When you contract with Image and Aspect, you always get your source files at the end of the project. You own them. Just sayin’.

Here are some pointers to help you learn the difference between renting and owning your site.

Renting

When you use a “hosted platform” package-solution, (Do-It-Yourself) it’s considered to be “Software as a Service” (SaaS) and you are renting your website from them. It’s usually a monthly or annual subscription and it has a lower up-front investment cost. Examples: Wix and Shopify.

Owning

Owning requires a custom solution, and there’s a higher up-front investment for this dedicated development. Owning allows for customization and integration with 3rd party services, provides greater flexibility plus there’s room for expansion. There is also less of a chance that you’ll pay for services that you’re not using. Basically you own your piece of web real estate and you can do what you want with it. Let’s think “keeping it within legal parameters .”

What Renters Can Expect

• Easy for Do-It-Yourselfers.
• Lower cost of entry.
• Various paid subscription levels (free, starter, pro, etc.)
• Add-on modules, plugins or extensions purchased from a dedicated “marketplace”.
• One combined service for hosting, payment processing, and website administration.
• Maintained infrastructure & automatic security updates.
• New features introduced on a regular basis.
• Technical support in articles, tutorials, videos.
• A wide selection of design templates (some are free).

The Downside of Renting

• No equity! When your subscription ends, the time, money and effort you put into building the website are lost.
• Incremental costs add up. With every add-on, a new cost emerges that is often higher than the original subscription fee. There will be a monthly fee for that one item for the rest of the duration of the website.
• Possibly little flexibility on the required services for payment processing, hosting, data warehousing.
• Limited customization for design.
• If you leave the platform, all the investment in design and development is lost. You can’t take it with you when you move to another hosting provider/webserver. You have to start over.

What Owners Can Expect

• Customization tailored to specific business requirements.
• Scalable for future growth.
• Integration with external services.
• Open architecture allows for development, the code is portable and not tied to an organization.
• Freedom of choice for your web hosting, payment processing, and website administration.
• Important as sales volume increases and competitive processing and transaction fees become critical.
• Accommodates creative innovations as opposed to waiting for the hosted platform to release updates or fixes.

The Downside of Owning

• A higher cost of entry.
• Must be actively maintained – if the site is not maintained through a web developer, (or someone who knows how to code or how to develop with WordPress) there will be no innovation, no new features, no security patching. Eventually, a website will become obsolete as code and formats change over time.
• Time constraints – building a custom site requires a collaborative effort and considerable thought and engagement from the site owner.

As with everything, there are costs either way. Financial costs, opportunity costs, perceived value costs. The best way to decide on whether to rent or own your website is to look at your long term business goals.

When you’re business takes off and you’re renting your site, will you want or be able to take the time to stay current on how to use the platform? Will you be able to set aside time to update the content, or be on the phone with technical support or Billing? Do you feel comfortable making scheduled full-backups and storing them off-site where they’ll be secure but still easy to find when you need them? Will you feel comfortable restoring your site from a backup if you make a mistake on the site and don’t know how to fix it? Will you have the time and the inclination to research the latest Google SEO changes or the newest security threats? Will you feel comfortable making these changes? Will you be able to quickly and easily find your log-in information, your API keys, and/or your font or photo licenses if a component of your site stops working? Will you keep up with all expiration dates for your domain name, SSL certificates, sub-domains, etc, so nothing accidentally expires? If something expires would you know what to do or who to contact? Do you feel comfortable troubleshooting and fixing text formatting, images, or email issues? If you can do these things, and more importantly you’d ENJOY doing them, well that’s just swell! 🙂

But do yourself a favor and hire a professional. You’re not a web developer already! (unless you are) LOL!

If you choose the DIY route and you get in over your head, you can always call me. I promise not to say I told you so. 🙂

Other articles you might like:

–Things to consider before building your website

–6 Ways to Use Storytelling in Your Blog Posts

–Balancing Consumer Personalization with GDPR Regulation

Questions?

[email protected]

My Contact Page

About the author

I developed Image and Aspect because I believe that professionals need to have an impactful web presence. One that showcases their unique talents, skills, and abilities as well as their values and style. A presence that focuses on social engagement and connection.

I’m passionate about what I do; I like helping fellow humans, I like having all kinds of social connection with others, and I want to give back, to make the world a better place.

I do much of the designing and coding myself, and I also have a wonderful network of professionals that may contribute as well; photographers, copywriters, branding experts.

I love designing and coding beautiful, elegant and responsive web creations. I ALSO teach and help others who want to learn how to do it themselves.

‘Tips and Snips’ is my blog, and it’s full of information and inspiration to help transform any online persona from “meh” to AMAZING! Sign-up HERE to get blog posts right to your in-box every Friday! I write about Design, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Branding, Vlogging, Color Theory, HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, WordPress, Social Media…anything you’d want to know to get yourself noticed online.

Visit Image and Aspect to learn more about your web presence options

Diane M. Metcalf, M.S.

1. If you’re including a URL to a website in the TWEET THIS link, go to bit.ly  (it’s free) to shorten the URL so Twitter will use it. Copy and paste the new short URL to a blank doc or text file so you can easily find it in a few minutes.

2. Tweet the image that you want embedded in the TWEET THIS link.

This is necessary because Twitter will store the image and you need the specific path to where it’s stored. (If the image isn’t on Twitter, then it won’t show up when using the TWEET THIS link.)

Here’s how to do that:

Sign in to Twitter, click “Tweet”, then click “add photo or video”, browse for and Tweet the image. (You can delete the tweet later if you want. The image will still be saved.)

Now for the fun part: You need to find the URL (path) to that image, and there are TWO of them.

You’ll use the URL that starts with “pic”.

Stay in Twitter and right-click the Tweeted image you just posted. “Inspect” it with web developer tools, like the one in CHROME. (TOP RIGHT on Chrome, 3 vertical dots)

To find the correct URL, hit Control+F and search for “pic“. When you find it, copy the whole line pic.twitter.com/XXXXXX.

Paste it where you can find it again in a few minutes.

3.To create the Tweet This link in HTML:

<a href=”https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO TWEET > </a>

There can’t be spaces in-between words in a URL, so replace all those spaces with %20, like this:

THIS%20IS%20WHAT%20I%20 WANT%20 TO%20 TWEET%20

Next, continuing on the same line, right after the 20, we add the link for the Twitter image (red) that we just tweeted , and the bit.ly shortened URL (blue) for our chosen website.

Remember, no spaces, and close the tag >.Don’t forget the quotes. The whole href needs to be in quotes.

(I’m condensing the code here for easier display)

pic.twitter.com/CfORwODo%20http://bit.ly/2oxajij“>

Now add some text to make a clickable link: (again condensing the code for easier display)

ODo%20http://bit.ly/2oxajij“>ADDED Clickable Text</>a

If you’d rather have a clickable image instead of text, then add the path to the image in an img tag, before the closing anchor </a> tag, like this:

ODo%20http://bit.ly/2oxajij“><img src=”path to image here”></a>

And here’s the end result in an outgoing email!

Here’s what clicking on it does:

Here’s what happens when I click TWEET:

TA -DAA!

Questions?

[email protected]

My Contact Page

Other articles you might like:

-Using images: Tips to improve your SEO rankings

-Use a customer thank-you page to avoid missed opportunities

-6 Tips to Make Your Blog Post SEO Friendly

 

About the author

I developed Image and Aspect because I believe that professionals need to have an impactful web presence. One that showcases their unique talents, skills, and abilities as well as their values and style. A presence that focuses on social engagement and connection.

I’m passionate about what I do; I like helping fellow humans, I like having all kinds of social connection with others, and I want to give back, to make the world a better place.

I do much of the designing and coding myself, and I also have a wonderful network of professionals that may contribute as well; photographers, copywriters, branding experts.

I love designing and coding beautiful, elegant and responsive web creations. I ALSO teach and help others who want to learn how to do it themselves.

‘Tips and Snips’ is my blog, and it’s full of information and inspiration to help transform any online persona from “meh” to AMAZING! Sign-up HERE to get blog posts right to your in-box every Friday! I write about Design, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Branding, Vlogging, Color Theory, HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, WordPress, Social Media…anything you’d want to know to get yourself noticed online.

Visit Image and Aspect to learn more about your web presence options

Diane M. Metcalf, M.S.

What’s Gutenberg?

Gutenberg is the name of the new editor that’s now part of the WordPress core beginning in version 5.0, released in early December 2018. Before, when you created a new page or post, you used what’s now being called the “Classic Editor”, a kind of lightweight word-processor, similar to a bare-bones version of MS Word. It’s been pretty much unchanged for the last decade or so.

Gutenberg, on the other hand, is more than a content field. It’s a being touted as a modern editing experience and will be the foundation for building with WordPress from now on. If you’ve ever used a third-party page builder like Beaver Builder or the Genesis platform, then Gutenberg will look familiar to you because it uses a similar “block” approach for creating.

Gutenberg will be rolled-out in three phases. The first is the inclusion in WordPress 5.0, and that phase focuses on implementing “blocks” for a “content-first” approach. This will clear the way for the next two phases that will go beyond creating “posts” to actual page templates, then finally into full site customization.

The editor will create a new page- and post-building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery. — Matt Mullenweg

The Blocks

Blocks, in my opinion, are a welcome addition because they get rid of some of the clunkiness that I hated about WordPress. By that I mean blocks replace much of the need to use other formatting tools such as theme options, meta-boxes, shortcodes, embeds, widgets, post formats, custom post types, and others. Blocks are used to organize and compose content. They allow WordPress to be as functional as ever but without all the hacking and add-ons. It always felt like I was using some sort of Frankenstein approach when I was creating a page, and if you know code and appreciate its purity, you understand what I mean. Creating with WordPress wasn’t a clean way of creating at all. Blocks completely change this and it completely streamlines the user experience. I welcome that.

Blocks actually unify multiple interfaces. This streamlines the whole writing, editing, and publishing experience by way of simplicity. And developers can create their own blocks which means way less piecing together of shortcode, widgets, hacks, and plug-ins. To me, that implies a potentially faster, lightweight site with fewer elements that need updating or that could potentially break your site.

Blocks can be static or dynamic and each one contains configuration settings. They are hierarchical, so they can be a child or a parent to another block. They contain rich formatting tools for composing content instead of using text plus inserted media, embeds and shortcodes (although there IS a shortcode block). With one block you can do what a boatload of plug-ins would do, and I found blocks to be quite intuitive. I like that. Blocks focus on how the content will look without needing to use other configuration options, and this approach means that bloggers and developers can present content in a more engaging, direct, and visual manner.

The new Gutenberg editor is designed specifically for creating content-rich and flexible website designs. Paragraphs, headings, media, and embeds now become the content that’s stored in the WordPress database.

I should tell you at this point that when WordPress announced the coming of Gutenberg, I was not a happy camper. I was angry and I didn’t want to be forced to learn a new way of using WordPress because the current way was difficult enough, what with having to click around so many areas of the dashboard to find where to change this, or modify that and requiring the downloading of widgets and such. We end up literally piecing together a functioning site. It was often confusing and frustrating and it felt like a primitive and hodge-podge way of “developing”. And it felt risky at best. I thought Gutenberg would just add another level of unnecessary complexity and I resented that. I resented what felt like having no say and no choice if I wanted to keep creating sites in WordPress.

So here’s what I did. I decided that the best thing to do, for me, was to see how it worked and so I installed the beta plugin of Gutenberg.

I have to say that using Gutenberg was a little confusing at first, after being so used to the previous editor. Putting no pressure on myself, I just started playing with it on a test-site, to see what it could do. First, I found within a few minutes that it was kind of fun. I should also tell you at this point that I went ahead and installed the Atomic Blocks plug-in and Atomic Blocks theme (atomicblocks.com) to extend Gutenberg’s functionality and it made a big difference to me. Now there were even more cool things I could do with the blocks. Second, within just a few minutes, I had created a pretty nice looking page, designed totally from scratch from a blank page, using only blocks. It seriously would have taken 2-3 times as long to do that in code. And because you can see your changes live, as you go, there’s no clicking back and forth to the browser to see your changes take effect, like there is when you’re writing in code. So there’s that.

Compatibility

I was concerned about compatibility, and I’m pretty sure there are lots of us out there still dealing with the anxiety that the Gutenberg roll-out has caused. For those of us who have highly-tailored existing sites, it’s good to know that our posts are totally backwards compatible, and our shortcodes still work. WordPress is exploring how to accommodate highly-tailored metaboxes, and is looking at other desired solutions such as a plugin that disables Gutenberg altogether, or possibly auto-detecting whether Gutenberg should even be installed/activated or not.

Not saying it’s better in any way than writing in code. I’m still a code girl. But it’s a nice alternative.

Here’s the Gutenberg Handbook for Designers and Developers in case you’re interested.

What’s Next

If you don’t want to use Gutenberg just yet, there is a way to keep the “Classic Editor” as the default. Go to “Plug-ins” and “Add New”. In the search box, input the keywords “Classic Editor”. Once it appears as a choice, install it and then activate it. IF YOU’VE ALREADY USED GUTENBERG to create a page or post, your formatting and CSS will be wiped out. So be careful.

Also, you know to make a backup of your full site before updating to WordPress version 5.0 and installing/activating/using Gutenberg, right? Just sayin’. Look in your C-Panel to find any backup utilities you could use. There are several WordPress backup plug-ins available as well. Go to Plugins>Add New>and search for keyword “backup”. Of course, you could also have me do it. I’d be happy to download a copy of your entire site, databases and all, for you to keep somewhere safe and sound, to restore your site in a jiffy if need be.

WordPress will continue to find ways of ensuring that a page’s existing functionality continues to work while allowing us developers the necessary time and tools to make a smooth transition. And I think that Gutenberg will certainly create desirable opportunities for plugin and theme developers to begin designing even more visually engaging user experiences.

In the meantime, if Gutenberg’s got you down, give me a holler. I can help with that. I’ve been using Gutenberg since it was available in the beta version as a plug-in and I’ve developed a couple of live sites with it.

Diane

Email me at [email protected]

More contact information is on my site Imageandaspect.com.

 

Questions? 

[email protected]

My Contact Page

Other articles you might like:

-10 Things to Do After Creating Your Website

-Using images: Tips to improve your SEO rankings

-Use a customer thank-you page to avoid missed opportunities

 

About the author

I developed Image and Aspect because I believe that professionals need to have an impactful web presence. One that showcases their unique talents, skills, and abilities as well as their values and style. A presence that focuses on social engagement and connection.

I’m passionate about what I do; I like helping fellow humans, I like having all kinds of social connection with others, and I want to give back, to make the world a better place.

I do much of the designing and coding myself, and I also have a wonderful network of professionals that may contribute as well; photographers, copywriters, branding experts.

I love designing and coding beautiful, elegant and responsive web creations. I ALSO teach and help others who want to learn how to do it themselves.

‘Tips and Snips’ is my blog, and it’s full of information and inspiration to help transform any online persona from “meh” to AMAZING! Sign-up HERE to get blog posts right to your in-box every Friday! I write about Design, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Branding, Vlogging, Color Theory, HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, WordPress, Social Media…anything you’d want to know to get yourself noticed online.

Visit Image and Aspect to learn more about your web presence options

Diane M. Metcalf, M.S.

I created a new div here because I had initially styled all of the icons on my site to be the same color. The new div allows me to separately style the icons inside of it .

“Icon-check” is the name of the check-mark icon I want to use. I already have the list of icons installed, so I know their names.

<div id=”mynewdiv”>
<h5>Status: Now Accepting Clients  <span class=”icon-check“></span>
</h5>
</div>

SPAN is an in-line element. It’s what puts the icon on the same line as the text. If you want the icon to come before the text, instead of after, just place the span class in front of the text like this:

<div id=”mynewdiv”>
<h5><span class=”icon-check”></span>  Status: Now Accepting Clients
</h5>
</div>

Remember to put a space between the span element and your text, so it looks good.

Now style it with some CSS:

#mynewdiv h5 {
padding-top: 30px;
text-align: center;
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
color: #36e736;
}

Questions?

[email protected]

My Contact Page

Other articles you might like:

-How your personal brand makes the difference

-Using images: Tips to improve your SEO rankings

-5 Tips to Stay Sane when Working from Home

 

About the author

I developed Image and Aspect because I believe that professionals need to have an impactful web presence. One that showcases their unique talents, skills, and abilities as well as their values and style. A presence that focuses on social engagement and connection.

I’m passionate about what I do; I like helping fellow humans, I like having all kinds of social connection with others, and I want to give back, to make the world a better place.

I do much of the designing and coding myself, and I also have a wonderful network of professionals that may contribute as well; photographers, copywriters, branding experts.

I love designing and coding beautiful, elegant and responsive web creations. I ALSO teach and help others who want to learn how to do it themselves.

‘Tips and Snips’ is my blog, and it’s full of information and inspiration to help transform any online persona from “meh” to AMAZING! Sign-up HERE to get blog posts right to your in-box every Friday! I write about Design, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Branding, Vlogging, Color Theory, HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, WordPress, Social Media…anything you’d want to know to get yourself noticed online.

Visit Image and Aspect to learn more about your web presence options

Diane M. Metcalf, M.S.