This is a perfect example of how fundamentally flawed modern SEO is. @ohashi has been producing the best hosting reviews in the WordPress ecosystem since forever. It seems like at some point in the past decade on page quality signals have been completely drowned out by backlink signals that can be easily amplified by bigger content producers and a resurgence in cheap on page SEO tricks.
Sorry Kevin I don't know what the answer is, but I'd thought I'd just say a huge thanks for the great work you do year after year. It might be VERY niche but perhaps some sort of annual premium membership for professionals in the WP ecosytem might be something that might work? I'd certainly be happy to support your work on an ongoing basis with access to niche "members only" performance reports on things like WooCommerce benchmarking tests etc.
It really does help motivate me to hear people get value from my work, because it definitely isn't financially motivated at this point.
I appreciate the offer of premium members only payments. I want my data to be public, I like open sourcing my contributions when possible. I think transparency and openness are the key to better reviews. So I've not ever approached that route. I've also avoided taking any sponsored money from web hosting for any sort of advertising because of even the potential conflict of interest (many have offered to sponsor those benchmarks).
There might be something in the works to help it financially this year, nothing really concrete, but I'm exploring some new options. Ultimately though, I'd rather it wither and die than just doing what every shitty affiliate ruining the space has done.
Answer, if you want to make money is play Google's game. Go get some VC funding to buy ads. Google with put the ads on their front page which will boost your search results. Eventually you'll figure out you dont even need a good product, you win with a mediocre product and a lot of SEO/ad spend.
Break Google up. Course that will never happen as politicians like the power Google has over the internet in the hands of a US company.
The whole reason I built what I did was because after a decade in the web hosting world, I still couldn't name a review site that was worth referring anyone to.
I wanted to build something different and meaningful. I did. It just hasn't mattered in a broad context.
If making money was the goal, I'd put whomever wants to pay me $300/sale first and pimp them out as the best company in the universe. Fuck that. I hoped that I could make a reasonable amount (at least enough to keep it going and maybe scale it a bit) and create a more honest review space.
Winning in this case isn't defined by money earned, you're advocating a race to the bottom I wanted to avoid. Google needs a shakeup and so does search as a whole.
I am honestly having a hard time articulating why I don't like the idea of people donating their money to me for what I do. I will try, maybe I am irrational?
There is so much money being passed around in web hosting review space, by companies to affiliates. I still make thousands per month off these affiliate deals. If my site were to rank at the top of search engines, I would be plenty compensated. Having individuals sponsor the work and it continuing to languish is a position I'm not really a fan of. A single sale commission can range from a few dollars to high hundreds or occasionally a thousand+. I can't imagine enough people wanting to donate a meaningful amount that would change that equation. I'd personally feel bad for every Patreon sponsor putting in 5,10,20 dollars because I might feel like I'm not doing enough with it. If those people just sent one person who ended up purchasing via a link on my site, it would likely outweigh most donations, it would also spread the reach to places I likely can't get to.
That's just what is running through my head, I don't know if that makes any sense.
Very interesting. I see lots of hate to CMP's here in the comments (which as an EU consumer I totally get) but I have to ask, what's the alternative? CMP's seem like the least worst solution right now (I'm sure we can debate lots of potential better alternatives that could be baked into the browser - which is where I think this will eventually end up).
CookieBot are probably one of the better CMP's I've used, but I'm surprised they haven't yet implemented full EU isolation - which surely is the short term solution here. Fathom have written extensively about their work on EU isolation which I think is very relevant here
https://usefathom.com/features/eu-isolation
Why is this even a service that needs to be offloaded to a third party? Implementing this properly obviously requires a ton of work, and no site is going to be able to dodge it by simply putting a banner service in front.
Using these automated services that pretend to "automatically" block various categories of cookies is also a ripoof. They use simple keyword searches and similar to try to establish whether a specific script is used for statistics, preferences, etc.
A properly implemented banner (i.e. hand-crafted for the site, and obviously updated each time any script is updated) would be pretty expensive to create and maintain. But if one doesn't see that as one of the key purposes of the law (i.e. push web sites towards using fewer of them because the technological and legal overhead is costlier than whatever the gain is) then I think it's being read a bit naively.
I agree that CMPs are better than everybody rolling their own solution (lots of time wasted by developers and lawyers).
However, CookieBot is terrible imho. They delay page load by about a second (!) because their APIs are so slow. Their tech is incredibly fragile, if their crawler has an issue and doesn't crawl your page completely, they'll silently (!) remove all cookies from the consent and leave you completely non-compliant until the next successful crawl (crawls take hours to days and are automatically done once a month). Their support has a response time of 3-5 business days (!) for commercial users and consists of people who barely know the product and definitely don't know anything about web tech.
I don't have a favorite vendor in that market, but CookieBot is definitely the worst one I have worked with.
Yes, but you've read Sendy is connected to SES right? So you're still getting the benefits of solid deliverability. Or are you saying SES deliverability is not as good as Mailchimp et. al?
SES is as good as Mailchimp and very inexpensive. Too bad Mailchimp phased out Mandrill, which was reasonably priced and had a nice interface. SES has no interface at all but works great.
If you like SES you should check out Email Octopus. It hooks up to SES and gives you a nice GUI for putting the messages together. We moved a good sized client over to them and their marketing people wanted a GUI and it filled the niche nicely.
It's very unlikely that page went live on apple.com as an error. I would imagine Apple control their public web presence very carefully. This will have the fan boys in an absolute tizzy if true. Perhaps he's just stepping down from a senior exec position?
I can't understand some of the comments here saying this is too expensive. Seriously folks, William has put together a great into to Bootstrap for a less than the price of a billable hour and it's too expensive? Sure all the information is out there - if you want to spend a few more billable hours finding it - plus a someone who is just now getting up to speed on Bootstrap - most of the tuts out there are for Bootstrap 2. I think the timing is right. The sample chapter is great. Williams product will hopefully save me many multiples of the purchase price by not wasting time seeking the right information and that is a point lots of people seem to be missing.
Exactly. The complaints are wildly off-base; it doesn't matter whether it costs more or less than a college chemistry textbook; it matters whether or not it will save you more than $60 worth of time.
I mostly write native apps, but happen to have started to make a website for the first time in several years the other day. Having decided to start with Bootstrap, I spent at least an hour chasing down blog posts about using Bootstrap, and then googling to see how things had changed since v2, how people do X and Y, finding conflicting opinions of unknown provenance, etc etc... and was expecting to have to do more of that to finish getting up to speed with Bootstrap (especially since I'm starting with v3 and most of the info on the inter web tubes pertains to v2).
So of course I bought this book. In order to be a worthwhile investment, all it has to do is save me from the hassle having to do that again, one single time. Perusing the site it really looks like it will. Sold!
I'm not connected with anyone who works on gov.uk but I've been a huge fan of what is going on over there for some time. In my view it is without a shadow of a doubt the best digital government team in the world. They've assembled a massively talented team who are knocking it out of the park week after week. It's rare to see this anywhere never mind a bloody government agency!
couldn't disagree more. Underneath the "frosting" of the design surface of this site is one of the best user experiences I've had on a government website in a long long time. As someone who is in the middle of building out a large government site at the moment I'm keenly aware of how hard it must have been to bring the Manchester council team along with their design and ux decisions. For me this is the real triumph of this site.
I agree. It is easy to complain about how boostrappy or wordpress like the theme is, but it is immaterial the source of the design inspiration. The most import thing is, that it works and is functional. Try going to the birmingham.gov.uk or london.gov.uk or any of the boroughs in London and see how much of an improvement this approach actually is.
I just started as a BA at Westminster, currently working on customer journeys and user stories, redesigned website and content to follow early next year....watch this space...!
this.
I just started a new project in Foundation 3 for a public sector NFP that requires IE8 compatibility. Foundation 4 is pretty much not an option for me as a result. Guess I'm stuck with Foundation 3 for now.
At a minimum you should have incorporated an adapative (which is what most people actually mean when they say responsive) grid like http://www.getskeleton.com/ into your redesign process.
Does it take a bit longer? Of course - but not much longer. Sounds like you're just copping out of investing the time to implement this stuff properly.
When you run a business you have to make decisions about where to invest your time and these guys found that the extra time was not worth it for their particular business. It has nothing to do with "copping out".
Sorry Kevin I don't know what the answer is, but I'd thought I'd just say a huge thanks for the great work you do year after year. It might be VERY niche but perhaps some sort of annual premium membership for professionals in the WP ecosytem might be something that might work? I'd certainly be happy to support your work on an ongoing basis with access to niche "members only" performance reports on things like WooCommerce benchmarking tests etc.