Cutting edge website design in Dungarvan

A background in visual arts has provided me with a useful toolkit and advantage in delivering websites that are more visually impressive than my client’s competitors. However, websites must also be well-coded. This is vitally important, and easily overlooked because 99% of clients do not have the resources or knowledge required to inspect the source code of a website to review the code. Most clients are essentially blind in this aspect of their investment. This is similar to buying a used car without having an experience mechanic thoroughly inspect the vehicle before purchase ☠️.

99% of clients do not have the resources or knowledge required to inspect the source code of a website to review the code. Most clients are essentially blind in this aspect of their investment.

The importance of semantic markup

It is vitally important for every public website to incorporate semantic markup standards to maximise compatibility. Semantic markup refers to the structure of the website code which makes it accessible to other services on the internet (e.g. search engines) and also users with disabilities (more on this later).

Does this relate to SEO?

When we use proper markup hierarchies in our design and development, Google and other search engines recognise those efforts and reward with higher rankings 🚀.

→ Importance Of Semantic HTML In SEO

What’s this Accessibility thing?

Visitors with disabilities use tools like screen readers to interpret a website for them. Page structure, link and menu item descriptions, even the contrast of elements should be observed to make the site usable by users with disabilities. Websites with semantic markup will be very usable (accessible), while non-semantic sites, will not.

→ How Much Does Google Care About Accessibility?

Putting it all together

When selecting an agency or freelancer to develop your website, be aware that many (or even most) do not put proper consideration to semantic structure and accessibility when they deliver to the client. They can do this because they know that the client has likely not been educated in these areas, and will be considering the product almost solely on a visual basis. The agency or freelancer possibly has not even bothered to become educated themselves about these concerns, and will be developing on that basis.

Here’s what you can do to verify that you are dealing with a true professional, who will deliver a modern website with good coding standards, producing websites that will stand the test of time.

Questions to ask:

1. Do you use starter templates or themes? If so, what template do you recommend?
   • If the answer is yes, this is a potential red flag, as starter templates and themes are far too “universal” to be truly performative and often lack the semantic features required.
2. What accessibility features do you build into the websites you produce?
   • Without any hesitation at all, the answer should be something like: “Every website we deliver has full screen reader capabilities such as skip links, visual focus cues, descriptive links, correct header tags, and contrast ratios”.

Further checks:

1. Ask for the most recent 3 websites from the agency / freelancer. Send them to a trusted third party who can check them for modern coding standards, accessibility features etc.
2. Educate yourself on the basics of modern website development. Good resources are listed below.

Resources:

→ Semantic HTML5 Elements Explained

→ EU Web Accessibility Directive

The post Bringing Premium Website Design to Dungarvan appeared first on Brightwood / Creative.

Error: couldn't get currently installed version for /opt/eff.org/certbot/venv/bin/letsencrypt:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/eff.org/certbot/venv/bin/letsencrypt", line 7, in <module>
from certbot.main import main
File "/opt/eff.org/certbot/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/certbot/main.py", line 6, in <module>
import logging.handlers
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/logging/__init__.py", line 26, in <module>
import sys, os, time, cStringIO, traceback, warnings, weakref, collections
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/weakref.py", line 14, in <module>
from _weakref import (
ImportError: cannot import name _remove_dead_weakref

One of the upgrades in Debian 10 is a Python upgrade to v3.7.2. This caused my certbot renewal to break.

How to fix the error:

sudo apt update

Next, install the dependencies for the python3-certbot-nginx package, which include the python3-acme, python3-certbot, python3-mock, python3-openssl, python3-pkg-resources, python3-pyparsing, and python3-zope.interface packages

sudo apt install python3-acme python3-certbot python3-mock python3-openssl python3-pkg-resources python3-pyparsing python3-zope.interface

Finally, install the python3-certbot-nginx package:

sudo apt install python3-certbot-nginx

To verify that your certbot is working properly:

certbot renew --dry-run

Don’t forget to check your Cron jobs…

In my case – the old Cron job for Let’s Encrypt renewals remained broken, so I disabled it and created a new one.

Old Cron:

/opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto renew >> /var/log/le-renew.log

New Cron:

certbot renew >> /var/log/le-renew.log

The post Let’s Encrypt cert renewals broken after Debian 10 ‘Buster’ upgrade appeared first on Brightwood / Creative.

The traditional experience typically works like this — the business owner or manager begins a relationship with an agency to develop a website. They also need a logo, domain name, email addresses, and hosting. After the agency collects basic requirements from the client, an estimate is produced (typically €1800-5000) for the website and logo. 50% of the estimate is paid to begin work on the project. After weeks or months of back-and-forth development, the website is ready for launch. The rest of the contract is paid, and the website goes live. Other service like the Email (€50-100 /year ), domain name (€15-50 /year), and website hosting (€50-300 /year) are invoiced annually. Updates to the website are charged by the hour.

Here is what a typical invoicing schedule looks like for that project over 15 months:

€1800 [50% project deposit]
  2 months later
€1800 [website launch]
  3 months later
€120 [updates to site]
  3 months later
€210 [more updates]
  2 months later
€20 [domain name renewal]
  1 month later
€50 [email service renewal]
  2 weeks later
€150 [website hosting renewal]
  2 months later
€250 [updates to site]

The client overall is happy with their website — but the invoicing is confusing, or awkward at least. What’s domain name renewal, and how is it different than website hosting renewal? Am I being charged fairly for these services? It’s actually hard to predict exactly how much the website and related services are going to cost the company next month, or at any point in the future.

Businesses (and individuals) often find that a more predictable expenditure on their essential services (i.e. flat monthly rate) is more easily managed.

Small startups with minimal funding also have a problem with setup costs, and a website + logo (€2k?) can definitely cause anxiety in this regard.

Our goal: Smash these complications and barriers to business, and streamline the entire development and billing process as much as possible.

Total Online Start-up Kit for Business
€200 per month. For everything.

What you get:

Brand Suite (custom logos + colour palette + typekit)

Wordpress Website (plus optional premium e-commerce plugins for shops, events, memberships etc, SEO, & SSL)

Pixelcraft Email Service (up to 10 mailboxes, unlimited storage, webmail, encrypted IMAP/POP3 integration)

1 x Domain Name (your choice)

Managed Wordpress Website Hosting (includes updates, backups, delivery optimization, security scans and virus/malware protection)

Support, Updates, & Development Credits

Let’s explore details of these components

Here’s a closer look at each of the five essential components the Total Online Start-up Kit for Business 2019

1. Brand Suite.

We will custom design a logo package for your company. Your logo package includes variations of the primary design to account for light/dark and tall/wide use cases. The logos are provided to the client in all common formats (vector pdf, raster png/jpg).

An official colour palette is developed alongside the logo suite.

The primary and secondary fonts and type recommendations are also included.

All of the above are packaged into a Brand Book (also known as a Style Guide), which is provided to the client in digital format.

2. Wordpress Website.

Using your new Brand Suite, we will develop a custom website for your company. The website will be developed using the popular and powerful Wordpress CMS. Since no business is exactly like another, we consult and work carefully with your company to make sure that your new website is setup to function exactly to suit the needs of your business.

If your business requires e-commerce, we will install and configure to your requirements.

Other popular configurations are ticketing & registration sites for festivals and events, membership sites for content creators and online teachers.

All pages and content on the website is configured with comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and secured with an SSL certificate.

Analytics platform of your choice is added to monitor visitor traffic and behaviour.

3. Email Service.

Our premium PixelCraft email platform has the latest technology and works just like Gmail or other Email providers. You can have up to 10 separate Email accounts, each with unlimited storage.

The Pixelcraft Email platform has built-in spam filtering, IMAP/POP3 access, SSL encryption, and a user-friendly webmail interface.

4. Domain Name.

We will register, manage settings, and handle renewals of any (1) domain name of your choice. If you aren’t sure what domain names are available or best suited for your business, we can help you pick one out.

5. Website Hosting.

Websites need a good home where they can “live” and perform their duties without complications. We operate and manage an array of specialised web servers in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Every website that we host is carefully monitored for security, integrity, and performance. Wordpress websites require routine maintenance. Package updates and core components are monitored updated by our website care team so that your website will always be healthy, happy, secure, and running smoothly.

We also take backup snapshots of your site and store them securely in case of any emergency situation should arise.

5. Support, Updates, & Development Credits

Included in our monthly service is an allowance of development credits which you may spend at any time if you require changes to your website. For example, a new page, handful of new Shop items, an image gallery, or a blog post.

All of the service in your package are supported by our customer care team, seven days a week, should any issue or problem arise.

Launch your business

Now that you can see the process and advantages of this unique start-up package, are you ready to launch your business online?

[contact-form-7 id=”1644″ title=”Start-up Kit Request Form”]

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Recently I noticed that one of our client websites was creating many 404 “not found” errors in our NGINX server logs. The errors were for “@2x.jpg” static files. I believe that the active Wordpress theme was coded to server @2x file URLs for retina and other HDPI screens, but the files are not automatically generated. Rather than dig into the theme’s template files and attempt some kind of patch, and since the website already looks great on high definition devices, I chose to look at adding a rule in the site’s NGINX .conf to stop these pesky 404s.

Normally a few Google searches would return a StackOverflow page with exactly the nginx rules required, but this time I could not dig up any pages where this problem had been addressed and fixed.

For Apache there was this post, where the .htaccess rules were perfectly coded. I even tried converting this ruleset to NGINX using an online converter, but the result was full of errors.

After some brief experimentation, I have a working NGINX ruleset that has solved my retina image 404 issue.

# rewrite retina image requests
location ~* ^(.*)\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ {
if ($request_filename ~ '@2x\.[a-z]+$') {
rewrite ^(.*)\@2x(.*)$ $1$2 last;
}
}

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What you can expect:

• One unique commentary article written and published weekly to your published post directory, notifying every single one of your connections and also building search traffic
• Posting in up to 5 targeted groups, 3 times a week
• Content is optimized for maximum impact and search benefits
• Personality matching system, to ensure our voice matches yours
• Assistance with growing connections

LinkedIn Management

€149/mo

Get more referrals, exposure and make a meaningful impact on LinkedIn with weekly commentary articles, posted in up to 5 targeted groups, 3 times a week.

Get started

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Probably the most useful software business tool we use at Brightwood Creative is Pancake App.

We love to craft beautiful websites and deliver smart graphic design projects to clients, and while business accountancy is certainly important, we’d rather be sketching the next piece of digital art or coding a responsive website than punching numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. Pancake App makes business accounting a breeze. More than just invoicing software, Pancake tracks our projects, expenses, proposals, estimates and takes payments.

Setting Up Pancake App

As self-hosted software, Pancake App is installed on any web-server by copying the installation files into an active web directory. Pancake also requires one MySQL database. The software will run on most common URL or directory configurations. For example in a directory (http://*domain*/pancake) or subdomain (http://pancake.*domain*/). The system functions perfectly with either Apache or Nginx web-servers. Once installed, the administrator can add more users (employees for example) with their own user names and passwords.

Next you will want to add your business’ Branding assets so that emails, invoices, estimates and proposals have your custom logo attached. Similarly, add your business address, phone numbers & contact email addresses to the appropriate fields.

Screenshots:

The post Take Control Of Your Invoicing & Project Management With Pancake App appeared first on Brightwood / Creative.

Website development:

A client requirement was back-end website access to update website content. The popular website platform Wordpress was selected as the most appropriate CMS for this project.

The post Recent Project: East Coast Martial Arts appeared first on Brightwood / Creative.

1) Blazing Fast, Reliable Linux Servers

We host all websites on fast, reliable, monitored, up-to-date Debian Linux web servers from Blacknight Solutions and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Why is this important?
Your website has significantly more resources available to it on our servers when compared to basic shared hosting plans that can be purchased elsewhere. Also worth noting is that Google uses server response and page-loading times in it’s ranking algorithms.

2) Routine Website Backups

We always make sure that your website files and database are backed up on a strict schedule. All backups are checked for consistency, and previous versions of your website will be available in case you want to undo some changes that you made.

Why is this important?
Your valuable online business is secure. If your website is compromised we can restore any number of previous versions within minutes. Interested in a previous version of your website? We can provide it within a few hours.

3) Monitored Website Updates

We maintain every CMS website (i.e WordPress, Magento, Joomla) with all important, security-essential daily updates to the core files, plugins and themes.

Why is this important?
Out-dated websites are easy-picking for hackers. Most at-risk are websites with old versions of plugins and core website files. Having your website always up-to-date is crucial for security and performance.

4) Hardened Website Security

Our Linux web servers are hardened with the best firewall and malware protection. On top of that, each website has its own firewall and daily security monitoring system. We make sure that you don’t have any problems with hackers installing malware on your website.

5) Support Whenever You Need It

We promise to provide every client with quick response to any problem or question, and can be reached at day or night— and even on the weekends.

See Hosting Options

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