elements web development

Author: elementsdev

  • Add Request a Quote Button to Transformer Ecomm Page

    Description

    Put a button on this page:https://jenkinselectric.com/transformers-coils/ above the download block linking to the form at https://jenkinselectric.com/product-category/transformers-specialty-coils.

    Solution

    Test Link: https://dev.jenkinselectric.com/transformers-coils

    Plain HTML was added to the Product List repeater field for the button. The class .button-filll-indigo was added to apply styling.

    <a class="button-fill-indigo" href="/product-category/transformers-specialty-coils/">Get a Custom Quote</a>

  • The hidden costs of website software subcriptions

    According to Freshbooks, an invoicing software provider, the average hourly rate for a web developer is $75 and the average price for a website is about $5000. Both clients and developers can easily find the going rate for web development and use this information to get the best outcomes during contract negotiations. Though sometime ago, clever people started offering subscription based service where you pay a certain amount per month and get access to general purpose website builder software. This approach allowed developers to have a small yet steady stream of income and offload the cost and time of desining a website directly to the clients themselves.

    More frequently, our proposals for traditional websites are rejected for low cost website builder platforms. So as the industry changes we are also looking for ways to adapt. Given our status as a small agency, its difficult to build and maintain the economies of scale it takes to maintain a service to hundreds or thousands of customers paying a monthly subscription and frankly its not where we see ourselves thriving. We love the hands-on approach of seeing the visions of our clients come to life and the personal connections that fuel our creativty.

    So would you rather pay $5000 upfront or $35/mo for a few years? Its seems like an easy answer, but remember the time it takes to actually build a fully working website is completey hidden from subcription based pricing. Our job lately is showing the value we provide in comparison to a low cost SAAS provider. We see ourselves similar to craftspeople or artisans who provide detailed hands-ons work and subscription platsforms as providers of mass produced goods. What type of service would bring the most value to a project? There are situations where you absoutely need an experience woodworker to build a customized set of furniture and there are cases when an off the shelf table from a big-box store would do the job. Its not necessarily a matter of luxury versus convneience. Its more about what best fits the needs of a project and the goals one is seeking to accomplish.

  • WordPress Plugin Starter Kit

    Here are some of our favorite WordPress plugins to install when approaching new WordPress site builds.

    Block Visibility
    This is an essential plugin for sites that rely mainly on the Full Site Editor and Gutenberg.

    Two Factor
    Given how many bots target the WordPress login page, having multifactor authenticatoin for admin accounts is an absolute must.

    A Cache Plugin
    Most sites will need some kind of caching. The one chosen largely depends on your webhost and webserver stack though. Otherwise, some good choices include LiteSpeed Cache for LiteSpeed enabled webservers and Cache Enabler for webhosts that dont provide built in caching.

    Site Healthcheck and Troubleshooting
    This is a useful plugn that can help prevent minor errors from piling up into a major issue. It also includes a useful troubleshooting mode for identifying problem plugins.

    Safe SVG
    Because WordPress still doesn’t include native support for SVG files…

    The SEO Framework
    A great, lightweight SEO plugin that gives most sites what they need to increase search engine visibility without sacrificing performance or filling the admin dashboard with ads.

    WP Code Snippets / WPCode
    Many plugins can be repalced by a code snippet or two, and these plugins add a lot of convenience to the process. Be aware, with this type of plugin you must keep your administraor accounts secure due to the security risk of having the ability to rune executable code from your admin panel. Otherwise, its better to make a custom functionality plugin and put your code snippets in there. Note that WPCode is a newer plugin with a nicer interface than Code Snippets, though it has a lot of ads and upsells.

    An SMTP Plugin
    Because WordPress still doesn’t include native SMTP email support. Some of my favorites include PostMark and WP Mail SMTP

    Sucuri Security
    Some webhosts provide their own security plugins or explicity advise against using one. Outside of those situations, Sucuri is a great lightweight plugin that provides more than enough hardening for most lightweight sites.

    Post Types Order
    Allows for drag and drop ordering of posts and pages from the admin dashboard.

    Post Type Switcher
    For sites with custom post types, this plugin is a great tool to have during development and is also useful for content editors.

    Contact Form 7 + Flamingo
    A true O.G. WordPress plugin combo from Takayushi Miyigo providing a great way to build a simple forms.

    Debug Bar (Development Only)
    A great development tool with lots of features to help with custom development.

    Query Monitor (Development Only)
    A great development plugin that can help identify resource hogging plugins and troubling database queries.

  • YITH Role Based Pricing bug fixed with a reset

    Somewhere along the way with the YITH Role Based Prices plugin, a client of ours had a sudden complete loss of all their specialized discounts. An update of the YITH Role Based Prices caused all the settingss for the dicount rules to completely dissapear. Specifcally, the discount rules were created for specific product categories based on user role. Both the applied user roles and the product categories were missing after the plugin update.

    Contacting the YITH support team did bring somewhat of a resolution to the problem. The support agent was able to the restore the data using a custom script. However, the pricing rules still were not applying any discounts on the front end of the website. Several rounds of troubleshooting eventually lead to discovering a solution: disabling and enabling each rule.

    The simple yet effective restart restored the display of the rules on the front of the site and everything worked as normal. This whole scenario points toward a poorly coded database table migration along with a lack of a communication from YITH on a major plugin update.

  • Gravity Forms filer to disable CSS only works with Orbital theme

    When using the Gravity Forms 2.5 Theme, the action filter to disable the default CSS doesn’t work. Luckily, the filter does work when using the recommended Orbital theme: 

    add_filter( 'gform_disable_css', '__return_true' );

    I discovered this while working on a legacy WordPress site that uses the Classic Editor and troubleshooting why my styling wasn’t applying correctly.

    My current version of Gravity Forms (2.9) includes a setting to called Output Default CSS which can be toggled on and off. Depending on the state of the Gravity Forms Plugin, this setting may have no effect. Unfortunately, there’s no indication or notification of this setting not working although it is mentioned in the docmentation.

  • What is WordPress and why is it so popular?

    WordPress is website publishing software. In technical jargon you may here it described as content management system or CMS. When WordPress was first introduced to the world, it was was primarly a blog publishing app. Now since blog have lost a lot of their popularity in the era of social media, WordPress is transitioning to become a more general purpose website builder.

    There many many software services that do the same thing as WordPress and some that do it much better. So what makes WordPress special?

    As an open-source software, WordPress is free to use. Yes, there is absolutely zero cost to get the WordPress software. However, you do still have to pay a web hosting company for server space and a domain registrar for a custom domain.

    WordPress also has a huge community of developers that create new enhancements for the core software. These ready-made softwar extentions, or plugins, are very convenient for website developers. This vast library of plugins also saves clients and website owners lots of time and resources.

    Since WordPress is open source, you own your content. Even if you stop paying for web hosting service, you can still set up a WordPress server and your own computer, migrate your website to it, and continue to make edits. With proprietary software companies, once you stop paying for service, you also lose the ability to export and change your content.

    So now you know that WordPress is a website publishing software that makes it easy to create content and publish it on the internet. You also learned that WordPress is well known for collections of feature extentions called plugins that make it easy to customize a website with a wide variety of features.

    For further study, you can check out these resources: