MadRiverWeb

Based in Vermont's Mad River Valley

Website Development, Design, Hosting, Optimization

  •   Contact Us
  •   802-496-4940
  • Home
  • Services
    • Portfolio
    • Development
    • Website Hosting
    • Domain Email
    • Domain Management
    • Starter Site
    • Portals
  • About / Contact
    • About Mad River Web
    • Contact / Support
    • Terms & Payment
    • Accolades
  • Client Pages
    • Optimize / Promote
    • Search Optimization Case Study
    • Photo Tips
    • WordPress Classic Documentation
    • WordPress Blocks Documentation
  • News & Tips
    • Projects
    • Client Tips
    • Services
You are here: Home / Archives for Webmaster

To Blog or Newsletter?

January 5, 2022

That is the question.

There are numerous methods for you to get the word out regarding your products and services including:

  • marketing/posting/blogging on your own website,
  • mailing a newsletter using tools such as MailChimp and Constant Contact,
  • posting on social media,
  • and/or posting on a forum or blogging platform such as Substack which has become popular lately.

Here is my assessment of the pros and cons of each.

If your site is created in WordPress, as is my preferred approach, blogging is built in. That is how WordPress came to being – its original purpose. Notification to subscribers can be set up with some well-tested plugins. An example of an organization using post notifications for 8+ years is https://www.awsaeast.org/. Note the breadth and organization of posts in the left sidebar. It can be a challenge to fine-tune 1) the addition of subscribers amongst spammers, and 2) the receipt of notifications by subscribers in their inbox and not in their spam folder. If generating revenue is important, paid membership can be established, and this improves the ability to add subscribers and reach them seamlessly. Although these take time, cost, and some technical knowledge, the biggest benefit is having a permanent record of everything you want to share on your own branding – your portfolio. Poise yourself as an expert. Find everything in one place rather than hunting for emails and in which newsletter you sent something.*

An email service such as MailChimp can be set up for you to send a newsletter. You can import a list of contacts, but be sure you have everyone’s permission. A signup form can be added to your website for new followers to add themselves to your list.

You can post on social media. As you probably already know, all of these efforts take time and reach a certain audience – not everyone. Plugins can be used on your website to include feeds or to attempt to cross post, but they can be problematic and will break every so often when the platforms change their methods. My biggest pet peeve about posting on social media is that older posts take time to find while loading the page by scrolling. Additionally, if anything you have said changes, like your holiday business hours or a sale price, it can persist on the internet because Google may have indexed it at one time.

The benefit of using a blogging platform such as Substack is that if you generate a large following you can easily turn it into a membership site. The con is that your material is on another platform.

*This post is a prime example of saving time and repetitive writing. Any of my clients or followers that read my tips will see it, and I can point people to it easily with the URL.

 

Filed Under: Client Tips

.Store Domains

September 22, 2021

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:

  1. 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.)
  2. Live/video/group engagement where you can share specifics and direct people to that nice, short domain name.
  3. Social media way down the list.

Filed Under: Client Tips

Town of Fayston

April 15, 2021

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.

Filed Under: Projects

Reinhardt Home Heating

March 30, 2021

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.

Filed Under: Projects

Borderline Disorders

March 5, 2021

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.

Filed Under: Projects

ClubXtaSki

March 1, 2021

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.

Filed Under: Projects

Johnnycake Flats B&B

November 18, 2020

Converted custom admin website to WordPress in September 2019. Added WooCommerce gift shop of hand-made goods November 2020!

Filed Under: Projects

Google, Can You Be More Disjointed/Fragmented?

September 24, 2020

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…]

Filed Under: Client Tips, Services

Doug Mosle Real Estate

September 2, 2020

We moved and upgraded this WordPress site, LiveMadRiver.com, from an unsupported version of Divi to the Genesis platform, modernizing and improving navigation. This site uses an IDX plugin to pull real estate listings from the MLS.

Filed Under: Projects

Fayston Forager, LLC

July 9, 2020

Fayston Forager, LLC, offers wild-harvested, fresh-processed Japanese Knotweed tincture and a few seasonal products using WordPress and the WooCommerce shopping platform. The owner is an active blogger.

The owner and I worked together to set up Google Merchant Center and a feed to provide product visibility in Google’s shopping tab. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Projects

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

News & Tips Categories

  • Client Tips (10)
  • Projects (30)
  • Services (6)

News & Tips Categories

  • Client Tips (10)
  • Projects (30)
  • Services (6)
Follow Us on Facebook
Follow Us on Facebook

Contact Us

Mad River Web
PO Box 877
Waitsfield, VT 05673
  802-496-4940
  Send an email on our Contact page.

© 1998–2022 MadRiverWeb  ·  All rights reserved