Tips Tuesday – Design Tips for More Money, Webmaster Designers, State of the Word

ByMaAnna Stephenson

Hello Happy Site Owner!

Tips Tuesday – Design Tips for More Money, Webmaster Designers, State of the Word

Tips this week include:

  • BlogAid Holiday Deals
  • 11 highly effective design tips backed by research – must read post
  • Why a Webmaster Designer is worth paying for – and who I use
  • Help for designers who want to become webmasters and get more jobs
  • State of the Word 2023 is Dec 11
  • PHP 8.3 launches soon and why we care
  • Status on the Helpful Content Update Recovery Workshop
  • A plugin that snuck in an AI component on us

BlogAid Holiday Deals

I’ve got HUGE discounts for you this year on the things you need, including:

  • DIY SEO course – save $100
  • Webmaster Training – save $190
  • Site Audit – save $100
  • Consults – half off
  • AI Images for Profit – first month for $1
  • AI Success Club – 25% off plus $900 worth of bonuses

See the Holiday Deals page for all the details.

And tell your blogger buddies about these deals too!!

Website Tips

11 Highly Effective Web Design Tips Backed by Research

This is not another style trends post with pretty home pages.

This article is all about designs that convert.

You most definitely want to read the whole article and see the research graphs that backup these designs.

Here I want to highlight a few of them.

Make site speed a priority.

Get a site audit and get the issues actually fixed. You can’t bandaid this stuff with plugins.

Less is more.

This concept is applied in several of the tips.

You need a clean layout that clearly guides the reader to exactly what you want them to do.

Avoid carousels, sliders, and accordians.

I’m going to disagree with this as a generic tip to follow. All of these things can have strategic value if you use the right thing in the right place.

But, using the wrong thing in the wrong place impacts your site speed, SEO, and conversion.

Use people in pictures.

This speaks to the very heart of where both SEO and conversion are headed.

Everybody needs to see real people getting help from real people.

Read the whole thing.

There’s a ton of good info in this article from Torque. Be sure to read the whole thing for yourself. The graphs and images clearly show the points they are trying to make about the tips being backed up by science.

A Webmaster Designer is Worth Paying For

Kadence, Astra, and other theme frameworks are geared to site owners who are still in the sweat equity phase of running an online business.

That’s why they do all they can to make it so you can spend hours and weeks doing your own theme design.

Here’s why I don’t waste a minute doing my designs on any of the 6 money sites I own.

A webmaster designer knows:

  • Speed
  • Security
  • Conversion
  • Accessibilities compliance
  • SEO

Do you know how theme elements effect each and every thing in that list?

No, you don’t.

And that’s why all the time you waste doing your own design is going to cost you twice.

You’ll waste the time stressing over stuff that doesn’t even matter while missing the stuff that does.

You’ll have a higher bounce rate and less conversion once folks do get to your site.

I can’t afford either of those issues.

That’s why I send every design to a qualified webmaster designer who knows everything I know, plus design.

I literally give them my brand colors and a word or two that describes the vibe.

And I don’t think about it again until they show me the mockup, which rarely needs many tweaks.

They do the final, get my approval, and then do the migration from the dev site to the live site.

And I pay them, happily, knowing how much money I just saved and/or did not lose by hiring someone who knows what they are doing.

Bottom line – if you hire a designer, including yourself, all they know about is pretty.

It’s worth spending money on an expert. You’ll make it back.

My Top 2 Webmaster Designers

Want to know who I use and send my clients to?

Both of these designers have been in my Webmaster Training course for years.

And they both help me dig into issues we have faced along the way, like deep theme testing for Core Web Vitals, accessibilities compliance, and more.

In fact, our little team is responsible for identifying theme issues like Cumulative Layout Shift and presenting it to the theme devs, who then fixed it in the framework for everyone.

We are primary beta testers for the themes you use too.

So, I’m not kidding when I say that webmaster designer’s knowledge goes far above what you can bring to the table by customizing a design yourself, or hiring a designer who is not a webmaster.

Want to Become a Webmaster Designer?

The Webmaster Training course is made specifically for designers who want to take their business to the next level.

You’ll stand out from the crowd and get a whole new level of client that you didn’t qualify to take before.

It pays for itself in just one of those new jobs.

And it’s on sale right now for the holidays too.

WordPress Tips

State of the Word 2023 Dec 11

This year the State of the Word gathering will be in Madrid Spain.

And it will be live streamed.

These events are always good for catching up on what the good the WordPress Foundation has put into the world, as well as the devs and volunteers they highlight.

And Matt Mullenweg’s keynote will give us a recap of what has been accomplished in WP dev and what’s coming for next year that will meet the over-arching goals of completing the entire Gutenberg project.

I can tell you now that plan will include more of the same – FSE themes, which were a big dud, and Gutenberg for teams, which has little to no bearing on the overwhelming majority of bloggers.

So for us, don’t expect much as far as new features or changes that will show on the front or back that you can make real use of.

But do expect more core code changes that will likely not be tested enough when released, just like we saw this year. And that’s why we wait a few weeks before updating. 

It’s also why it has become so critically important to ensure your PHP and MySQL versions at the host are also matched to the WP requirements. Those 2 things are being developed at lightning speed too.

PHP Tips

PHP 8.3 Launches Soon

PHP is the main coding language of WordPress and it is critically important to keep pace with its development.

Me and my clients moved up to PHP 8.1 this fall, as 8.0 reached End of Life in November, and 8.1 was the minimum for WP 6.3, even though they didn’t say so. They did say so for the WP 6.4 update.

PHP 8.3 will be released this month, but it is not considered stable yet.

We’ll likely be moving up to PHP 8.2 before the next WP release this spring.

If you want someone to help you know when it’s safe to do all of these types of upgrades, get a site audit and become a Hub member. We like things easy and we stay out of panic mode by staying well ahead of the curves.

SEO Tips

Helpful Content Update Recovery Workshop Status

Last week I took a paid workshop on building a GPT with OpenAI.

I also spent time looking into how to arrange analytics data in a spreadsheet so that ChatGPT could process it.

This week I’ll be uploading those spreadsheets to see what kind of questions I can ask, and how ChatGPT can format the replies visually in tables and graphs.

As I mentioned last week, this is not a viable method for us to use due to the lack of privacy and my profound security concerns that have now been verified.

So, you may ask why I’m wasting my time with it.

I’m not wasting time.

The Data Analyzer in ChatGPT shows its code, which is in Python.

I’m learning how it processes the data.

OpenAI is not the only AI model available.

And Python code can be run on several of the free AI models available for download.

It  would take many months to build something for commercial use. That’s not what I’m after right now.

I want to use AI to crunch the data so I can see which data and which queries are most useful for us to get the info we need to help us recover from the Helpful Content Update.

Then I’ll see if I can generate those same queries into a custom Dashboard on Looker Studio, which I told you I was looking into last week.

I hope to have some conclusions about the best way to go with all this by the end of the month.

And no matter what, we will start our Quick Checks in the DIY SEO course in January. 

Then we’ll move right into the Content Revamp series of workshops so that you know how to make the changes for the best SEO impact.

Hopefully by then I’ll have a workshop ready for us to do the HCU Recovery investigation so we’ll know what needs to be changed.

I’m also thinking that Google will be rolling out more updates between now and February too, and we want to see that impact as well before we start changing things.

AI Plugin Tips

Sneaky, Sneaky

I told you this would happen!!

Yesterday I found a tab in my site’s admin sidebar to an AI tool that I’m positive that I did not install.

Yep, it was snuck in on me when I updated a plugin I do use.

They had zero explanation about how to use it in the plugin either, and this tab was nowhere near the tab for the plugin or in its regular settings.

I’ll have more on it next week for Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers.

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MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English. She helps DIY site owners plus webmasters and designers create sites that are secure, perform well, and get noticed by search engines and readers.