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Design, Strategy

Why Your 404 Page Should Be More Than Just an Error Message

Todd Zeigler

|

February 24, 2025

We’ve all clicked a link expecting something great, only to hit a dreaded 404 error page. It’s frustrating, right?  Most of the time, these pages are boring and unhelpful. But what if they could be an opportunity instead of a dead end?

This video showcases some of the most creative and engaging 404 pages from around the web. These companies use humor and creativity to turn a frustrating experience into something memorable that communicates their brand identity.

A great 404-page can:

• Reinforce your brand’s personality
• Keep visitors engaged instead of bouncing
• Guide users back to valuable content

Watch the video below to see how these brands turn a simple error page into something fun, functional, and memorable.

Here are links to the 404 pages referenced in the video:

• United State Senate
• Washington Post
• Disney
• Lego
• Pixar
• Heinz
• Tripomatic
• New Yorker
• World Association of Zoos and Aquariums
• Sierra Club
• Brick Factory

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Strategy

Giving Back

Todd Zeigler

|

December 21, 2024

In the US, the holiday season is by far and away the most charitable time of the year.  Some estimates suggest that the time between Giving Tuesday (the Tuesday after Thanksgiving) and the end of the year accounts for as much as one-third of annual non-profit contributions.  The final three days of the year alone bring in roughly 10% of yearly gifts for non-profits. 

Each year, Brick Factory allocates funds to each employee to distribute to a charity (or charities) of their choice.  The resulting lists are always a joy for us to read through – reminding us of just how many causes there are to care about and how many amazing organizations are trying to make a genuine difference in the world.

We thought it would be both informative and fun to highlight the recipients our eclectic and compassionate staff chose this year. And, with that, we wish you a very happy Giving Season.

The following list is in no particular order, and links are generally to the organizations’ homepages.

American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is a leading non-profit organization dedicated to preventing animal cruelty across the United States.

Fayetteville Animal Protection Society, Inc.

The mission of Fayetteville Animal Protection Society, Inc. (FAPS) is to provide a licensed, No-Kill shelter for homeless animals until adopted into a loving and caring lifetime environment; to reduce the population of stray animals; and to promote responsible pet ownership.

Strategies for Youth

Strategies for Youth is a national nonprofit training and policy organization committed to ensuring that youth experience the best possible outcomes during interactions with law enforcement.

Sandy Hook Promise

The organization’s mission is to educate and empower youth and adults to prevent violence in schools, homes, and communities.

San Antonio Food Bank

The San Antonio Food Bank is a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting hunger and feeding hope across Southwest Texas.

Last Chance for Animals

Last Chance for Animals (LCA) is an international non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating animal exploitation through education, investigations, legislation, and media attention.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.

Trans Youth Equality Foundation

The Trans Youth Equality Foundation provides education, advocacy and support for transgender, nonbinary and gender non-conforming children and youth and their families.

Live Like Lou

The Live Like Lou Foundation is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to combating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Art 180

ART 180 is a community-centered arts space, gallery, and creative collective curating events, workshops, exhibitions, residencies, and art experiences for young people, their families, and the working artists in our city.

Hope for Ukraine

Bringing hope to Ukraine since 2016. Providing food, medical attention, shelter and education for Ukrainians whose lives has been devastated because of war.

End Hunger Fund

Contributions to the End Hunger Fund assist in delivering emergency food supplies, treating malnutrition, training farmers in sustainable agricultural practices, and more.

Global Health Fund

Our Global Health Fund includes organizations that prioritize scalable solutions to reduce child mortality, with a focus on combating diseases that disproportionately affects children.

Musicares

MusiCares, established in 1989 by the Recording Academy, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing health and human services to music professionals in need.

Robbie’s Riders

Robbie’s Riders provides the opportunity for children with all abilities to enjoy the childhood experience of bicycle riding, positively impacting their lives in a variety of ways!

Open Arms

An agency that focuses its work on survivors of sexual violence, those in the LGBT+ community that are finding their identities, and those in the Concho Valley expanding their understanding of these communities.

Hawai’i LGBT Legacy Foundation Scholarship

he Hawaiʻi LGBT Legacy Foundation is dedicated to supporting and empowering the LGBTQIA+ community in Hawaiʻi through various initiatives, including educational programs and financial assistance.

American Civil Liberties Union

The ACLU dares to create a more perfect union — beyond one person, party, or side. Our mission is to realize this promise of the United States Constitution for all and expand the reach of its guarantees.

Nature Conservancy

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is a global environmental nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters upon which all life depends.

UNICEF

UNICEF is on the ground in 190 countries and territories, providing children with the lifesaving supplies and assistance they desperately need.

Save The Children – Palestine

Save the Children has been providing essential services and support to Palestinian children impacted by the ongoing conflict since 1953, and have had a permanent presence in the occupied Palestinian territory since 1973.

In addition to the preceding charities chosen by staff, Brick Factory also made contributions to these excellent nonprofits we are honored to count as clients:

African Parks

African Parks is a non-profit conservation organisation that takes on direct responsibility for the rehabilitation and long-term management of protected areas in partnership with governments and local communities.

Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network

The Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN) is a community of patients, caregivers, survivors, advocates, medical and research professionals united in support of people impacted by bladder cancer.

United Against Nuclear Iran

United Against Nuclear Iran (“UANI”) is a nonprofit and non-partisan policy organization formed to combat the threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Counter Extremism Project

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, international policy organization formed to combat the growing threat from extremist ideologies.

Fibroid Foundation

The Fibroid Foundation is the premier global community of Fibroids patients and physicians, advocating to create and support initiatives to find a cure for fibroids

International Youth Foundation

The International Youth Foundation believes that educated, employed, and engaged young people possess the power to solve the world’s toughest problems. IYF connects young people with opportunities to transform their lives.

Israel Cancer Research Foundation

Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) supports the best and brightest scientists conducting groundbreaking cancer research in Israel. Our goal is to end the suffering caused by cancer

Nature Forward

Nature Forward inspires residents of the greater Washington, DC region to appreciate, understand, and protect their natural environment through outdoor experiences, education, and advocacy. Nature Forward seeks to create a larger and more diverse community of people who treasure the natural world and work to preserve it.

Stuttering Foundation

The Stuttering Foundation  provides free online resources, services and support to those who stutter and their families, as well as support for research into the causes of stuttering.

UsAgainstAlzheimers

UsAgainstAlzheimer’s was founded in 2010 to disrupt and diversify the movement to cure Alzheimer’s.

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Development, Strategy

What you need to know about Drupal 7 end-of-life

Todd Zeigler

|

November 3, 2024

Since its introduction in 2011, Drupal 7 has been incredibly successful. In fact, the platform still powers millions of websites. However, Drupal 7 will officially reach end-of-life during the first week of 2025 after years of delays. 

We thought it would be helpful to create an FAQ for people using Drupal 7. This will help them understand their options better.

Please note that Brick Factory regularly works with clients on Drupal upgrades and migrations to new systems. If you would like a free consultation, please contact us.    

When will Drupal 7 reach end-of-life?

Drupal 7 will officially end on January 5, 2025. This date is exactly fourteen years after its release on January 5, 2011.

What does reaching end-of-life mean?

Once Drupal 7 reaches end-of-life, the Drupal community will no longer provide security and compatibility updates. You cannot update sites running in Drupal 7 using the normal process. Unless steps are taken, these sites will remain insecure and vulnerable to hacks by bad actors.  

Moving forward, the Drupal community intends to release a new version of Drupal every two years and support only the latest two versions. Consequently, the practical lifespan for newer versions of Drupal will be approximately four years.

Will my Drupal 7 site stop working on January 5, 2025?

No. Your website will continue to work after January 5, 2025. Moving forward, you will just be unable to quickly make critical security and compatibility updates to your site.

Can I safely keep my site in Drupal 7?

Yes. You can hire many for-profit companies to do security updates. A list of these companies is on the Drupal Associate website. 

To be clear, we strongly advise against staying in Drupal 7 unless you purchase an extended security support plan from a reputable company. If you choose to remain in Drupal 7 without a security plan, it is likely only a matter of time before your site gets targeted by bad actors.  

Why is upgrading from Drupal 7 to a newer version so tricky?

Unfortunately, upgrading from Drupal 7 to a supported version of the platform (currently Drupal 10 or 11) is a time-consuming process. Often, it is more of a rebuild than a simple upgrade. There are a few reasons upgrading is so complicated:

• In creating Drupal 8 code, the community essentially started from scratch. The priority was to innovate, not to provide an easy migration path for users of older versions. As a result, fundamental aspects, such as how themes work and how modules are created, are entirely different in newer versions of Drupal.
• Users extend their Drupal site by applying add-on modules. Since Drupal 7 is fourteen years old, many of the modules used to build sites still running on it don’t exist in newer versions. Developers must audit these modules, find replacements, or write custom code to replicate the functionality.

The good news is that, starting with Drupal 8, the Drupal community prioritized creating cleaner upgrade paths for those moving from one version to another. So, once you get your site into a newer version of Drupal, upgrading will be much less of a hassle.

I want to get my site off of Drupal 7. Should I upgrade to a newer version of Drupal or switch to a new platform?

That is a complicated question that depends on how happy you – and your users – are with the Drupal experience, the specific features and functionality of your website, and whether you want to make design updates as part of the project.  

In our experience, we have found that upgrading a site from Drupal 7 to a newer version is often just as time-consuming as moving to a new platform altogether. So, this is an opportune time to switch if you have a Drupal 7 site and want to migrate to a different Content Management System.  

As a matter of fact, a recent study found that more sites have migrated to other systems, such as WordPress, than have upgraded to a newer version of Drupal. For a deeper dive, you can read our detailed comparison of Drupal vs. WordPress here.

If you have further questions or are ready to take action, please contact us for a free consultation and to discuss options.

Can you summarize my options for a Drupal 7 site I need to maintain?

There are four distinct paths forward if you have a Drupal 7 site:

1. Leave your site in Drupal 7 and do nothing. This is not recommended, as you expose your site to security vulnerabilities.
2. Leave your site in Drupal 7 and sign up for an extended security plan. This approach allows you to keep your site safe while thinking through longer-term solutions.
3. Upgrade to a modern version of Drupal. Stay in Drupal, but move to a new version supported by the Drupal community.
4. Move to a different Content Management System. If you are considering moving your Drupal 7 site out of Drupal, this is a good time.

Can you help me understand my options and make a wise decision?

Absolutely. We have worked with many clients on both upgrades to the latest Drupal version and migrations to WordPress. Contact us now for a free consultation – we are happy to discuss your options.

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Strategy

How to use UTM parameters to track website traffic and conversions

Todd Zeigler

|

October 10, 2024

Tracking where website traffic and conversions (purchases, donations, etc.) come from is one of the biggest challenges for digital marketers. Since we spend time and money on email marketing, social media, and paid ads, we need to know which channels are most valuable.

One of the easiest and best ways to do this is by using Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters. You should add these to all external links to your website. This article explains UTM parameters and offers tips for their efficient use.

What are UTM parameters, and what are they for?

UTM tracking links are special URLs with extra code. This code helps you track where a website visitor comes from in tools like Google Analytics.  As an example, let’s consider how we might link to this blog post on our company’s Facebook page:  

Normally, the link would likely look something like this:

–https://blog.thebrickfactory.com/2024/10/how-to-use-utm-parameters-to-track-website-traffic-and-conversions/

However, when using UTM parameters to attribute the traffic specifically to Facebook, the link would have more detail attached to the end of the URL:

–https://blog.thebrickfactory.com/2024/10/how-to-use-utm-parameters-to-track-website-traffic-and-conversions/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=blog-post

The resulting data from adding the UTM parameters can easily be viewed in Google Analytics under Traffic and User Acquisition Reports. This report shows me how much traffic I drove to the website from that specific Facebook post. 

What UTM tracking options do I have?

Most marketers use the five standard UTM parameters.  Note you can use any or all of these parameters when creating a link.  At Brick Factory, we typically use Medium, Source, and Campaign Name, with Term and Content rarely used.

• Campaign Medium – The broad category used to characterize the link. A typical value might be “social_media” or “email”.  
• Campaign Source – The platform from which the traffic originated. When you post a link on social media, it often displays the name of the network. This could be Facebook or Instagram, for example.    
• Campaign Name – The content or campaign that leads to the link. For example, if you are running a Halloween sale, your campaign name might be “halloween_sale_2024”.  
• Campaign Term – The relevant ad-based keywords, such as those from a Google Ads search campaign.
• Campaign Content – The distinguishing factor between two pieces of content that share other parameters. For example, if you were to make two social posts about the same Halloween sales, you would use this parameter to distinguish the two emails.  

Using these parameters in your shared links helps you track your traffic and conversions. You can use them in links from different channels, such as email, social media, and ads. This way, you can see where your visitors are coming from. 

Using the example above, I could see how many sales came from my Halloween sale. I could also find out which channels, like social media and email, brought in the most money. Additionally, I could see which sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, were responsible for the highest revenue. 
You can create additional custom parameters if anything you want to track falls outside the above options.  This article outlines how to customize your UTMs.

What tools can I use to create URLs with UTM parameters?

There are many free online tools to create URLs with UTM parameters. The most popular one is the Google Campaign Builder tool. 

Once the UTM parameters are created, many of our clients use Google Sheets to track the parameters they create.  Our team has created two templates to help with systematically building these URLs. These templates allow you to provide default values for fields such as “Medium” and “Source”, where the same options are used repeatedly.

• Robust Template – creates the URLs and stores them permanently for future reference. It is useful if you want to make a permanent record of the URLs that you have created.
• Simple Template.  It replicates the Google Campaign Builder tool but allows you to set default values for repeated use.

Clicking on the links above will prompt you to copy the Google Sheet templates into your own Google Drive.

What tips can help me get the most out of my UTM parameters?

Make sure your UTM parameters are all lowercase.

Google Analytics and other tools are case-sensitive. This means that using “Facebook” and “facebook” as your source parameters will create two separate entries. This requires extra work to compile accurate tracking numbers.

Do not include spaces in any of the UTM parameters. 

In most analytics tools, spaces will appear as “%20” in your analytics platform. For example, if you enter a UTM medium of “paid social” in Google Analytics, it will appear as “paid%20social.”  To avoid that, use either dashes (-) or underscores (_), or simply don’t separate words.  In the example above, effective alternatives include “paidsocial”, “paid-social”, or “paid_social”.    

Establish naming conventions for each parameter that is used consistently across your organization.

Consistency is the key to getting the most out of your UTM parameters. Consider employing these brief guidelines for each of the three most used parameters:

• Medium – Create a name for each of your main channels, like “email,” “social media,” “paid social,” and “paid search.” Keep the names consistent.
• Source – Develop clear rules for how this is used. Typically, this is as straightforward as using the name of the site where the link is posted (i.e. “instagram”).  For email marketing, you might use source to categorize the type of email that is being sent (i.e. “newsletter”, “sales”, etc.).
• Campaign – Develop a consistent naming convention – because campaign information in Google Analytics can get messy very quickly. For example, campaigns could consist of content descriptor + campaign purpose + year. A sales effort around Halloween would then use the parameters “halloween_sales_2024.”  

Use URL shortener services with UTM parameters

Many organizations use URL shorteners, such as Bitly or Rebrandly, to make the URLs they post on social media more attractive and to help track those links. UTM parameters work exceptionally well with these platforms, and many of the shorteners have tools you can use to add them as you create the shortened URLs.  Alternatively, you can always add URL parameters to the URL prior to shortening.

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Development, Strategy

WordPress vs. Drupal: Which Platform is Right for Your Organization?

Todd Zeigler

|

May 18, 2024

Selecting a Content Management System (CMS) is one of the most critical decisions organizations can make about their web program. Mistakes can be costly, leading to wasted time and money. Whether it’s time to rebuild your existing website, or you’re starting something new from the ground up, you’ll be quick to discover (or be reminded) that the vast majority of the web is generally powered by only a handful of technology platforms.

Fifteen years ago, this dilemma was closer akin to a headache, with dozens of hopeful CMS products competing for your attention. Each had their own pros and cons worth weighing endlessly against each other. Your options were a mix of purpose-built solutions (often relics of the past) like dedicated blogs or ecommerce platforms versus “all in one” monolithic solutions like the CMS options that we know today. Among these options were WordPress and Drupal, and over time, the clear advantages associated with these two platforms caused the competition to wane away.

Here at Brick Factory the decision was clear, both platforms are outstanding in their own unique ways, and we’ve chosen to specialize in both of them almost exclusively within our practice since our inception in 2011. 

Drupal and WordPress have both grown and changed extensively over the years, with many of their individual strengths and weaknesses shifting back and forth between the two of them as they’ve evolved. Which platform we ultimately lean towards recommending these days can take careful consideration and is often very project-specific, this article is intended to serve as an insight into many of the pros and cons we consider when making that final recommendation.

Drupal Pros

• Flexibility. It’s often touted as being “for developers,” and this is roundly true. Since its inception, Drupal has focused on better serving the developer community that helped build it. As a result, Drupal has a reputation for being the more flexible solution of the two, allowing developers to form and mold it into any objective you toss at it.
• Security. Drupal has a “no compromises” approach to handling security. The track record for Drupal is industry-leading, with stringent policies from the ground up. If your top priority is security, Drupal historically wins the argument. This is how Drupal ended up being the typical go to solution for Fortune 500 companies and government agencies worldwide, earning its moniker of THE “Enterprise Solution.” While not immune to security breaches, its reputation far exceeds the competition.
• Modern Codebase. Drupal has already endured the growing pains of moving away from an entirely procedurally driven codebase and into the age of modern object oriented programming. As a result, developers are now empowered to write modules that utilize reusable code as well as implement cross compatible services that can be used by other modules across the entire ecosystem. Beyond that, while no codebase is timeless, Drupal users can finally expect a worthy lifespan out of their sites with a solid upgrade path for many years to come. 
• Truly open source. While WordPress and Drupal are both open source at their core, the expansion capabilities they provide through plugins and modules are unique between the two ecosystems. Drupal “Modules” are truly open source, unlike WordPress, Drupal doesn’t treat its Module offerings as a vendor marketplace, where the best solutions are typically licensed for a price. Modules found on Drupal.org are all free to use, this generally leads to more community-driven modules. Open codebases allow developers the freedom to change what is needed without licensing concerns, while encouraging these same developers to contribute that new code back to the community.
• Speed and Performance. While both platforms are capable of reaching impressive and comparable speeds, Drupal has the leg up in this category by being notably performant straight out of the box. It offers enhanced caching and is generally built from the ground up with an intent to serve large scale audiences.

Drupal Cons

• Upgrades. As Drupal prioritized being the gold standard enterprise solution for modern developers, the dedicated users and developers that helped build the framework paid the price. With each major version release of Drupal came a complete lack of an upgrade path, leaving the Drupal community with the ongoing need for almost complete website rebuilds every lifecycle, typically around every 6 years. This was finally resolved over the past few versions, but early adopters paid a price that many found unforgivable, resulting in a migration to WordPress.
• Usability. Despite offering a truly flexible content workflow, Drupal’s lack of attention to the administrative UI for content moderators led to it gaining a bad reputation for usability. While there have been notable improvements in recent iterations and plenty of modules to enhance this experience, Drupal’s past reputation for poor UI has led many organizations to switch to WordPress over the years.
• Effort / Cost. Being developer-focused comes with a cost. Drupal lacks the “plug and play” reputation earned by WordPress. Building a Drupal site similar in nature to WordPress typically requires a higher effort/price tag and higher maintenance costs.

WordPress Pros

• User Experience. The winning selling point for WordPress often boils down to the expectation of greater usability for content managers. Content-rich sites require authors and administrators to work daily with drafting, organizing and publishing content. Out of the box, WordPress undoubtedly shines in this area, where it arguably counts most for those users.
• Plugins. The marketplace approach that WordPress took with Plugins, where many come with an up-front cost or an ongoing license, led to a greater variety of truly feature-rich options to choose from. This not only lowers development costs if your project goals align with those of the plugin offerings, but it also generally means that those plugins are far more polished than the equivalent Drupal offerings.
• Developer Access. WordPress is far and beyond the most adopted platform on the internet, and finding developers to work on your website can be challenging at times with Drupal given the smaller community. With WordPress there’s never a shortage of developers to hire, although with WordPress being an easier market to enter, not all developers are created equal, or up to the task.
• Brand Recognition. This can’t be understated; public awareness matters. For individuals and businesses new or less experienced with shopping for custom websites, WordPress may be the only option that seems to spark a sense of familiarity and, therefore, trust, clout or other perception of abstract benefit. Further, the addition of WordPress experience is a modern-day resume enhancer and the population’s more common acquaintance with the WordPress UI, results in a greater supply of qualified administrators, content creators and developers – a reality that drives down the cost and accessibility of human resources. Powered by the advantages afforded by its visibility, the WordPress ecosystem will be favored for the foreseeable future. 
• Ease of updates. WordPress is years ahead of Drupal in regards to ease of updates, both minor and major. This is largely a central deciding factor for smaller organizations that are cost conscious when it comes to ongoing maintenance and support for their website.

WordPress Cons

• Security. Unfortunately, WordPress has earned its reputation for being less secure than Drupal through a combination of historically less stringent code review policies, less control over the plugin marketplace, and being a larger target due to its popularity. While running a secure website in WordPress is possible, it is more difficult and requires more work and monitoring than Drupal.
• Plugins. The WordPress plugin marketplace is a double-edged sword. Due to the monetary focus of plugin developers, often their creations are heavily proprietary, if not completely encrypted and incapable of modification. This can lead to data privacy concerns and the inability to identify potential security concerns. Additionally, the competitive nature of the WordPress marketplace also leads to many plugins simply being incapable of working together. If a plugin does 90% of the job you’re looking for, there’s often no way of adding in the remaining 10%. More often than not, you may be forced to fit a proverbial square into a circular slot. 
• Legacy Codebase. With endless backwards compatibility and relatively seamless upgrade paths comes bloated, unnecessary and potentially insecure code that’s no longer in use. In general, “best practices” and modern object oriented coding techniques simply did not exist in their current form when WordPress first hit the market, and making that leap would’ve required the same growing pains felt by the Drupal community in years past. As a result, WordPress tends to be considered outdated when it comes to its codebase, and it’s easy to assume that in time, those necessary growing pains will catch up to it.

The differences that separate the two platforms might lead you to expect Drupal to be the industry-leading solution, while, in fact statistics show that WordPress sites represent roughly half of the websites in existence. This is quite an impressive feat for WordPress, considering its modest origin as a simple blogging tool. Meanwhile, Drupal struggles to maintain even single-digit percentages in the market after losing a great deal of market share largely due to migration issues in earlier releases. 

The future of both platforms will be interesting to watch over the next decade. Will Drupal regain lost community support as developers rebuild their confidence in its newfound ability to finally achieve upgradable lifecycles? Will WordPress suffer a reckoning at some point in the future as it’s inevitably forced to endure a transformative code base upgrade, or will they once again manage an almost seamless upgrade/migration path? One thing seems for certain for the time being, these open-source products took years to achieve this level of market confidence, and for the foreseeable future, both options will be leading solid choices for years to come.

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Development, Strategy

How To Back Up & Preserve Your Google Universal Analytics (UA) Data

Mike Roberts

|

April 21, 2024

Sunsetting of Google Universal Analytics

Google Analytics has enjoyed a long shelf life as the leader in website traffic monitoring. First released in 2005, the third generation of the platform, commonly known as “Universal Analytics (UA)”, was released in 2012 and was used widely for ten years.   

It has been over three years now since Google released its latest rendition of Google Analytics, dubbed “GA4”.  GA4 brought many new features to the table and modernized how website and product owners visualize and report on website usage. But with great change came great sacrifice. The historical data stored in Universal Analytics is essentially incompatible with GA4, with no migration path available between the two. For close to two years, Google ran the two systems in parallel.  This caused confusion and frustration, as many users continued to use the old version due to the learning curve of GA4. 

That struggle came to a predictable end, however, when UA was officially retired from collecting new data in July 2023, forcing all users to adopt GA4.  While Universal Analytics is no longer collecting new data, users still have access to the historical data.  That changes July 1, 2024 when Google will completely shut down Universal Analytics. 

How to back up your historical Google Universal Analytics Data

If you have any interest in backing up your historical Google Universal Analytics data, now is the time to act. What follows is a general outline of some of the more popular approaches to preserving your past Google (UA) data.

Option 1: Back up your Google Universal Analytics data to BigQuery

If you’re looking for the trendiest, Google-recommended solution, BigQuery is it. BigQuery is Google’s premier “Data Warehouse,” allowing massive amounts of data to be stored and queried in a novel way compared to typical databases. This option offers the fewest limitations, combined with notable complexity. While not infinitely free, BigQuery does come with a generous 1tb worth of queries per month within their free tier plan, and with careful configuration, even large sites will find storing and accessing their past data to be priced well within reason.

If you’re already a paid Analytics 360 subscriber, a built-in API exists that can help connect your UA data and export it directly into BigQuery. If you’re not a 360 subscriber, you’re left with two choices, leverage a paid 3^rd party application designed to bridge the gap, or export and import that data manually.

Option 2: Back up your Google Universal Analytics data to CSV, TSV, Excel, or Google Sheets

For smaller and lower-traffic sites, this option likely makes the most sense. Out of the box, Google UA allows direct exporting of views into the above file formats. For this article, we’ll focus on Google Sheets. Google Sheets offers a free cloud-based storage solution that, like Excel, is easier for most users to view and digest compared to a novel database system like BigQuery. Google Sheets has its limitations. For example, views that generate more than 50,000 to 75,000 rows will easily stall the cloud-based service, leaving many users forced to break their data up into multiple Google Sheets to achieve a complete picture of the past. 

If you decide to take this route, choosing which data views to export can be the key to avoiding an unwieldy collection of Google Sheets. We recommend narrowing it down to areas you’ve previously found yourself reviewing every month. For example, most of our clients achieve this by focusing on Visitors by Day, Page Views, Traffic by Channel, Referrals, Source/Medium, and Conversion Data.

Option 3: Combine the two options above by exporting to Google Sheets & importing to BigQuery

While there may be no direct connection between Google UA and BigQuery for non-Analytics 360 users, BigQuery and Google Sheets do play quite nicely together. If your ultimate objective is storage, Google Sheets offers a completely free long-term storage solution. And if your bonus goal was to leverage the power of BigQuery, by importing that exported Google Sheet data directly into BigQuery, you gain the power of both, timeless backups and powerful queried access to that data.

Most users will find Option 3 to be the most well-rounded cost-effective solution.

Visualizing your past Google UA Data with Google Looker Studio

While looking at CSV Tables and writing your BigQueries can be amusing and useful, most users will quickly long for the days of useful reporting views, charts, graphs, metrics, and more. Google has this covered with its own “Looker Studio” (formally known as Google Data Studio).

Looker Studio offers the ability to visualize your stored data in ways even Google Analytics itself may have fallen short. It supports custom dashboards and reports, as well as sharing and collaborating.

Whether you opt for storing your data in BigQuery or Google Sheets, Looker Studio has the built-in ability to directly connect to either source, and you’ll be setting up dashboards and reports in no time. Looker Studio allows you to custom-tailor your reports around your unique product/website app conversion goals. Let us know if you’d like to see a separate article on how Looker Studio can be leveraged to enhance your standard Google Analytics dashboards.

But what about GA4, is your data safe at last?

Great question, the short answer is no, at least not by itself. Out of the box, GA4 comes with a shorter memory span than even UA had. Google’s commitment to providing year-over-year analysis of your traffic as a built-in feature of Google Analytics is seemingly over for good. Fortunately, however, solutions are in place to streamline how to create your own long-term retention and visualization plans, and we look forward to covering that here in a subsequent article. Stay tuned.

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Design, Development, Strategy

How We Built the New Brick Factory Website

Todd Zeigler

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February 14, 2024

We started working on a new Brick Factory website last Summer and made steady progress throughout the Fall and early 2024.  In late January it was clear that we were almost finished, so I joked that we should launch the website on Valentine’s Day as a gift for our Chief Creator Officer, Tom McCormick.  Well, we did it and you can check it out here. Happy Valentine’s Day, Tom.

A few weeks ago, I previewed the site and wrote about the strategy behind the redesign. To give folks a peek behind the curtain, here is another post detailing the process we used to build this site. 

Discovery and Content

As the owner of the company, on this project, I was basically the client.  My job was to explain what I was looking for with my teammates guiding me through the process of building the site. 

Before we did any design or development work, I did some thinking about what I wanted the new site to accomplish.  In advance of getting started, I gave the team the following information:

• A list of things I don’t think work on the existing site.  This included feedback on illustration styles, overall palette, and use of typography.
• A new sitemap.  I re-read all the content on the site to make sure it still reflected who we are and what we do.  I also reviewed our site Analytics to see what content visitors were actually reading. Based on my findings, I created a new sitemap that simplified the structure of the site.  
• Content plan.  Based on the sitemap, I wrote out the content for a few pages on the site (Homepage, About, and Services) that would serve as models for other pages.  I also created a document outlining all the content that we would need to create or rewrite as part of the project.  Having real content to work from helps to greatly streamline the design process.
• Competitive analysis.  I reviewed the websites of around thirty competitors and created a spreadsheet where I gave each site a grade and highlighted things I liked and didn’t like.  The point of this exercise was to help convey my taste to the team and to create a shorthand to communicate concepts.  It is always easier to talk through concrete examples.

Design

After the planning work was done, we had a kickoff meeting with Tom and Morgan Williams, who was our primary project manager on the redesign.  I provided the materials mentioned above to them prior to the meeting so they had time to review and do their own research.  In the meeting, Tom shared his thoughts and we brainstormed some design initial ideas.  And then he got started doing actual design work.

On most of our projects, we start with low-fidelity black-and-white wireframes to get quick feedback on initial concepts.  Once we have a solid foundation, we move on to high-fidelity visual design prototypes that more or less look like the end product.  For all design deliverables, we produce versions for both mobile and desktop.

On this project, we felt like we had a good enough grasp on the content to skip doing the low-fidelity wireframes.  Tom went straight to producing the visual design prototypes.

Homepage

The design process started with the homepage.  As is true with most organizations, the homepage is the most visited page on our website.  The homepage establishes the initial brand identity for the company, with the interior pages taking visual cues from it.  The homepage design process was smooth, and we pretty quickly got to something we all liked.  

Here are some early versions of the homepage opening, along with the final version we ended up going with.

Interior Page

After getting the homepage to a good spot, we turned our attention to the site’s interior pages.  This was a bit of a struggle. The initial versions we came up with were a little too close to what we had on our existing site and frankly felt a bit overdesigned to me.  Here are some early iterations of our Services section, as a point of reference:

After thinking about it, it became pretty obvious that the problem was with the content I had produced and the direction I had provided.  The interior page content was sparse, lacked introductory content, and was not very web-friendly.  Since the text itself was lacking, our designers felt the need to embellish it with design elements.  I went back and edited the content to break things up into digestible chunks.  I basically rewrote it to be more web-friendly.

Tom then turned the content into a design system that would work well with WordPress Guttenburg.  By making the text more digestible, we were able to create pages that are attractive and easy for impatient web users to scan.  Here is what the Service section ended up looking like.

Agile Development

Once the designs were approved, we began building the website in WordPress.  We used a modified agile development process with Morgan Williams serving as project manager, and Chet Gassett, Silvio Loto, and Michael Dippold working on frontend development.  Chet, Silvio, and Michael cycled in and out of the project based on availability.

Here is a high-level overview of how the process worked:

• All the work on the project was broken up into a series of user stories (tasks) that were organized into larger epics (groupings of tasks).  These user stories were then organized into two-week work sprints.
• Morgan held quick meetings (stand-ups) with the team twice a week to check on progress and make sure everyone had what they needed.  
• At the end of each Sprint, Morgan held a retrospective where the team discussed what went well, what didn’t go well, and what could be improved.  In the same meeting, the team planned the next Sprint based on priorities and availability. 

Review and Quality Assurance

Morgan, Chet, Silvio, and Michael did Quality Assurance on the site throughout the development period.  Morgan took the lead in testing the site on different devices and screen resolutions, using Browserstack to facilitate the review.  Once we had a draft of the site done, Tom reviewed it from a design perspective and provided feedback.  

I was briefed on progress and provided feedback when asked, but mostly stayed out of the initial QA process.  I only reviewed the site when it was close to completion, and also shared it with a few other folks in the company for their feedback.  This review resulted in some adjustments to the original design that I’m certain were frustrating to our front-end team.  

As an example, on our homepage opening, we ended up unbolding the intro text and adding a white background to the Brick Factory tag.

In another example, we tightened up the width of our content areas to improve readability.

These types of adjustments may need small, but coupled together they ended up making the site much more refined.

Conclusion

Tom, Chet, Morgan, Michael, and Silvio did an amazing job and I’m really proud of our new website.  In terms of lessons learned, I would flag the following, most of which are on me:

• It would have been more efficient to have one developer devoted to the project instead of swapping people in and out like we did.  This was difficult for us to avoid given that our we were trying to juggle the build of our own site with client work.
• I wish I had done more thinking about the content earlier in the process.  My initial content drafts for the interior pages weren’t very good, and this lead to wasted time by our design team trying to work with copy that wasn’t very web friendly.
• We should have had more people review the site earlier in the process.  This would have allowed us to flag small design issues earlier and saved the frontend some time and stress.

The post How We Built the New Brick Factory Website appeared first on Brick Factory - Washington, DC Digital Agency.

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Design, Strategy

Doctor, Heal Thyself: A Preview of our New Website

Todd Zeigler

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January 25, 2024

All consulting companies struggle to find the right balance between doing work for clients and doing work for themselves. When you are fully booked with paid projects, it is difficult to find the time to update your own blog, redesign your own website, etc. 

For me, the other challenge is that I have always found it easier to do work for other people than for myself.  On client projects, I’m pretty decisive and rational.  When working on Brick Factory stuff I tend to agonize over decisions, struggle with writing copy, and generally let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  

So in mid-2023, we found ourselves with a Brick Factory website that was probably a good year past its shelf life, with no real path forward.  We finally buckled down, made a plan, and got started.  

Assuming the creek don’t rise, we will launch our new site in mid-February.  Below is a summary of our main objectives with the redesign, along with a few preview screenshots.  We hope you like it!

Overall Positioning

Our website is primarily focused on reaching prospective clients looking to hire a digital agency.  There are three types of projects we are primarily contacted about:

1. New websites or website redesigns.  
2. Taking over maintenance on existing websites.
3. Developing digital marketing campaigns.

We updated the language on our website to speak directly to prospects looking for these kinds of services and to make it dead simple for them to reach out if they are interested. 

Use of Color

Our name is Brick Factory and when our logo was developed in 2011 we went with a maroon color scheme to reinforce the “brick” theme.  I made this decision despite not really liking the color red. 

Since then we have felt a bit boxed in by our palette.  We have created a lot of monochromatic designs using just the brick color with greys and whites.  After a while, it has all started to feel a bit drab, so when redesigning the site we wanted to experiment with additional colors.  

We spent some time with the color wheel and introduced some secondary colors that we use judicially throughout the new site.

Updated Factory

Ever since we launched, having a factory illustration on our homepage has been part of our brand.  While we all work remotely from desks with computers, what we do is hard work.  Being successful online involves showing up every day and grinding away.  So I love the factory metaphor and wanted to keep it.

We came up with an updated version of our factory illustration that I think works really well.

Web-Friendly Content

While you would think we would know better, our previous website featured a lot of large chunks of text that required a commitment from the user to get through.  We know that online users tend to scan content for items of interest instead of reading from top to bottom.

We rewrote the website to include more pull quotes, factoids, and elements that can be opened/closed.  The content is now much easier for impatient website visitors to get through.

Personality

Our previous site felt a bit cold and didn’t show a lot of personality.  We wanted the new site to better show who we are and what it is like to work with us.  We did this by adding behind-the-scenes team photos, including quotes from our clients, and providing more content about our philosophy and culture.

Desktop/Laptop First

For many of our client projects, the vast majority of traffic comes from mobile devices.  That is not the case for the Brick Factory website – around 80% is from desktop.  It makes sense.  Most organizations looking for a digital partner will do so during work hours from a desktop or laptop computer as opposed to a mobile device.

So while we always try to create a great mobile experience, we definitely started our design process with desktop/laptop users in mind.

WordPress

We specialize in building websites in Drupal and WordPress.  While the calculus is complicated and often based on the client’s preference, we typically use WordPress for simpler websites and Drupal for projects that require more customization.  

Our previous website was built in Drupal.  Since this was a complete start-over, we decided to rebuild in WordPress given how basic our site is.  This allowed us to develop quickly and utilize the Gutenberg block system, which is our default tool for building sites in WordPress.

The post Doctor, Heal Thyself: A Preview of our New Website appeared first on Brick Factory - Washington, DC Digital Agency.

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Strategy

StrategyData-Based Decision Making: Thoughts from WordCamp Asia

Hannah Del Porto

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May 8, 2023

I recently presented at WordCamp Asia – the regional conference for WordPress developers – and talked about how to gather and use data to make decisions as a small-to-medium sized web development agency. Over the years, we have made countless spreadsheets and custom apps to help us capture information about our clients, projects, finances and workflow in an effort to make better decisions. 

As we have grown, we’ve transitioned a lot of this work to online software-as-a-service companies that collect and analyze company data for a subscription fee. But a lot of smaller companies aren’t there yet, so I wanted to pass on some of the sheets and techniques that we developed, so hopefully other companies don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

The three main areas I focused on were finances, workflow and estimates. Being in a service industry is hard. We charge for our time. We want to charge clients fairly and keep prices low for them, but if we don’t charge for our time, we can’t pay our employees. So knowing how much to charge, knowing how much work we can do and when, and guessing how long projects will take are some of the most critical tasks in our industry. 

Whenever I present at conferences, I always write a script for myself in the speaker notes. This keeps me from going off on tangents, but it also provides a transcript so that attendees don’t have to take notes or worry about missing something, and anyone who didn’t attend the session isn’t stuck trying to understand the slides with no context. The slide deck – with full speaker notes – is available here.

In the finances section, we figured out:

• How much to charge clients generally (billable hours, profit margin)
• If each individual client is profitable (break even rate, target rate)
• What an hourly rate scale might look like
• Spreadsheet for tracking revenue by client over time
• Spreadsheet for tracking hourly effective rate, break even rate and margin by client

In the workflow section, we talked about:

• Figuring out if we can do the project
• Determining when we can start the work
• Trying to guess when we can finish or how to set deadlines
• Some tips on how to handle overflow

Estimates are probably the hardest part of our work. We have to guess how much work a project will be, often with limited details on what we are actually building. What our developers view as a guess, our clients often take as a promise. The best place to start with estimates is educating your clients on why estimates are actually an estimation, and on the techniques you can use to make sure you get paid fairly for your work while the client stays within their budget.

• Estimates are hard.
• Some projects are not worth taking.
• Look at past builds to help estimate future projects.
• Use templates to help break work down into stories or sprints to improve accuracy.
• For complex projects, add a pain factor to the estimate.

Maybe one day soon AI will guide us on how to set prices, manage workflow and estimate new work. For now, I hope sharing our experiences will help make these challenges a little bit easier for others.

The post StrategyData-Based Decision Making: Thoughts from WordCamp Asia appeared first on Brick Factory - Washington, DC Digital Agency.

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Strategy

6 Tips to Get to Know GA4

Maylene Kuahiwinui

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April 4, 2023

With the impending phase-out of Universal Analytics (UA) in July and the start of Google’s forced migrations in March, it may finally be time to transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and leverage its numerous advantages over UA. When you log into your Google account, you are probably greeted with the image below. If this tends to fill you with dread, don’t worry – read on for everything you need to know about migrating to GA4.

As we’ve migrated many clients to Google’s new platform, we took GA4’s features for more than a few spins to understand how to make the most of this powerful tool. Let’s dive in as we outline GA4’s benefits over UA and provide some #ProTips to get started.

#1: The Event-Driven Data Model

GA4’s event-driven data model significantly improves on UA’s session-based model. This approach allows for a more flexible, accurate**, and comprehensive understanding of your website or app user interactions. You can now track events like scrolling, video plays, and file downloads without custom coding, making it easier to identify user behavior patterns and optimize your marketing strategies.

Tip: Use GA4’s pre-built events or create custom events in Google Tag Manager (GTM) to capture valuable user interactions that matter to your organization.

#2: Enhanced Cross-Device Tracking in GA4

GA4 has simplified cross-device tracking, allowing you to better understand how users interact with your content across multiple devices. With the help of Google signals, GA4 unifies user data from different devices*** and provides a more holistic view of the user journey. This enables you to create targeted marketing campaigns and deliver personalized content.

Tip: Ensure you have activated Google signals in GA4 to maximize cross-device tracking features.

***As of April 2023, Google signals does not support devices operating iOS 14+.

#3: Improved Audience Building and Segmentation

GA4 offers advanced audience-building and segmentation capabilities. Create more granular audience segments based on a broader range of criteria, such as events, demographic information, and technology used, and tailor your marketing efforts to specific groups, improving the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Tip: Experiment with GA4’s audience builder to create custom segments that align with your organization’s objectives.

#4: Enhanced Analysis and Reporting

GA4 introduces new analysis and reporting tools such as Explorations (formerly Analysis Hub), which allows you to create custom reports and visualizations. With features like path, funnel, and cohort analysis, you can dive deeper into your data and gain valuable insights to better inform your marketing decisions.

Tip: Deep dive into Exploration’s capabilities and use them to create reports that answer specific questions about your marketing performance.

#5: AI-Powered Insights and Predictions

GA4 leverages machine learning to provide automated insights, anomaly detection, and predictive capabilities. This helps you identify trends and potential issues in your data, allowing you to take data-driven actions to optimize your marketing efforts.

Tip: Keep an eye on the GA4 insights section to stay informed about significant trends and opportunities in your data. Or Next Level it and create custom insights.

**#6: Google Tag Manager Superpowers

So you’ve transitioned to GA4 and are excited about all the built-in Enhanced Measurements it provides? Well, not so fast. Apparently, GA4 (currently) only works with some forms, videos, or <fill in the blank>. So your data may vary wildly if there’s any anomaly that Google machine learner hasn’t anticipated.

Enter Google Tag Manager. Once set up, GTM allows you to wield custom event superpowers to track nearly anything and everything. This was available in UA, but it really shines with GA4.

Tip: If your organization depends heavily on GA4 built-in stats, do yourself a favor and re-create them as custom event tags in Google Tag Manager, paying particular attention to custom dimensions.

The Wrap Up

Although Google Analytics 4 offers several critical advantages over Universal Analytics, it requires practical application to learn its many aspects. GA4 is an entirely different platform from UA which begs for exploration, so don’t hesitate to start now.

Of course, if you feel overwhelmed after dipping your toe into the GA4 ocean, reach out to us for help better understanding your audience, optimizing your marketing strategies, and achieving your goals.

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