap-shoot. Depending on the hosting company, the tech support team may be half-way around the world or worse. We don’t want the clients who we build or redesign websites for ever feeling helpless about their site security or hosting, so it made a lot of sense for us to add business-class web hosting to the list of services we provide.

We are now pleased to offer affordable business-class web hosting from a name you already know and trust — us! If you are like most smart business owners, you will value the comfort in knowing your site will always be secure and easily configurable. Every hosting account has it’s own Cpanel, unlimited MySQL databases, the ability to host multiple sites and park domains, etc. And if you ever have a problem you can count on us — a local, dependable service provider for 24+ years — to help you fix things right away.

Stop feeling helpless when your site has a problem. Give some thought to moving your website to KKPhosting.com. We can help you migrate an existing site to our servers or help you build a new one.

January 11, 2013 By Tom Gimer

Yes, WordPress is awesome, but…

We love building websites with WordPress. Creating beautiful, functional websites with WordPress is so much easier and cheaper than coding from scratch. WordPress is the best open-source CMS out there due to its ease of use, standard features, security, and especially its extendability (more on this later). We recommend the WordPress platform to almost every client who consults with us about building a new site or planning a redesign of an existing one. We trust it so much that we built our own website with it. Simply put, WordPress is awesome, but…

(there is always a but, isn’t there?)…

WordPress’ most valuable feature is its extendability. It can be easily customized and extended with “plugins” that are essentially add-ons to the core code which make WordPress do something extra. As valuable as they are, plugins are also the platform’s biggest vulnerability. You see, the guys who created WordPress are not the only ones writing code for it. There are literally thousands of plugins which extend the core functionality of WordPress (23,062 plugins are in the WordPress repository at the time of this post), and it is difficult to tell the good from the bad because anybody who can code can develop a plugin. Making things more interesting, since WordPress is constantly being improved and updated, unless a plugin developer continues to update and support his plugin in perpetuity (to ensure it works with the latest release), there is a pretty good chance it won’t continue to work forever.

On a site built with WordPress, whenever things aren’t working perfectly (or worse, things stop working completely), fixing things typically involves figuring out which plugins are conflicting with one another. To do this you literally need to disable each plugin one at a time until you identity the conflict. If you have a lot of plugins on your site, this can be very time consuming. Importantly, your site won’t tell you when there is a plugin conflict, it will simply stop working! When plugins do conflict and you figure out the problem, your work is not done. Now you need to decide which plugin you will continue to use and how to address the functionality you will lose by deactivating the problem plugin. Sometimes this is as easy as finding a replacement plugin that doesn’t cause a conflict, but sometimes it is not.

You probably now see the importance of limiting the number of plugins you use on your WordPress site. Not only do plugins have the potential to slow down your site, when they do conflict they can make your site absolutely useless. If yours is like most businesses, you depend on your website to generate leads, provide information to customers, schedule appointments and do other things which are critical to your company. You need to make sure every change or upgrade to your website doesn’t cause it to break. In other words, don’t go plugin crazy! Make improvements that bring value to your business and test them completely.

Oh and remember when I mentioned WordPress updates? It’s great that the platform is constantly being improved, but this can also cause huge problems for the unsuspecting site owner. Before updating the code to the latest release, you’ll want to back up your entire site as well as your database. Ignore this advice at your own peril — you could lose your entire site if the update process fails.

OK enough doom and gloom; we’ll stop scaring you now. And honestly we really do love WordPress! We just recommend that you exercise extreme caution when you make changes to your site or you could easily bring down the entire thing and stifle your business.

May 3, 2012 By Tom Gimer

When Google talks, listen

A couple days ago, Google released a huge hint to web designers and developers as well as the business owners they serve in this blog post about responsive design.

And Google wasn’t weighing in on how YOU and I should be dealing with the issue of responsive design. They were talking about how THEY were dealing with it. There were several good tips in this post about making web content appear nicely across the wide array of devices and screens from desktops to tablets to smartphones. But the biggest tip was the one Google didn’t have to talk about. They had already spilled the beans. Google believes that responsive design (rather than a separate domain for mobile users) is the best way to ensure all visitors have a pleasant browsing experience and doing it right is a priority for Google on its own sites. If Google believes this is important, do you think perhaps you should give it some weight as well?

So, if you haven’t heeded our advice yet and incorporated responsive design principles into your site, perhaps you should listen to Google. And if you still aren’t convinced, check your Analytics and see where Google ranks in your list of traffic sources. (Then imagine what would happen if that source started thinking you don’t care about your website visitors.)

March 15, 2012 By Tom Gimer

Your mobile visitors deserve responsive web design

mobile visitors deserve better Gone are the days when everyone surfing the web was sitting in front of a desktop monitor. The number of internet-enabled smartphones and tablets is now staggering, and they are only going to continue to climb as more and more people discover that the mobile web is actually becoming quite good. And I’m not talking about the Facebook app you use on your iPhone, the Twitter app on your Android phone, or the PGA Tour app on your pitiful Blackberry (guilty). No, I’m talking about old school surfing of the internet — browsing websites — but while using a mobile device. It used to be painful. What’s changed?

Responsive web design is improving the mobile web in a big way.

Responsive web design is basically the practice of adapting a site layout to the viewing environment — it makes site content look pleasant and flow nicely on a broad range of devices and browsers such as those found on the aforementioned smartphones and tablets. This is accomplished by displaying content differently depending on the size of the screen. When you visit a website, your device tells the site what size your screen is. How the site responds (or doesn’t) is another story!

If you’ve ever surfed the internet on a smartphone, the odds are you’ve landed on plenty of sites that were extremely difficult to navigate and/or view. Whether it was tiny text that you had to zoom in on to read or to make a link clickable, or perhaps it was the constant need to scroll up and down or sideways to get to anything worthwhile, it seemed that every click created new work for you. It was a nightmare!

Then along comes a concept so simple, yet brilliant. Responsive web design. It eliminates these problems for most mobile visitors by “responding” with an appropriate site layout. (And with the right CMS and theme framework, it’s actually not that difficult to implement on the back side. But that’s a topic for another post.)

If your website has been around for a while it just may be the nightmare I described above. And if it is, you know it is hurting your business. Mobile users are potential customers too (about 20% of our traffic is mobile, your mileage may vary), so you may want to try this little test… pull out your smartphone and visit your website. If it is difficult to navigate or read for you (and of course you know a lot more about where and how to find information on your site), you might want to give some serious thought to a re-design based upon responsive web design principles. Your mobile visitors deserve better, don’t they?

websites

(there is always a but, isn’t there?)…

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