Foundation Web Design & Development
Web Design & Development
Welcome to another installment of Cool Things for Cool People, hoping to make your inbox (and your day) a little more interesting. Don’t forget you can submit your own cool thing using the cool things form!
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: April 2024”
There are many ways to make your WordPress site faster, but seldom is the topic about your database. When your WordPress site starts to slog, it can be a frustrating experience for not only you, but your visitors as well. If a website is too slow, did you know it can actually lose potential customers? Really! According to Google, the probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. Keeping your site quick isn’t just a vanity project; it has real consequences that can help grow your business.
For the uninitiated, every WordPress install has two parts: the PHP, CSS, and JS files that make up the functionality of WordPress, and the MySQL database that houses all of the information that propagates into the WordPress installation. A WordPress installation cannot function if it’s missing its database, and you’ve likely seen the dreaded “error establishing database connection” error before that tears down your entire site. So, let’s talk databases, identifying if they’re slow, and what you can do to fix them.
Continue reading “Identifying and cutting WordPress database bloat”
One thing I really love about the simple portfolio site sale is that I get to make a bunch of unique portfolios for a variety of artists. Tim Paul was part of my portfolio site sale, and he came to me in the middle of it when he admitted that he had wanted to build a site on WordPress, but hadn’t gotten around to it for years. I’m excited to show you what we built together!
Continue reading “New Site Project: Tim Paul Illustrations”
Welcome to another installment of cool things for cool people. I’ve got a mix of cool things for you to check out this month. Don’t forget you can submit your own cool thing using the cool things form!
Continue reading “Cool Things for Cool People: March 2024”
When parent company Automattic announced just a few days ago that they were going to be selling user data from WordPress.com and Tumblr to Midjourney (Company responsible for LLMs), at first I just shook my head. I read the details, including the grisly fact that all user data has likely already been scraped and sold, including private data like unanswered asks on Tumblr and private blogs, and put it aside for a moment. Later, a paltry toggle switch to opt-out WordPress.com and Tumblr accounts (despite the data likely already being taken) appeared, and I thought: no.
Continue reading “The Great Migration – Moving from WordPress dot com to Self-Hosted”
Foundation Web Design & Development is excited to announce the launch of a new site for Groveland Gecko, a NH-based gecko breeder and supplies provider.
Continue reading “New Site Project: Groveland Gecko”
Welcome everyone to the inaugural Cool Things for Cool People series! This series aims to highlight some neat things I find on the web or that are sent to me via my form. The things contained within are just meant for a little fun and not necessarily related to web design or online marketing. I just want to inject a little fun into your inbox from time to time!
Let’s get started!
Continue reading “Introducing Cool Things for Cool People!”
When it comes to marketing yourself on the internet, it’s a lot to do for one person, especially if you’re responsible for updating your website, updating your social media, and doing everything else to run your business smoothly and effectively. When it starts becoming too much for you to handle social media on your own, you may be looking to hire someone to help you with your social media marketing and presence. How do you determine if the person you pick is right for you? Let’s look at some different social media marketing programs and ways you can tell if a social media marketer is for you! I’ll compare marketing agencies and virtual assistants, and give you some eagle-eye tips for things to look out for when making your decision.
Continue reading “What should you look for in a social media marketing company?”
In the new year, you may be looking to set some goals for yourself, and one of those goals might be taking care of your languishing website. Updating your website is a great goal, and identifying barriers for customers in regards to your digital presence is another goal you should make, and page speed might be it.
One barrier I come across often is a site’s page speed. Is your site a slow loading beast? How can that affect your customers and your potential to do business? What can you do to fix it?
Continue reading “Improve your page speed optimization now with these 5 tips”
Having just gone through the pain myself of trying to figure out what’s the proper cover photo size/ratio for Bluesky, I thought I’d share my findings and the helper image I created for it.
Continue reading “What’s the correct cover photo size for Bluesky?”