The A Johnson Company, located in Bristol, Vermont, had been ready for a while for a website that they could update. The old website was converted to WordPress and a robust News section was added. Two capable persons in the office were fully trained and they are keeping the site updated in parallel with their similar postings on social media.
International Society of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy
When the ISTFP came to me for website guidance, their WordPress site had been developed in 2012 and was still not mobile compatible. Our 2021 redevelopment brought the site up to the latest technical functionality.
The technical highlight of this project is a membership system with checks and balances. WordPress provides native user functionality. Public sign-up has always been fraught with spammed submissions. Various good membership systems exist, and it is up to the developer to determine which one(s) have the best functionality for the client needs. This membership needed less interaction with each other and more automated payment functionality.
.Store Domains
Just a quick note here. Our domain registrar, Tucows, hosted a webinar about selling online when the .store (dot store) top level domain (TLD) became available. I was curious and watched/listened to most of it, the reason being many small businesses have made the shift to selling online, especially during the pandemic. With the growth in number of websites, being found, i.e. search utility visibility, continues to be a challenge. The bigger portals, Etsy, Shopify, and even Google, are doing whatever they can to suck you onto their platforms—the customer and the business person—at the detriment of arriving at individually branded websites.
The takeaways from the two featured speakers:
- A great, short domain name can still be bought on the .store TLD, sometimes your first choice.
- The .store TLD is a clear call to action—no ambiguity that product will be sold on the website.
- Even if you have a store on a portal, it’s important to have your own branding, offering credibility.
One of the speakers, when asked which marketing activities bring in the most revenue, listed them as:
- Her email list generated the most sales. (My two cents: remind your people to share your email, spread the word, perhaps offering them an incentive.)
- Live/video/group engagement where you can share specifics and direct people to that nice, short domain name.
- Social media way down the list.
Marilyn Ruseckas
Marilyn needed a simple, clean website that would allow her bold pastels and paintings to stand out.
Visit her website at MarilynRuseckas.com.
Town of Fayston
The Town of Fayston website was upgraded from its original twentyeleven WordPress theme in April 2021. The theme still worked seamlessly, but with all the upgrades to WordPress and the creativity offered in the block editor and the number of staff now editing, they were missing out on additional flexibility, functionality, and ease of updating.
A child theme was developed on the Genesis platform. The Advanced Custom Fields plugin allowed ease of setting up a file upload and management process for the departmental agendas, supporting documents, and minutes. Pages were created using either the standard sidebar or a two-column format for varied “sidebar” information per page where desired. Reusable blocks were created for Board Meeting and Office Hours schedules to be displayed on multiple pages. Header images can be random or specified per page.
Reinhardt Home Heating
The Reinhardt family of websites was re-launched as a WordPress multi-site in March 2021 in response to changes in PHP and VPS cPanel software over the last few years that resulted in significant and repeated code and server updates that didn’t seem to be ending.
Four energy sites and three mini-marts share a custom child theme based on the Genesis platform. The theme uses a full-width two column approach styled to display exactly as do the sidebar pages, providing greater content flexibility in each page. The home page features a slider with messaging, calls to action, latest posts, and selected testimonials.
We developed a process for the client to write blog posts and push them to the subsites. This same process was used for page deployment during development. Reusable and custom blocks were created. The Gravity Forms plugin was used for a variety of forms as well as a zip code locator with conditional redirect pages.
Borderline Disorders
Borderline Disorders is a website founded and maintained by a group of clinicians and researchers dedicated to the study and practice of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for borderline and other personality disorders. The site’s objective is to provide professionals and the public with information related to TFP-related scholarly and clinical activities in the greater New York City area.
This site was developed on the Bootstrap platform and utilizes a custom admin to simplify the two areas of update needed—publications written by and seminars/events led by the group’s psychiatric professionals.
ClubXtaSki
ClubXtaSki, Mad River Valley vacation rental and ski house needed a new website. Mad River Web established the site branding and layout/structure in WordPress, added existing site content, and trained the owner to add his beautiful photography and updates going forward.
Johnnycake Flats B&B
Converted Johnnycake Flats’ custom admin website to WordPress in September 2019. Added WooCommerce gift shop of hand-made goods November 2020!
Google, Can You Be More Disjointed/Fragmented?
Really, Google. Must you make it SO HARD for all of us small businesses?
I have been managing Google Business (business.google.com) for a number of clients for 15 – 20 years. From that sub-site of the Google empire, a developer or business owner can manage their listing and be found in Google maps (maps.google.com). Quite sufficient for a good long time. Now you’re offering us to add products, yet there is a whole new spinoff, Google Merchant Center which does same. [Read more…]
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