Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/where-these-companies-got-their-names-from-part-1/
World-famous companies with the origin of their names and the ideas behind their establishment
The post Where These Companies Got Their Names From – Part 1 appeared first on Hongkiat.
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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/N3c0dx4cWFc/
Whether you’re a photographer, artist or designer, Photoshop brushes can be a huge help. Simulate watercolors, clouds, smoke, grain, explosions – the extent of what they can do is limitless. People seem to collect and hoard Photoshop brushes like they’re going out of style.
The huge demand has led to an abundance of free resources across the web. Even if you can’t afford huge, premium packs, you can still find quality brushes for use in your work. Here are ten invaluable and beautiful brush sets – available for anyone to download.
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Ultimate Brush Pack 5
Who could say no to 87 high-resolution brushes? These explosive patterns can add a paint-like, textured feel to your images. Great for clouds, abstract pieces and anything that requires a dynamic texture.
83 Light and Burst Brushes
Lens flares, sunbeams and bursts of light; these brushes can give any image a sunny, bright effect. It also works great for general lighting, magical effects and even as background textures. Along with rays and waves of light, there are also halos and coronas to give the sun a more striking ring.
Bling Effects Pack
Sometimes a picture needs some extra bling. Maybe some sparkles, a lens flare, or a perfectly-placed light flash will do the trick. The Bling Effects Pack can help you add some pizzazz to a boring picture. Just remember that effects like this should be used sparingly as enhancements.
Watercolor 93
This pack of nearly a hundred brushes was created from actual dabs of watercolor that were scanned. There are varying shapes, intensities and luminosities to each brush – so there’s a ton of variety. If you’re creating something that requires a softer look, these watercolors will do the trick.
Hair Brush Set
Whether you’re painting hair or just need a wispy, soft texture, the Hair Brush Set can get the job done. You’ll need a pressure sensitive tablet to get the full detailing effect. Perfect for creating fine, feathery textures.
lazy brush set
Need a huge pack of essentials? The lazy brush set contains 174 brushes, varying from basics to textures to silhouettes and light flares. It’s great for artists, but many of these brushes can be used in design work too. If you can only download one brush set, choose this one; it’s huge and contains just about everything you’ll need.
Free Brush Stroke Photoshop Brushes
These 15 high-resolution brush strokes look great in almost any project. Modelled after watercolors, they have a multitude of uses, from professional effects to sketches to grungy art pieces. Basic, but essential.
Free Hi-Res Photoshop Brushes: Acrylic Textures
If you need a rough, realistic, watercolor-like look, these acrylic textures will be perfect. At 2500px, every stroke will be detailed and gorgeous. If your designs turn out looking false or cartoony, these brushes can help them to appear more organic.
Radiate Brush Set
Looking for something a little more abstract? Great for posters, backgrounds and tech projects, Radiate was created by modifying different shapes. The fringe style is just what you need if you’re trying to make your piece look extra cool.
Mad Fractal
Fractal brushes are great for backgrounds, wispy textures and abstract designs. Their randomness makes an image more interesting. And there’s 30 brushes, so your design options with this collection are limitless.
Beautiful Brushes
Finding the best brushes can take some experimenting, so feel free to download lots of them to test out! The sites listed here have plenty of free brush packs to try. Do some digging and testing until you have some that you feel comfortable using. Once you find one (or ten) that work for you, you’ll be effortlessly crafting beautiful art, photos and web design layouts.
Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/i9qU546aZbM/brand-identity-really-tatafriends-studio
Brand Identity for Really. by Tata&Friends Studio
abduzeedo
Jun 04, 2018
Tata&Friends Studio shared a beautiful brand identity project on their Behance profile. It’s for Everis’ content agency. There are many things to talk about the design solution but for me, the most important is the simplicity. I love seeing projects that rely on simple typography with handpicked visual ornaments to focus on the basics. It’s all the contrast of types and wise usage of white space.
Really is the content agency of everis. As content creators their work range from illustrations, infographics – to video production, a wide range of different creative projects. Really craft contents and visual solutions for brands. Our approach was to define the naming and visual universe of the brand.
Brand identity
Naming:
The name Really. is a statement, represents a solution, a final product, something to be proud of.
Visual:
We use holographic stamping to create “the metaphor of everything” in order to represent the creative result.
Tata&Friends Studio is ta design muscle for positive brands. They believe in process, research, experiments, curiosity and positive thinking. It is a collaborative studio, a place to grow, to collaborate, to learn and to share knowledge.
Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/Cll8SUM5pwk/brand-identity-new-york-city-architecture-firm-dash-marshall
Brand Identity for New York City Architecture Firm Dash Marshall
abduzeedo
Jun 05, 2018
TwoPoints.Net shared a beautiful brand identity project for the New York City architecture firm Dash Marshall. When designing the corporate identity they realized that architecture acts in the intersection of the old and the new, the static and the flexible, the properties of matter and the lives of people. Within these constraints, Dash Marshall creates spaces which tell the stories of their habitants and invites them to create new ones.
“Just as Michel de Certeau argued that spatial stories are what actuate the notion of place, our physical environments can give rise to new characters and events by organizing, proffering and collectivizing human sensibilities. They may even allow certain transgressions to occur, as the Independent Group aspired to do. For this reason, an architecture that upholds its commitment to its users holds tremendous power: its narratives of the past and present are the framework from which to imagine the future scripts of tomorrow.” writes Esther Choi (estherchoi.net) in the preface of the book “Matter Battle, 45 Lessons Learned” by Dash Marshal
The obvious eventually came to us as a surprise. Today’s corporate communication has become almost exclusively digital. It is context-responsive, morphological and semiological, and almost unaware of physical constraints. To design a consistent visual language for an architecture office, acting in the material, but communicating in the immaterial world, was the challenge. Our solution is a flexible visual identity which works within a confined space of the letters “D” and “M”. Like outer walls of an apartment or the plot of a house, the letters “DM” create a confined space, but within this framework nearly anything is possible.
To tell the stories of Dash Marshall we have not just designed their Visual Identity, but also their website, the book “Matter Battles: 45 Lessons Learned” and the booklet “Small Measures”.
Client: Dash Marshall
Year: 2015—2018
The letters “DM”, drawn in the isometric perspective, are the archetype of the visual identity. The lines of the letters may be removed and colored, creating a multitude of variations of the icon.
Brand Identity
Dash Marshall’s architecture plays with contradictions as old and new, classic and modern, emotional and rational. To visualize these contrasts we added the drawn Berlingske to the constructed graphic system.
“Matter Battle, 45 Lessons Learned” by Dash Marshall.
Producing a beautiful book has to be considered today a statement in itself. The time, work and money going into a physical object, which will be given away to only 200 select individuals, shows the appreciation of the constraints of the physical world.
Along with the big book, comes a smaller, shorter book called “Small Measures”, focusing on the details of the projects and presenting them only in cropped images. The combination of a large and small book give Dash Marshall the flexibility to convey their work in different ways based on the needs of a given situation. A small book for small meetings, A big book for more substantial introductions, or both for moments of special gratitude.
branding
Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/S6YL4ZuvVoQ/
It used to be that building an eCommerce website was an arduous and expensive task. And while that is still the case in some specialized situations, those barriers have been largely removed when it comes to more mainstream usage.
Take WooCommerce, for example. It’s a free eCommerce plugin for WordPress; the most widely used content management system on Earth. Right out of the box, it enables anyone to sell their products and accept payments online. If you need more specialized functionality, it’s widely available in the form of free or reasonably-priced premium extensions.
This is certainly a great development for small businesses that don’t necessarily have a huge budget for building a website. But, what type of impact does it have on eCommerce overall? And what, if any, negative side effects have “cheap” eCommerce platforms had on web designers?
Square Holes and Round Pegs
It seems that, no matter how many online stores you build, no two will be exactly the same. Products, services and even business owners are all variables that need to be taken into consideration – and that’s even before you start the design and development process.
On the surface, it may look as though a tool like WooCommerce is perfect to handle all the different quirks that go along with customizing an eCommerce site. After all, you get to pick and choose which extensions you need. Plus, skilled developers can even create their own solutions.
Yet, it often feels like we’re trying to bend and shape extensions or the basic cart itself to fit into our own narrow use cases. The results are mixed, with some features essentially going against the grain of what the original software was intended to do.
Yes, we have options, but what if those options don’t really align with our needs? And this isn’t just limited to WooCommerce. Other, more proprietary eCommerce suites aren’t necessarily more flexible – some are even less so.
The problem here is that a one-size-fits-all approach means that site owners won’t necessarily get everything they want. That shouldn’t even be a problem, as low-cost solutions aren’t meant to attend to each and every need. But that brings us to the next point.
The Expectation of Low (Or No) Cost
Because the barrier to entry is so low, many seem to think that eCommerce can and should be done on the cheap. The expectation is that, no matter the need, a top-quality shop can be built for very little cost.
Sometimes, that expectation actually comes to fruition. Depending on a client’s specific needs, it is possible to build something that looks great and performs the necessary functions on a tight budget. However, it doesn’t mean that every case is going to turn out that well.
The more realistic view is that each and every feature that goes into a website has an associated cost. This is especially true for eCommerce, where a seemingly “little” tweak can take up a lot of time and resources to implement.
But because there are so many free and low-cost tools out there, some clients simply expect that everything can be taken care of with minimal effort and at extremely little cost. Personally, I’ve seen cases where site owners refused to even purchase a fairly cheap but specific bit of functionality that was critical to making sure orders came through correctly.
It may be a risk they were willing to take, but the approach was very short-sighted.
Above All, eCommerce is an Investment
As the professional designers and developers in the room, it’s up to us to communicate exactly what goes into making an eCommerce site work. That doesn’t need to include every single technical detail. But it should include an honest assessment of how complex the entire process is and that one-size-fits-all often means making some sacrifices.
Even more important is that clients should understand that an investment in their eCommerce site is an investment in their own success. It’s understandable that some far-flung features could be put on hold until there are more resources available. However, there are some types of functionality that are simply too vital to skimp on.
Once, I worked with a client who utilized a SaaS shopping cart provider that increased their monthly subscription fees. As any of us might, the client lamented the fact that costs were going up. But when you looked at the bigger picture, the price hike was miniscule when compared to the amount of money being made off of the website itself. It was a relatively small price to pay for success.
If that same client were to sell through more traditional brick-and-mortar channels, their overhead costs would have been significantly more. Yet, because they were used to paying very little for eCommerce capabilities, the expectations were completely different.
This is a point worth making to clients who scoff at paying a bit extra for a worthy investment. Relatively speaking, the potential rewards for doing things the right way can easily outweigh the initial cost.
Keeping It Real
While free and low-cost eCommerce isn’t the right way to go for everyone, it can still be quite effective for many businesses. The key is in understanding what it can and can’t do, along with keeping realistic expectations.
The bottom line is that you’re not going to create a site that works exactly like Amazon on a shoestring budget. Clients often see what the “big” players are doing and naturally want to mimic their success. While we can certainly understand their hopes, we also need to communicate what can be done for what they’re able to spend.
Overall, it’s great to see that anyone can enter the eCommerce game. Our goal as designers should be to help clients learn about the positives, negatives and realities of selling online.
Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/how-to-zoom-this-close-into-google-maps/
It is almost impossible to imagine doing day-trips or traveling to a new place without checking it out on Google Maps. Unfortunately, it restricts to zoom in after a certain level. However, there is…
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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/G7CLXu9AnnI/how-to-create-an-innovative-web-design-agency-website-in-5-steps
If you want your business to be prosperous and popular among customers, it’s indispensable to create a website for it. The worldwide web is the first place to which people refer in search of new knowledge, inspiration, and resources that will get specific types of services done in the pro way. Are you a freelance […]
The post How To Create An Innovative Web Design Agency Website in 5 Steps appeared first on designrfix.com.
Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/apache-vs-nginx-performance-optimization-techniques/
Some years ago, the Apache Foundation’s web server, known simply as “Apache”, was so ubiquitous that it became synonymous with the term “web server”. Its daemon process on Linux systems has the name httpd (meaning simply http process) — and comes preinstalled in major Linux distributions.
It was initially released in 1995, and, to quote Wikipedia, “it played a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web”. It is still the most-used web server software according to W3techs. However, according to those reports which show some trends of the last decade and comparisons to other solutions, its market share is decreasing. The reports given by Netcraft and Builtwith differ a bit, but all agree on a trending decline of Apache’s market share and the growth of Nginx.
Nginx — pronounced engine x — was released in 2004 by Igor Sysoev, with the explicit intent to outperform Apache. Nginx’s website has an article worth reading which compares these two technologies. At first, it was mostly used as a supplement to Apache, mostly for serving static files, but it has been steadily growing, as it has been evolving to deal with the full spectrum of web server tasks.
It is often used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and for HTTP caching. CDNs and video streaming providers use it to build their content delivery systems where performance is critical.
Apache has been around for a long time, and it has a big choice of modules. Managing Apache servers is known to be user-friendly. Dynamic module loading allows for different modules to be compiled and added to the Apache stack without recompiling the main server binary. Oftentimes, modules will be in Linux distro repositories, and after installing them through system package managers, they can be gracefully added to the stack with commands like a2enmod. This kind of flexibility has yet to be seen with Nginx. When we look at a guide for setting up Nginx for HTTP/2, modules are something Nginx needs to be built with — configured for at build-time.
One other feature that has contributed to Apache’s market rule is the .htaccess file. It is Apache’s silver bullet, which made it a go-to solution for the shared hosting environments, as it allows controlling the server configuration on a directory level. Every directory on a server served by Apache can have its own .htaccess file.
Nginx not only has no equivalent solution, but discourages such usage due to performance hits.
Server vendors market share 1995–2005. Data by Netcraft
LiteSpeed, or LSWS, is one server contender that has a level of flexibility that can compare to Apache, while not sacrificing performance. It supports Apache-style .htaccess, mod_security and mod_rewrite, and it’s worth considering for shared setups. It was planned as a drop-in replacement for Apache, and it works with cPanel and Plesk. It’s been supporting HTTP/2 since 2015.
LiteSpeed has three license tiers, OpenLiteSpeed, LSWS Standard and LSWS Enterprise. Standard and Enterprise come with an optional caching solution comparable to Varnish, LSCache, which is built into the server itself, and can be controlled, with rewrite rules, in .htaccess files (per directory). It also comes with some DDOS-mitigating “batteries” built in. This, along with its event-driven architecture, makes it a solid contender, targeting primarily performance-oriented hosting providers, but it could be worth setting up even for smaller servers or websites.
Hardware Considerations
When optimizing our system, we cannot emphasize enough giving due attention to our hardware setup. Whichever of these solutions we choose for our setup, having enough RAM is critical. When a web server process, or an interpreter like PHP, don’t have enough RAM, they start swapping, and swapping effectively means using the hard disk to supplement RAM memory. The effect of this is increased latency every time this memory is accessed. This takes us to the second point — the hard disk space. Using fast SSD storage is another critical factor of our website speed. We also need to mind the CPU availability, and the physical distance of our server’s data centers to our intended audience.
To dive in deeper into the hardware side of performance tuning, Dropbox has a good article.
Monitoring
One practical way to monitor our current server stack performance, per process in detail, is htop, which works on Linux, Unix and macOS, and gives us a colored overview of our processes.
Other monitoring tools are New Relic, a premium solution with a comprehensive set of tools, and Netdata, an open-source solution which offers great extensibility, fine-grained metrics and a customizable web dashboard, suitable for both little VPS systems and monitoring a network of servers. It can send alarms for any application or system process via email, Slack, pushbullet, Telegram, Twilio etc.
Monit is another, headless, open-source tool which can monitor the system, and can be configured to alert us, or restart certain processes, or reboot the system when some conditions are met.
Testing the System
AB — Apache Benchmark — is a simple load-testing tool by Apache Foundation, and Siege is another load-testing program. This article explains how to set them both up, and here we have some more advanced tips for AB, while an in-depth look at Siege can be found here.
If you prefer a web interface, there is Locust, a Python-based tool that comes in very handy for testing website performance.
After we install Locust, we need to create a locustfile in the directory from which we will launch it:
from locust import HttpLocust, TaskSet, task
class UserBehavior(TaskSet):
@task(1)
def index(self):
self.client.get(“/”)
@task(2)
def shop(self):
self.client.get(“/?page_id=5”)
@task(3)
def page(self):
self.client.get(“/?page_id=2”)
class WebsiteUser(HttpLocust):
task_set = UserBehavior
min_wait = 300
max_wait = 3000
Then we simply launch it from the command line:
locust –host=https://my-website.com
One warning with these load-testing tools: they have the effect of a DDoS attack, so it’s recommended you limit testing to your own websites.
Tuning Apache
Apache’s mpm modules
Apache dates to 1995 and the early days of the internet, when an accepted way for servers to operate was to spawn a new process on each incoming TCP connection and to reply to it. If more connections came in, more worker processes were created to handle them. The costs of spawning new processes were high, and Apache developers devised a prefork mode, with a pre-spawned number of processes. Embedded dynamic language interpreters within each process (like mod_php) were still costly, and server crashes with Apache’s default setups became common. Each process was only able to handle a single incoming connection.
This model is known as mpm_prefork_module within Apache’s MPM (Multi-Processing Module) system. According to Apache’s website, this mode requires little configuration, because it is self-regulating, and most important is that the MaxRequestWorkers directive be big enough to handle as many simultaneous requests as you expect to receive, but small enough to ensure there’s enough physical RAM for all processes.
A small Locust load test that shows spawning of huge number of Apache processes to handle the incoming traffic.
We may add that this mode is maybe the biggest cause of Apache’s bad name. It can get resource-inefficient.
Version 2 of Apache brought another two MPMs that try to solve the issues that prefork mode has. These are worker module, or mpm_worker_module, and event module.
Worker module is not process-based anymore; it’s a hybrid process-thread based mode of operation. Quoting Apache’s website,
a single control process (the parent) is responsible for launching child processes. Each child process creates a fixed number of server threads as specified in the ThreadsPerChild directive, as well as a listener thread which listens for connections and passes them to a server thread for processing when they arrive.
This mode is more resource efficient.
2.4 version of Apache brought us the third MPM — event module. It is based on worker MPM, and added a separate listening thread that manages dormant keepalive connections after the HTTP request has completed. It’s a non-blocking, asynchronous mode with a smaller memory footprint. More about version 2.4 improvements here.
We have loaded a testing WooCommerce installation with around 1200 posts on a virtual server and tested it on Apache 2.4 with the default, prefork mode, and mod_php.
First we tested it with libapache2-mod-php7 and mpm_prefork_module at https://tools.pingdom.com:
Then, we went for testing the event MPM module.
We had to add multiverse to our /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu xenial partner
Then we did sudo apt-get updateand installed libapache2-mod-fastcgi and php-fpm:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-fastcgi php7.0-fpm
Since php-fpm is a service separate from Apache, it needed a restart:
sudo service start php7.0-fpm
Then we disabled the prefork module, and enabled the event mode and proxy_fcgi:
sudo a2dismod php7.0 mpm_prefork
sudo a2enmod mpm_event proxy_fcgi
We added this snippet to our Apache virtual host:
<filesmatch “.php$”>
SetHandler “proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000/”
</filesmatch>
This port needs to be consistent with php-fpm configuration in /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf. More about the php-fpm setup here.
Then we tuned the mpm_event configuration in /etc/apache2/mods-available/mpm_event.conf, keeping in mind that our mini-VPS resources for this test were constrained — so we merely reduced some default numbers. Details about every directive on Apache’s website, and tips specific to the event mpm here. Keep in mind that started servers consume an amount of memory regardless of how busy they are. The MaxRequestWorkers directive sets the limit on the number of simultaneous requests allowed: setting MaxConnectionsPerChild to a value other than zero is important, because it prevents a possible memory leak.
<ifmodule mpm_event_module>
StartServers 1
MinSpareThreads 30
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadLimit 64
ThreadsPerChild 30
MaxRequestWorkers 80
MaxConnectionsPerChild 80
</ifmodule>
Then we restarted the server with sudo service apache2 restart (if we change some directives, like ThreadLimit, we will need to stop and start the service explicitly, with sudo service apache2 stop; sudo service apache2 start).
Our tests on Pingdom now showed page load time reduced by more than half:
The post Apache vs Nginx Performance: Optimization Techniques appeared first on SitePoint.
Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/06/5-simple-steps-to-zero-conversions/
Alright, so let me begin by addressing the title because there is a method to my madness: There are literally hundreds of articles out there with tips, tricks, and best practices when it comes to e-commerce; some are generic and some are more technical but they do cover most areas of interest.
But how about the big no-nos of e-commerce? How can you be sure you won’t make a single sale today? Well, that’s why I’m here. I’ll go through a list of the biggest deal breakers and conversion killers that a store owner can implement to make sure their precious inventory will never reach the grubby hands of shoppers.
Follow these tips and you won’t make a single sale…
1. The Store Platform
That’s right, the platform is one of the biggest decisions in building a store that doesn’t sell anything. You’ll have to pick one that is hard to use and maintain, needs a heavy server to run, and has to be slow, and by slow I mean 1992 dial-up slow. You want people to feel comfortable with your store and waiting in line is something that seems to happen to you every time you hit the mall, so why not try to recreate this all too familiar feeling by making the customer wait a couple minutes before the site loads.
the platform is one of the biggest decisions in building a store that doesn’t sell anything
Do not fall for the hype of getting for a popular self-hosted e-commerce platform like Magento, or Woocommerce, and especially don’t fall for any of those fancy e-commerce Software-as-a-Service providers like Shopify, or Zento. Oh no no no. Find one that has yet to build a developer community, one that has a limited list of features and make sure it costs a lot (that’s how you know it’s going to be great).
The domain name is important too. Get one that perfectly describes what you are trying to sell (or not). Something like www.buy-the-perfect-pair-of-black-loafers-that-go-with-everything.com. Get a lot of characters in there and do use as many hyphens as the registrar will allow.
2. The Design
Every now and then you’ll have one stubborn user that sticks around while the site loads painfully for minutes on end. Since they waited this long you’ll want to use every bit of real estate on the website. Leave no room unused. Have anything and everything display on the first page with lots of buttons and input fields to click on.
Make sure you show your pop-up on Every. Single. Page.
The logo needs to be on par with your brand image and to accomplish that, I’d advise you use Clipart. Open up MSPaint, drop a couple of cliparts in there and you are all set. (Why spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on fancy logo designers when you can do it yourself?)
After you’ve carefully created the site you’ll want to have a couple of pop-up show up, and don’t be fooled: people click on the “hide” button by mistake all the time. Make sure you show your pop-up on Every. Single. Page.
3. The Product
There will be some that might try to convince you need to spend time and money doing your research before selling a product. Don’t believe the hype! If you are going to do this whole selling of goods online you need to have a solid conviction and trust your instincts. Basically listen to our good friend, Shia LaBeouf’s words of wisdom: Just do it! (You’ll be surprised at the outcome, trust me!)
If you are going to sell your own product, go both feet in! Talk to the company building the product and make sure they make anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 units. You’ll want to fill your warehouse with inventory, after all, you do know what the people want.
Pricing is going to be important too. Don’t worry about knowing the market, cost of production, or the competitors, what’s important is that you stick to your guns—your initial assessment. Keeping tabs on costs and different factors like storing fees, handling or shipping will only slow you down. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
4. Customer Support
Customer lifetime value, customer loyalty, support department, man stop pushing that hippy stuff. Listen, we as a community of dedicated “Zero conversion shop entrepreneurs” (yeah, we are making this a thing) need to unite and scream off the top of our lungs: “We don’t care!” Don’t answer the phone, don’t email back, and avoid any social media interaction with your customer, you already have a lot on your plate and you certainly don’t need that negativity in your life.
Now if you absolutely need to contact customers I’d advise you email them. You might like to try a little something that I like to call “the email waterboarding technique.” Send them a message about a product you have and every couple of days you ask them if they’ve seen it and if they are ready to buy it. Your email subject should read: “How about now?”
5. Marketing
Deals, special offers, freebies, free shipping? Are you kidding me? You have worked your ass off getting here and after countless minutes setting up your website and putting together a design after slapping on a logo made by your 12 yo nephew—who, everyone knows, is good with computers—you really don’t want to give away free stuff.
If you build it, they’ll come
So when you think about offering discounts or rewards to your customers remember kids, just say no!
What about Ads, you say? No! The Ad industry is but a smoke screen for the large enterprises that want to reach into your pockets and grab your hard earned cash. You really don’t want to get mixed with the likes of them in order to get customers. Like my favorite quote from the movie Field of Dreams said: “If you build it, they’ll come.” Just get the website up and people will storm the gates.
How about marketing automation? Well, robots are taking more of our jobs with each passing day so it is our responsibility, nay, our duty to make sure no robot, bot or machine learning technique will ever take a real person’s job away from them. Hubspot, Marketo, and Autopilot are just a few examples of services that would eliminate countless hours of doing manual sales groundwork so avoid them at any cost!
Conclusion
To summarise the wisdom I’ve shared with you all, to make sure you don’t have a store that sells you have to follow these 5 simple rules. Thank you for sticking with me through this article and, remember, only YOU can stop people from buying stuff from your online store.
PS. If on the other hand, you’d actually like to run a successful store, then take advice in this article, and do exactly the opposite.
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Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/complete-guide-wordpress-performance-optimization/
According to Builtwith.com, WordPress holds close to 50% of the CMS share of the world’s top 1,000,000 websites. As for the ecommerce sphere, we’re at 33% with WooCommerce. And if we cast a wider net, percentages go higher. Although we may complain that WordPress can get bloated, resource-heavy, and its data model leaves a lot to be desired, there is no denying that WordPress is everywhere.
WordPress can thank its simplicity and a low barrier to entry for this pervasiveness. It’s easy to set up, and requires next to no technical knowledge. Hosting for WordPress can be found for as little as a couple of dollars per month, and the basic setup takes just a half hour of clicking. Free themes for WordPress are galore, some with included WYSIWYG page builders.
Many look down on it, but in many ways we can thank WordPress for the growth of the internet and PHP, and many internet professionals have WP’s gentle learning curve to thank for their careers.
But this ease of entry comes at a cost. Plenty of websites that proudly wear the WordPress badge were not done by professionals but by the cheapest developers. And often, it shows. Professional look and professional performance were afterthoughts.
One of the main points of feedback the owner of an aspiring high-quality website will get from a grudging professional is that performance and a professional look and feel shouldn’t be afterthoughts. You can’t easily paint or stick them over a website. Professional websites should be premeditated.
Above, a famous UK used car dealer, Ling’s Cars, tried a unique way to make a kitsch marketing punchline. Unless you’re REALLY sure about what you’re doing, DO NOT try this at home
And this starts with…
Choice of Hosting
Typically, new users will go with products that are on the low-cost side, with most of beginner-friendly bells and whistles. Considering the shady business practices by some big industry players in this arena, and the complaints and demands for site migration professionals coming from clients, this is a part of website setup that requires due attention.
We can divide WordPress hosting vendors into a few tiers.
Premium, WordPress-dedicated vendors like Kinsta whose plans start at $100 per month, or even higher-grade managed hosting like WordPress VIP by Automattic, may be worth their salt, but also may be out of reach for many website owners.
Medium tier Flywheel, A2 hosting, Siteground and Pantheon are among those considered reliable and performance oriented, offering acceptable speed and a managed hosting service for those more price-conscious. Users here may get a bit less hand-holding, but these services usually strike an acceptable balance between a solid setup, price, and options for more advanced users. Not to forget, there is Cloudways, which is a hybrid between VPS and managed hosting. Those with their audience in Europe may look into Pilvia, as it offers a performant server stack and is pretty affordable.
There’s an interesting survey of customer satisfaction with more prominent hosting vendors, published by Codeinwp.
For those of us not scared of the command line, there are VPS and dedicated-server vendors like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, Amazon’s Lightsail, Hetzner in Europe, and OVH. Hetzner is a German vendor known for its quality physical servers on offer, somewhat above the price of virtual servers, while OVH offers very cost-efficient virtual servers. For the price-conscious, OVH’s subsidiary Kimsufi in Europe and Canada also offers bargain physical dedicated servers, and Host US has very affordable virtual servers.
With managed hosting, things to look for are a good server stack, good CDN integration, and of course SSD storage. Guaranteed resources, like with A2, are a big plus. The next thing to look for is SSH-access. Tech-savvy users may profit from WP-CLI availability.
When choosing a VPS, the thing to look for is XEN or KVM virtualization over OpenVZ, because it mitigates the overselling of resources, helping guarantee that the resources you bought are really yours. It also provides better security.
Easy Engine is software that can make your entire VPS/WordPress installation a one-hour job.
Regarding the server stack, Nginx is preferred to Apache if we’re pursuing performance, and PHP 7 is a must. If we really need Apache, using Nginx as a reverse proxy is a plus, but this setup can get complex.
Tests performed give PHP 7 a big edge over the previous version. According to fasthosts.co.uk:
WordPress 4.1 executed 95% more requests per second on PHP 7 compared to PHP 5.6.
When choosing your hosting, be aware of negative experiences with some providers that have become notorious.
Software Considerations
Things that usually slow down WordPress websites are bulky, bloated front ends with a lot of static resources and database queries. These issues arise from the choice of theme (and its page builders, huge sliders, etc) — which not only slow down initial loading due to many requests and overall size, but often slow down the browser due to a lot of JavaScript, and stuff to render, making it unresponsive.
The golden rule here is: don’t use it unless there’s a good reason to.
This may seem like a rule coming from the mouth of Homer Simpson, but if you can skip any of the bells and whistles, do so. Be conservative. If you must add some shiny functionality or JS eye candy, always prefer those tailored and coded as specifically as possible for your exact need. If you’re a skilled coder, and the project justifies the effort, code it yourself with minimalism in mind.
Review all the plugins your website can’t live without — and remove the others.
And most importantly: back up your website before you begin pruning!
Data model
If you have a theme where you use a lot of custom posts or fields, be warned that a lot of these will slow down your database queries. Keep your data model as simple as possible, and if not, consider that WordPress’ original intended purpose was as a blogging engine. If you need a lot more than that, you may want to consider some of the MVC web frameworks out there that will give you greater control over your data model and the choice of database.
In WordPress we can build a rich custom data model by using custom post types, custom taxonomies and custom fields, but be conscious of performance and complexity costs.
If you know your way around the code, inspect your theme to find unnecessary database queries. Every individual database trip spends precious milliseconds in your TTFB, and megabytes of your server’s memory. Remember that secondary loops can be costly — so be warned when using widgets and plugins that show extra posts, like in sliders or widget areas. If you must use them, consider fetching all your posts in a single query, where it may otherwise slow down your website. There’s a GitHub repo for those not wanting to code from scratch.
Meta queries can be expensive
Using custom fields to fetch posts by some criteria can be a great tool to develop sophisticated things with WP. This is an example of a meta query, and here you can find some elaboration on its costs. Summary: post meta wasn’t built for filtering, taxonomies were.
get_post_meta is a function typically called to fetch custom fields, and it can be called with just the post ID as an argument, in which case it fetches all the post’s meta fields in an array, or it can have a custom field’s name as a second argument, in which case it returns just the specified field.
If using get_post_meta()for a certain post multiple times on a single page or request (for multiple custom fields), be aware that this won’t incur extra cost, because the first time this function is called, all the post meta gets cached.
Database hygiene
Installing and deleting various plugins, and changing different themes over the lifetime of your website, often clutters your database with a lot of data that isn’t needed. It’s completely possible to discover — upon inspecting why a WordPress website is sluggish, or why it won’t even load, due to exhausted server memory — that the database has grown to hundreds and hundreds of megabytes, or over a gigabyte, with no content that explains it.
wp-options is where a lot of orphaned data usually gets left behind. This includes, but is not limited to, various transients (this post warns of best practices regarding deletion of transients in plugins). Transients are a form of cache, but as with any other caching, if misused, it can do more harm than good. If your server environment provides it, wp-cli has a command set dedicated to transients management, including deletion. If not, there are plugins in the WordPress plugins repo that can delete expired transients, but which offer less control.
If deleting transients still leaves us with a bloated database without any tangible cause, WP-Sweep is an excellent free tool that can do the job of cleaning up the database. Another one to consider is WP Optimize.
Before doing any kind of database cleanup, it’s strongly recommended that you back up your database!
One of the plugins that comes in very handy for profiling of the whole WordPress request lifecycle is Debug Objects. It offers an inspection of all the transients, shortcodes, classes, styles and scripts, templates loaded, db queries, and hooks.
After ensuring a sane, performance-oriented setup — considering our server stack in advance, eliminating the possible bloat created by theme choice and plugins and widgets overload — we should try to identify bottlenecks.
If we test our website in a tool like Pingdom Speed Test, we’ll get a waterfall chart of all the resources loaded in the request:
This gives us details about the request-response lifecycle, which we can analyze for bottlenecks. For instance:
If the pink DNS time above is too big, it could mean we should consider caching our DNS records for a longer period. This is done by increasing the TTL setting in our domain management/registrar dashboard.
If the SSL part is taking too long, we may want to consider enabling HTTP/2 to benefit from ALPN, adjusting our cache-control headers, and finally switching to a CDN service. “Web Performance in a Nutshell: HTTP/2, CDNs and Browser Caching” is a thorough article on this topic, as is “Analyzing HTTPS Performance Overhead” by KeyCDN.
Connect, Send, and Receive parts usually depend on network latency, so these can be improved by hosting close to your intended audience, making sure your host has a fast uplink, and using a CDN. For these items, you may want to consider a ping tool too (not to be confused with the Pingdom tools mentioned above), to make sure your server is responsive.
The Wait part — the yellow part of the waterfall — is the time your server infrastructure takes to produce or return the requested website. If this part takes too much time, you may want to return to our previous topics of optimizing the server, WordPress installation, and database stack. Or you may consider various layers of caching.
To get a more extensive testing and hand-holding tips on improving the website, there’s a little command line utility called webcoach. In an environment with NodeJS and npm installed (like Homestead Improved), installing it is simple:
npm install webcoach -g
After it’s been installed, we can get detailed insights and advice on how to improve our website’s various aspects, including performance:
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