Together we identified a design aesthetic he liked and utilized his primary color scheme.

Services we provided include:

• New sitemap development – identified important pages.
• Used WordPress’ Custom Post Types to allow for Testimonials and FAQs
• Built a Slider – easy to manage slides from the WordPress Admin
• All content input
• A custom contact form, including map.
• Logo Design

Our semi-dedicated hosting is a dedicated server shared across only 12 clients.  MJJ Designs rents our servers for $480 per month. By placing 12 clients on the same server, each client is only responsible for 1/12th of the annual hosting costs for the server.

Compared to shared hosting — which houses up to 10,000 accounts per server — and VPS — which houses up to 250 accounts per server — we feel our semi-dedicated hosting is a big step up in speed, reliability, and cost-savings.

Included Features

• cPanel – an industry leading control panel allowing a site administrator to manage all functions of the hosting account — add new domain names, set up databases, add email addresses, configure subdomains, and more.
• Hosted email (IMAP or POP3) — host your email with MJJ Designs, use your me@mydomain.com address using either a desktop mail client or one of our available webmail clients.  (If you’d prefer to use Google Apps for your email, we’ll gladly set up your MX records for you.)
• Unlimited Domains — host as many websites as you want!
• Unlimited Databases — we provide the latest versions of both MySQL and phpMyAdmin and do not limit the number of databases you can have.
• Unlimited FTP users —  set up as many FTP users as you’d like, granting access to all or just part of your domain(s).
• SSH Access – prefer to work in SSH? Simply turn on SSH access through cPanel and configure your private and public keys.
• Industry leading support — we handle all of our hosting support internally. If you call us for help, you’ll talk to us. If you open a ticket or a live chat, you’ll talk to us. We’ll never outsource our support and we’ll always answer when you call.
• Reliable servers — we don’t guarantee 100% uptime for your websites, that’d be impossible.  Our servers are extremely reliable and, if something does go wrong, we’ll work around the clock to fix it.
• Site Migration — we’ll move your first website over to our servers free of charge. No need to worry about the technical aspects of things, we’ll take care of it. (Certain restrictions apply. Additional sites are at the rate of $99 per site.)
• Web Statistics — take your pick from AWStats, Webalizer, or Analog.  We’ll also help you configure Google Analytics if you prefer it to any of our available packages.
• 175 gigabytes of storage — more storage space than you could ever possibly need for a website. Store all your website files, videos, photos, and music online without worrying about running out of space.
• Fantastico Deluxe — instantly install a number of open source applications with nothing more than clicking a button.  Applications include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, osTicket, MediaWiki, and hundreds more.
• Fast Account Setup — with a dedicated server, setting up your new account can take up to 48 hours.  With our semi-dedicated hosting, your account can be set up in as little as two minutes.
• 30-Day Money Back Guarantee — if you’re unhappy with the speed of your new website, the performance of the server, or any other reason, just let us know.  We’ll give you a pro-rated refund within the first 30 days.

If there are features you require for your hosting account that aren’t included by default (perhaps a new version of PHP, a different database server, or anything else), just let us know and we’ll see what we can do about getting it installed for you. If there are licensing fees associated with any software you require, you will be responsible for the licensing fees.  MJJ Designs will install the software free of charge.

Terms & Conditions

By purchasing semi-dedicated hosting from MJJ Designs, you agree to abide by our Terms & Conditions.

Purchase

To purchase hosting from MJJ Designs, please visit the Hosting Control Panel to register an account. Once registered, click “Order” to walk through the process of purchasing a hosting plan.

Choosing a Font

People Perceive Fonts

If you’re not a designer, you probably can’t recognize a font or distinguish one from another. Visitors to your site are never going to say, “Oooh! This is Arial Narrow! How classy!” The goal in choosing a font isn’t to have the visitor react to it directly.

Our partners at Pinkergreen did the design work for the site, and handed it off to us to convert into a WordPress powered website.

Some of the features we developed include:

• A slideshow on the homepage – this slideshow is configurable from the WordPress admin, so the site admin can update, add or remove any images to the slideshow.
• Navigational menus – the menus will show any sub-page upon mouseover of the parent page.  If a sub-page isn’t present, the descriptor of the parent page is shown in its place.
• A blog feed – the homepage pulls in the four latest posts from the blog, and shows an excerpt.
• Join the Conversation – the site admin can configure a variety of forms to be shown in these spots, all from within the WordPress admin area.
• Let’s Connect – utilizing social media is a big part of marketing these days.  Twitter and Facebook links are incorporated right into the homepage and footer, along with the more traditional contact methods of telephone and email; both of which link to a contact form.
• Twitter feed – the homepage pulls in the five most recent tweets and displays them in a list formatted to match the rest of the website.
• Sidebar – throughout most of the site, when mousing over a specific link, and orange box will appear in the right hand sidebar with content pertaining to that link; strategy information, details on services, and client testimonials all use this functionality.
• Blog – a traditional blog is built into the aesthetics of the site, which can easily be updated by adding a new “post” in the WordPress admin area.
• Contact form – the site admin controls what information is asked for on the form, whether or not it’s required, and the content of the thank you message.  The site admin can also configure whether or not the person filling out the form receives a confirmation email, and what that email says.
• Featured images – each image displayed at the top of any page throughout the website is controlled using WordPress’ built in “featured image” function, so the site admin can easily update or change that image at any given time.

ideaworks also changed the domain name they used for their website during this project, utilizing the Icelandic .is TLD.  During this process, we learned that the Icelandic domain controllers (ISNIC) have some pretty specific rules about the server that houses a domain name ending in .is, which was a challenge in itself.

In addition to development services, MJJ Designs is also providing hosting for ideaworks on our client hosting servers, ensuring maintained speed and security of the ideaworks website.

However, having a website that’s built in Flash has a number of drawbacks. In this week’s blog post we’ll list the top five reasons to avoid a website built in Flash.

1. iOS

Whether you’re a fan of Apple products or not, there’s an estimated 160 million devices running iOS, Apple’s operating system for their mobile devices.  That’s a lot of iPads, iPods, and iPhones.

That should concern you because iOS doesn’t run Flash. At all. Not even a little bit.

Having your entire website (or even a large portion of your website) built in Flash is closing the door on those people. 160 million is a lot of people locked out of your website.

2. Confusing URLs & Bad SEO

Not always, but most times, the way a Flash site is built makes it difficult to link to specific pages within your site.  Sometimes it is even impossible.

Many Flash sites have crazy URLs for specific sections, such as http://www.mywebsite.com/#/!/143/item-5.  While that may not seem like a huge deal, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to remember that URL to tell their friends about.  Instead they’ll say something like “Go to mywebsite.com,  click on the menu at the top, and wait for it to load. Then click on 143 and finally click Item 5.”  That’s a lot of steps.

There are ways around this using other technologies, but often the Flash developer doesn’t do them or the client doesn’t have the budget for that additional work.

On top of that, search engines hate Flash websites.  They can’t read the content contained on a page, and thus have no idea what’s on your page.  Again, there are a number of things that a developer can do to get around this, but a good percentage don’t.  If a search engine can’t read your site’s content, you’re essentially wasting your time being online.  It’s virtually impossible to survive on the web without search engines.

3. Expensive to Maintain

Most Flash sites are built in a way that makes it difficult to maintain them.  Unlike a traditional website  (often built in a CMS), a Flash website can be sometimes impossible to update yourself.

I’ve heard clients say that their Flash developer required the site to be updated by them. Meaning the client had to pay every time they wanted to update their own website.

It’s tough to say, “a Flash website costs X to maintain,” as there are so many different companies that charge so many different rates.  At any rate (see what I did there?), a non-Flash site can be updated by anyone willing to learn.

4. Fixed Size

Imagine you just got a nice shiny new screen for your computer;  it’s big, beautiful, and uses a really high resolution.  Let’s say you get a 27″ screen and you set it to a resolution of 2560×1600, one of the highest most average computers will run.

Go to a Flash website that’s designed for a smaller resolution, like 1024×768, and you’d be looking at at over 75% empty white space in your full screen browser — a teeny, tiny Flash website in the middle of it.

Looks silly, right?

5. There’s No Reason For It

There’s nothing that you could do with Flash that you can’t do without Flash.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite these days.  There are things that you can do with a non-Flash website that you can’t do with Flash.

A prime example is Google Maps.  To embed a Google Map into a non-Flash website takes just a few clicks and some copying and pasting.   It’s impossible to embed a Google Map into a Flash website.

With the advances in jQuery and other JavaScript tools that are available today, there’s no reason to have a Flash website.  If told that you must have a Flash website, it’s not because what you want to be done can’t be done, it’s because the developer simply doesn’t know how to do it.

In part 3 of our series, we explain why unoptimized images can slow your site down. We’ll also provide some ways to get them optimized without quality loss.

Optimize Images For The Web

Finding the perfect image to use on your website or blog is often a challenge.  If you’re not the type to create or take your own, you know how frustrating it can be to find the perfect image that gets across exactly what you want it to.

Finding the image is only half the battle; making sure the image isn’t going to slow down your website is the other half.  Normally, it’s not that big of a deal because a lot of people have broadband connections these days.  But imagine you’re in an area that doesn’t have broadband — or their broadband is so slow it might as well be dial-up.

Trying to look through an album of photos that were taken at 10.1 megapixels or better in that situation would be nearly impossible — those images can take quite a bit of time to download, causing a lot of frustration.

Below is an image I took of a temple during my trip to India in March of 2008.  The image is in various formats to illustrate the difference in load times.  Click the image to view the full size and fully realize the difference in load times.

A 10.1MP image at full size, not optimized, but re-sized using HTML.

Optimize the photo using any image processing software you’d like — I use Photoshop CS5. Photoshop has a great “Save for Web & Devices” feature that allows you to change to various filetypes and image qualities to make the overall filesize smaller. The bigger the file, the longer it takes a visitor’s browser to download.

To get to the “Save for Web & Devices” menu in Photoshop, use the File menu, the keyboard shortcut:  S on a Mac, or Control+Alt+Shift+S on Windows.  The dialog looks like this:

Save for Web & Devices dialog

The highlighted areas indicate the filesize and quality. Reduce the quality near the top right corner to make the file smaller and the image load faster.

In addition to adjusting the file type and quality of the image, you may want to resize the image itself.  A 10.1MP photo is 3888px wide and 2592px tall, which is quite large and way to big to fit in any website design.  Resize the image to have it fit nicely in your site’s layout, which will make the image will load faster.

To resize an image is simple, in Photoshop you can use the keyboard shortcut  I on Mac, or Control+Alt+I on Windows.  That will bring up the resize dialog:

Resize Image Dialog

Once the dialog box opens, you can enter new dimensions of your new image.  In this case, I resized my image to 1024×683, but you can choose what dimensions will fit in your site’s layout.  Another thing to consider is that most CMS applications will resize your image for you when you upload it.  WordPress, for example, will create “Thumbnail,” “Medium,” and “Large” sizes of your image when you upload it, which will vary in size based on your image’s original proportions.

When you resize your image, take advantage of Photoshop’s “Constrain Properties” checkbox.  Photoshop automatically adjusts the second property when you change the first. For example, if you change the width, the height changes automatically and the image remains proportionally correct.  That saves you from trying to figure out what size to change the height to without skewing the image.

By no means is this a be-all and end-all of optimizing images.  These are just a few easy to accomplish things that will guarantee faster loading times of any page containing images on your site.

 Recap

• Adjust your filetype for web – JPG and PNG are better than BMP and GIF
• Resize your image to fit your site – Resizing with HTML is not optimal as the whole image still needs to load.
• Only use images that are absolutely necessary.
• Test your page’s load time - Use a third party service (I recommend Pingdom) to help you evaluate what’s slowing the site down.

Using a CMS May Slow Down Your Site

I know what you’re thinking: “But a CMS makes my site easier to manage!” You’re right. A CMS greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to update a site — it also requires less knowledge to do so.

However, not all CMSs are created equal. They are a lot like our favorite computer  species — Windows v.s. Mac — there are “fanboys” who love a certain one and will bash the others with no sound reasoning.  For every one person that loves Drupal, there’s one which loves WordPress just as much.

So the answer to “Which CMS should I use?” is debatable.

How can a CMS slow down my site?

To not make a complicated process overly simple, when a page loads through your CMS, it runs a bunch of queries to the database containing all of your site’s assets.  Those queries retrieve and assemble all of your content (text, images, page titles, SEO, and so forth) and work with the visitor’s browser to present a full page.

The problem is that databases only execute so many queries per second.  Depending on the CMS you’re using — and the CMS of every other website on your server — that can quickly add up.

When MySQL (pronounced My Sequel or sometimes My S-Q-L) — which is the database that powers most popular CMS applications — hits its limit of how many queries it can process, it queues them up.  What that limit is varies by host and their individual settings.

When MySQL queues up queries, your CMS waits in line to get the files from the database that it needs to display your page.  Sometimes that delay is so tiny you won’t notice.  While other times that delay takes minutes, causing frustration, anger, and a call to your host (who’ll likely claim that nothing’s wrong on their end).

Most systems run a handful of queries when a page is loaded — there is no correct number of queries. This certainly isn’t the only reason a CMS can slow your site down, but database queries are generally the biggest reason.

If it’s not MySQL, what else can slow my CMS down?

Some other things that you want to look at:

• Outdated software – Most CMSs will give you a warning in your admin area when there’s a new version available — it is important to always upgrade as soon as you can.  Using an old version of any CMS slows your site or presents security vulnerabilities.
• Outdated plugins/modules – It’s no secret that it’s virtually impossible to use a CMS without at least one plugin or module to enhance the website.   If there’s a new version available, be sure to upgrade.
• A poorly written theme/design – Your theme may be executing multiple queries that you don’t need to execute. Loading more than you need places more load on the server and can affect performance.

How do I fix it?

There are a number of things you can do to make your CMS-powered site faster.  One thing many people try that likely won’t fix the issue  is moving to another CMS.  No CMS is perfect. Switching from one to another may gain you a nanosecond in load time, but it’ll be a long, and probably frustrating, process.

The best thing you can do is use a caching plugin/module.

A caching plugin removes the necessity for database queries, going about its business in a simple, genius way:  The first time someone visits a unique page of your site, the caching plugin creates a static version of that page — the same page, but stored with all of its content in HTML.  The next time a visitor’s browser requests that page, instead of a bunch of database queries to completely rebuild the page, the CMS can serve up the static version in a fraction of the time. This greatly improves overall site performance.

However, caching does come with some sacrifices.  Until a cached page “expires,” your page may not display new comments correctly.  You may also run into issues if you have dynamic content on your page.  Many caching plugins gracefully handle these pitfalls and even allow you to customize what and when pages are cached.

Here are some of the more popular caching plugins that should help:

• WordPress – WP Super Cache
• Joomla – JotCache
• Drupal – Cache Plugin
• Movable Type – Cache Block

In this blog series, we’ll evaluate some common reasons why your site my be slow, and what you can do about it.

Inexpensive Web Hosting

I once worked as a tech support manager for a pretty large web hosting conglomerate – one that owned many of the companies whose logos you see above.  Working in the industry taught me many things about how hosting actually works.  What it really taught me is that any inexpensive web host is not going to always perform as well as you’d want it to.

Don’t get me wrong, you may get lucky, find a host for $5 a month, and be perfectly happy with it.  Let me explain how these hosts work.

These types of hosts are referred to as “shared hosting.”  In layman’s terms, that simply means that each one of their web hosting servers houses many, many customer accounts — sometimes upwards of a few thousand.  With most of these companies offering the promise of “unlimited” everything (space, bandwidth, domains, email addresses, etc) that means that each of these few thousand customer accounts could be running dozens of actual websites.

How does that affect the speed of a website?  Glad you asked.  A web server, just like your home computer, can only do so many things at one time.   So many page requests, so many database queries, so many DNS lookups, etc.  The number of how many tasks the server can perform depends on how good of a server it is, but it’s generally a lot.

The problem comes in when the server is trying to perform too many tasks at once.  When the server becomes overloaded, it starts to queue up requests, and processes them in the order it gets them.

Imagine the host is a bank with only a few tellers (servers) and many customers (websites).  The tellers can only do so many things at a time (in this example, likely just one) and a queue of customer tasks forms.  The teller finishes with their customer and the next person in line steps up.

Why It’s Not Optimal

A shared host may work just fine for you — it all depends on what your website’s doing, how much traffic you get, and whether or not your website is your only source of income. If your site is your personal blog that only gets one or two visitors a day, you may not care if it takes a few extra seconds to load.

If your website is your business (an e-commerce store, a popular blog, an advertising site, etc) and needs to bring money in, you may run into problems using a shared host.

A shared host, when it runs out of processing power, can have websites taking literally minutes to load.  Imagine you are the person visiting a website: Would you wait around for minutes for the site to load?  Personally, if a site doesn’t at least start loading within a second or two, I’ve already browsed to the next website I wanted to visit.

How to Fix It

Like everything in life — you get what you pay for.  If you only spend a few bucks a month, you will, at some point, be frustrated by either the speed of your website or the support you get when your site is slow.

The obvious solution is to upgrade your hosting to something better.  What’s better?

There are two better types of web hosting – Virtual Private Server (VPS) and Dedicated Servers.

A VPS is the same hardware as a shared hosting server. However,  the VPS limits how many customer accounts are put on the server — making it virtually private.  It’s a big step up because you’re sharing resources (server power) with between 10-100 (depending on the provider) instead thousands.

A dedicated server is the top of the line. It is a single, fully functioning server all to yourself.  No one to compete with for resources.  Unfortunately, a dedicated server can cost you quite a bit more than you were paying for shared hosting.  A decent entry-level dedicated server will run you around $85 per month.  Top-of-the-line servers can cost thousands of dollars a month, but that’s likely overkill for most situations.

I switched from a shared host to a dedicated server in August of 2009 and I was immediately blown away by the difference in speed. We’ve upgraded quite a few times since then, but even that original dedicated server was faster than any host we’d ever used before.

Be sure to check out for Part II of the series – Your CMS May Be Your Problem.

Like many architectural firms, DSA had a Flash based site, meaning anyone with an iOS device was unable to see it.  In many cases a website can be programmed to have a “fall back” option if Flash isn’t an option.   However, DSA’s website did not have that option, essentially disabling anyone with an iOS device from viewing their website.

Our project was to recreate the website in WordPress, exactly was it was in Flash to maintain their brand, design, and content.

While we were “under the hood” of the new site, we also took advantage of the opportunity to add a number of new features to the site, including a dedicated mobile version, a printable view (as to allow the client to no longer have to manually create printable PDF files), and some overall code cleanup.

Since DSA were completely closed off to iOS mobile devices with their previous website, we took the opportunity to build a dedicated mobile version of the site, making it fast loading and easy to navigate.  Upon visiting the website on any number of mobile devices, the website automatically detects the mobile device and displays the mobile version of the website.  Should a visitor choose to view the “full site”, we have a cookie based option that will allow a user to override the mobile version of the site for the remainder of their visit.

The mobile site also utilizes a number of JavaScript libraries that allow us to have a “finger controlled gallery”.  Meaning rather than navigating using left and right arrows onscreen, one simply flicks to the left or right to navigate through the gallery.  Replicating the natural behavior of viewing images on any particular mobile device on the website makes the visitor feel more at home when viewing the gallery.

There’s many companies out that that will offer to help you with this part of your site.  And that’s fantastic.  But how much can someone really learn about your company or products after a few phone calls and a meeting or two?

The best person/people to put together the content for your website is you. You know the ins and outs of what you do. You know the history of your company.  You know the services and pricing of your products.  Can you tell a marketing person all of that information? Absolutely.  Will it be as good as if you wrote it yourself?  Possibly.

The best way to tackle it is two fold – first, come up with all of the content you’ll want on your website (which I’ll talk about in a bit), and then have a web professional review it.  Someone who lives and breaths the web is going to be able to evaluate the content not only for grammatical and spelling but can also evaluate the content for web friendliness.

Content written specifically for the web needs to have a few key attributes about it

• Concise – you don’t have to say everything in Tweet-like form, but getting to the point is helpful. People don’t often want to spend a lot of time reading things on the web.
• Search Engine Friendly – A web professional can help ensure that your content includes certain keywords that will help search engines find your content and rank you better.
• Images – it’s no secret that people have a short attention span, especially on the web.  Including some images can catch someone’s eye and entice them to want to read your article.
• A timestamp – knowing that the information they’re reading is up to date will make them more likely to contact your business.

With that said, some common things that you should think about writing for to include on your website

• About Us – a short history of your company, when you were founded, who founded you, how many employees you have.
• Executive Biographies – if your company has an executive team, or board members, including some information specifically about them can give your business a more personal feel.
• Contact Information – phone number, mailing address, a Google Map embedded on the page, any social media links, etc.
• A clear message for your homepage – assume everyone that comes to your website starts on your homepage – you have 15 seconds to catch their attention. What will your message say?
• Services – what are you trying to sell?  A detailed list including pricing will get a potential customer’s attention. A web designer can arrange it in a nice aesthetic way to catch the visitor’s eye.
• A Blog – while some people will never want to blog in their lifetimes, it can be good for business.  Having new fresh content on your site on a semi-regular basis can draw back return visitors to the site.
• Products – if you’re selling an actual product, it should include a detailed description, pricing, and multiple images.

What content you should ultimately have on your website depends on a number of factors, including what type of industry you’re in.  A large company selling thousands of products online will need different information on their site than a tiny biological research company, for example.  If you’re unsure about what information you should include, consult a professional.  Either a marketing firm, a designer, or web developer.  Someone who spends their days building the web will be sure to guide you in the right direction.