We are proud to announce that Valier as joined forces with two other Missoula, Montana video creation veterans to create Missoula Media Company – a video production, website design, website development, and graphic design company based out of…well…Missoula. Valier will continue to thrive, but our focus has shifted more towards web application development and away from digital marketing over the years. We have long felt that joining a collective that includes local photography and video production pros would be a good move to expand our capabilities from a digital marketing perspective, and we were right. So far, we are blown away at the way our involvement with MMCO has elevated our digital marketing!
Digital Marketing is Collaborative / Three is Better Than One
Merritt Lentz – Graphic Design, Website Design, and Motion Graphics
Merritt is the founder of Valier and a veteran designer, developer, and graphic designer with over 13 years of professional experience in the industry. According to Merritt, Valier needed to break out of the bubble of working in remote offices and regular Zoom meetings. Valier’s relocation to Missoula, Montana served as the perfect transitional time to make this move, with our new offices located at 101 East Broadway Street – right in the vibrant beating heart of downtown Missoula. This new space with expansive views of the mountains serves as the home of Valier as well as Missoula Media Company.
Benjamin Zeimet – Videography and Photography
Ben is Missoula Media Company’s lead photographer and videographer, and simply put, his work takes all of our projects up 10 levels. Building a website with award winning photography and videography provided by Ben flat out changes the game. During a time where everyone can build a decent looking website, we are separating ourselves from the pack by providing rich media that is captivating and immersive. Additionally, we can now take on full video production projects, where Valier was limited to providing motion graphics and 3d modelling.
Nick Davis – Writing and Producing
Nick is Missoula Media Company’s producer and writer. Nick has an extensive background of over 20 years in video production, and is quite frankly the best producer in the region. His story telling drives branding projects forward into new and illuminating places, and bringing his writing skillset into the website design arena has been transformative in terms of elevating the quality of the content we can create. Nick’s passion for the outdoors and life in Montana has helped him to produce some amazing outdoor video projects, including this amazing video for Epic Montana:
What does this mean for existing Valier clients?
It means that you can now hire us for top-of-the-line video production, photography, and writing through our partnership with Missoula Media Company. Whether you are a locally-based business or one of our clients from around the globe, we would love to work with you remotely or travel to a filming location to create immersive rich media for your brand. To learn more about Missoula Media Company and the services we offer, or to ask for a quote, contact MMCO today!
One of the most common recommendations that you hear regarding WordPress security upgrades is to change the name of your WP-Admin directory. Does this really make much of a difference?
Not really.
Improving WordPress Security by changing the WP-Admin directory
So what does this do exactly? Well it makes it harder for a hacker to find your WP-Admin directory and attempt a brute force hack. That’s known as “security through obscurity,” and while it will prevent a certain number of malicious IPs from reaching your login screen, it won’t prevent sophisticated attacks in any real way. Here is what the WordFence Security experts have to say about this:
Changing your WP-Admin Directory Can Break Your Site
There are tons of plugins and themes that depend on wp-admin being located at /wp-admin. One common reason is that plugins or themes may rely on accessing the admin-ajax.php file, which is in the root of the WP-Admin directory. If you change this directory, the plugin or theme may not have the proper configuration to be able to find it at its new directory, and the AJAX call will fail. For many sites, changing this directory isn’t a viable option, and as you will see, it does little to protect your site at the end of the day.
Better WordPress Protection Against Brute Force
The security pros at WordFence have a great feature that detects brute force hack attempts and bans the IP address that attempted the hack. It then submits this IP to a blacklist, which includes blacklisted IPs from all over the world. Sites that are on this blacklist are not permitted to access your website.
The easiest solution for protecting your site is to ensure that every user has a strong password. This is critical. Your WordPress site security is only as bulletproof as your weakest armor, and if users are creating weak passwords, there will always be security issues. We recommend auditing password strength for all users automatically, and making sure that they are all using strong passwords. For an extra layer of security, you can also enable 2FA to force users to verify their login on new devices.
Contact Valier for a full WordPress Website Security Audit
To refer back to the armor analogy, its important to note that security issues with themes and plugins is the most common manner in which WordPress sites are hacked. It’s imperative that you keep WordPress website up to date, including themes, plugins, and WP-Core, and that you audit every plugin that you use to make sure you aren’t installing something that damages the security of your site.
The best way to make sure that you are doing everything you can from a security standpoint is to hire a WordPress security expert. Valier offers a fixed-rate audit for any WordPress site, which is a great way to make sure you are doing what you can to protect your website and your customers’ data. We will analyze plugins and themes, and perform a series of updates to make sure your site is safe and secure. We also offer ongoing WordPress security services, which includes premium security services and ongoing testing/updates. If you want to be a worry-free WordPress site owner, this is the way to go.
With the sudden switch to Lighthouse, the once revered optimization platform becomes unrecognizable and unusable.
Editors note: It would seem that the team at GTMetrix has listened to the developers that were impacted by the sudden website optimization platform revision, and have been working tirelessly to improve the proprietary parts of their testing platform to offer more relevant scores. They also worked closely with Valier to address optimization issues on our managed sites, and as a result our sites improved and GTMetrix improved their scoring system. While this post is relevant in the sense that it offers insight into the process that took place, we now hope that it also serves as a testament to GTMetrix’s commitment toward its customers. We will continue to monitor GTMetrix’s platform updates and will continue to discuss these changes here at valiermedia.com.
Today I went to complete an ongoing optimization project for a client of mine only to discover that the entire GTMetrix platform has been converted to use Lighthouse rather than PageSpeed and YSlow. While I am aware of the “advantages” that Google feels that Lighthouse offers (they think all of their software is the best), the service has never provided useful optimization reports for developers like myself, who are generally tasked with updating a site until it scores well in a trusted rating system. For years, that trusted rating system has been PageSpeed and YSlow through GTMetrix.
I have been an ardent supporter of GTMetrix for years, and have continuously found the reports offered through PageSpeed and YSlow to be vastly superior to the gross generalizations made by Google’s optimization platform. Google’s PageSpeed testing platform for example, pitches the need to switch to their proprietary image extension (webp), presenting this as a major issue with website performance when we all know what it is – another effort by Google to use their purchasing power to force more of the internet to be reliant on their tech. Many browsers don’t even support that image format! After over a decade of working as a developer, I can comfortably say that Google often uses their software to pitch services that they offer at every juncture, even if the service won’t actually serve their customer’s best interest.
Now let’s talk results.
Many sites that objectively perform well, and have had every available effort to optimize the site short of stripping it down to nothing perform terribly on the new GTMetrix rating system. This prevents developers from being able to explain to their clients that their site isn’t actually performing at 30%, that there are a few small things that could be changed but largely the third party scripts that have been added to the site (and are completely out of our hands as developers) are making it appear as though their site is performing about as poorly as possible. Irrational scores like this make me constantly have to explain that a single image that can be compressed to save a whopping 1kb of data shouldn’t be reducing a site’s image optimization score down to 60%, but that’s exactly what it does. What’s worse, is that Google can then use these asinine scores to determine the page ranking of your website. Say that again – if you don’t use Google’s proprietary image extension, they may be pushing your page down in search results.
In GTMetrix’s own words, they say that Lighthouse is designed to rate how a page actually loads for the user, rather than how it is built. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Take a look at this real-world example of two sites I manage:
Site A – scoring 39 Site B – scoring 95
I am using a relatively very slow internet connection right now (~12mbps) at my country home, and the user experience in loading these two pages is roughly the same. Neither appear particularly slow or fast. But the reality is that Site B has a large 33.1mb HTML5 video loading in the masthead area that I know for a fact was not optimized properly. It is the slower loading site, and the performance issues are obvious, measurable, and solvable. But according to the new GTMetrix Lighthouse rating system, a system that is supposed to be more accurate, Site B is getting a solid “A” while Site A is getting a very low “E” – which is a special rating for sites that are worse than an “F.” It would be one thing if the sites were in the same ballpark, that at least would be reasonable. But they aren’t even on the same planet in terms of there scores, so what is the value of GTMetrix to developers now that it doesn’t actually provide any objective measure of a site’s performance? In their own blog post they explain how PageSpeed only showed how well a site was built, not how well it actually performs, but it did both and their own screenshot shows that it did both in very clear terms – three percentage based ratings for structure and three objective scores for load time, size, and requests. Just look at the vast disparity between these scores, many of which are using the same optimization techniques and all of which are getting good structure scores:
With the move to Lighthouse, it is highly unlikely that I continue to use GTMetrix for anything, and will assuredly end up cancelling my account. But that’s not the real issue. This change affects the profitability of all active optimization projects for every one GTMetrix’s loyal customers, and may force them to rework large parts of their business and edit marketing materials. Companies that focus solely on optimization now have to purchase credits to run more than three scans, rendering the test and contact business model dead in the water. If you deliver monthly optimization reports your clients are likely suddenly seeing horrible scores without any explanation as to why they have plummeted.
The bottom line
Developers need to be able to show that they did their job well in today’s development world, but if GTMetrix service can’t recognize the difference between a site with a 33mb video loading at the top of the page and a fairly efficient website, or worse, it thinks the efficient website is trash (what else would you call a score of 39?) and the unoptimized website is nigh perfection, how can you possibly rely on their service to represent your work?
I would rather not have to write such a scathing review, but the truth is that I am far from being the only developer who will be negatively affected by this change. My hope is that this article helps to serve as a wake up call for GTMetrix and potentially, Google, and that our voices as developers are heard.
We are the ones who are ultimately tasked with optimizing websites. As a paid subscriber, why didn’t we receive notifications in our dashboard area that this change was coming? Why weren’t we given an option of using the legacy software while we transition to another service (edit: this was added and announced in late November following backlash from customers, but like most major updates, customers should have been given the option to switch to Lighthouse, not the other way around). Both would have been thoughtful moves for their customers, but with this move it is clear that we are not a priority. Just look at the comments they received on their Facebook page announcement, do these look like happy customers?
🎉 Welcome to the new GTmetrix – by powered by Lighthouse. Learn more about our new performance metrics, new test…
The rise of analytics has ushered in a new era of business management. Once only obtainable through expensive market research, data is now available, and used by businesses of all shapes and sizes. Google Analytics, when used properly, is one of the most commonly used and powerful analytics tools on the market. Its also fucking free. Everyone is, or should be, using it. Sadly, many website owners misinterpret their website analytics data and rush off to hire a web developer fix things that aren’t actually broken.
Many website owners look to see improvements in two categories: pageviews and conversions. After all, a store that gets busier and sells more product is growing right? Perhaps, but if pageviews or conversions are not increasing, does that then mean that the business is dying? You see, this becomes an area where you want to dig deeper into the data and perform experiments in order to discover what is working and what isn’t. Maybe your product is missing a key feature. Maybe the prices are too high. Maybe your traffic is coming from off-topic search terms or bad advertising. All of this can be researched through a careful examination of the existing numbers.
Seasons Change, Data Does Too.
First, compare your data trends to previous quarters, then to one year ago, and then two years ago. Most websites go through natural fluctuations on a seasonal basis. For me, November and December are usually big months, while April and May are usually pretty slow by comparison. This is likely due to tax season fluctuations. Having been through a few years of this, I now know what to expect but initially I was caught off guard!
New websites haven’t been around long enough to demonstrate how the seasons will impact your analytics data. Your first year, your first quarter, and your first month are all experiments. You don’t have a large enough sample size at this point to fully understand the data, so you will have to rely on your professional instincts and short term experimentation to draw strong conclusions.
Where’s Your Traffic Coming From?
Where your traffic is coming from makes a big difference. Often times, this is reflected in your bounce rate. Think about it this way, if you ran an ad on the radio for a sale on cars but you actually run a billiards store, you would likely get a bunch of visitors who immediately turn around and leave once they see that you don’t have what they want. Your bounce rate is just that: customers who bail right away.
One of the best ways to analyze your bounce rate is to look at individual traffic sources and see where they are coming from. Start from your highest traffic pages and highest bounce rate pages, and go down the list. Are the visitors arriving through organic searches? Paid advertising? What are the search terms that are attracting them? For example, a user searching for “restaurants near me” and landing on a web page that talks about restaurants in a different state are going to leave. These people are hungry. Don’t do that to them, and don’t do that to your bounce rate, even if it means that your pageviews are improving.
Run experiments through A-B Testing
If you feel confident that your product is priced properly and your traffic is consistently coming from good sources, then its time to analyze the design of your site. To do this effectively, run an A-B test using Google Experiments so that you can compare and contrast page style and content variations so that you aren’t left guessing. The results will show you which page variation performed better, helping you to understand which parts of your website design are working better than others.
One good way to see if your website design is impacting your sales is to run a short A-B test where you put your product in a very simplified page. I’m not talking a page that sucks, just a page that is ultra minimalist – like this page. A page that this leaves little for the user to be turned off by in terms of design, so if it performs as poorly as your main product page, then you can bet that your website design isn’t impacting your conversion rate as much as your product is. Here’s the thing – a good web designer or developer is going to push you to isolate variables and take a good look at your entire online presence rather than just jumping into redesigning the site. This isn’t because they are proud of the site and are unwilling to change it, rather that they are willing to tell you not to spend your hard earned money on their services if they aren’t going to solve the problem.
…and cut yourself some slack!
The internet is an extremely competitive and confusing place. In 2019, there are a 1.8 billion sites and 51.8% of all internet traffic comes from bots. All Cyberdyne jokes aside, this means that most of the traffic coming to your site could be completely irrelevant. In the next article, I will show you how you can configure Google Analytics to filter out bot traffic and get closer to the truth!
– Merritt
Valier (pronounced “Va-leer”) is a boutique graphic design and website development studio focused on creating unique projects for unique clients. We work with companies and individuals that are pushing the boundaries within their industry and are looking for a partner in media development that can inject life and creativity into their marketing presence. With over 10 years of experience in the graphic design and website development industries, Merritt Lentz (Founder), has a proven track record of producing successful and innovative projects for a wide variety of clients ranging from artists and ski companies to government agencies and payment processing companies. Regardless of the size or complexity of your vision, we will help you hone in on a digital actualization of that vision and deliver a product that is rich and captivating.
WordPress has gone through a number of changes over the course of its life cycle. I know of at least one major developer who even considers WordPress to be a legacy application – meaning that it has passed beyond the the peak of its life cycle. From a popularity standpoint I’d say that’s pretty debatable considering the number of sites out there that are using WordPress. However, what they are referring to is just the overall architecture of the WordPress platform and how it compares to some of the new(er) kids on the block.
React app development, for example, has really taken the development world by storm, and in many cases, slower PHP based applications are being phased out in a lot of cases for JavaScript applications. There are pros and cons to either language, but what is important to keep in mind is that WordPress will still continue to have a place in as a marketing tool for years to come. It’s just that popular. Because of this, the demand for WordPress development will keep a lot of developers very busy coding WordPress themes and plugins. So how do we take a 10 year old PHP platform and modernize it using modern libraries like React?
Enter Gutenberg
The biggest change in the WordPress website development world is the implementation of Gutenberg as part of the WordPress core. Gutenberg basically allows WordPress to function as a block editor by replacing the popular but now somewhat dated feeling WYSIWYG editor. The Gutenberg block editor is both great and frustrating to use at times, but it does represent a major milestone in the life cycle of the WordPress platform. Most importantly, it indicates that WordPress is adapting and growing. Guess what Gutenberg is built off of? React. Want to build a new Gutenberg block for your WordPress site? You are going to have to dig into some React development.
Gutenberg offers a number of advantages in terms of being able to organize content in a way that is efficient and consistent. Take the YouTube Gutenberg block for example: in the past you would copy and paste the embed code from YouTube and style the resulting iFrame if necessary. These days? Simply add a new block, select “YouTube” from the list of available blocks, and add the video ID. The best part is that if you then want to move the video to a new place on the page, you can click and drag the block to a new location.
Hey look its a Gutenberg block with a video about Gutenberg blocks. That’s some “Inception” shit right there.
Update your WordPress site and start using Gutenberg
At Valier, pride ourselves in being able to deliver highly customized WordPress packages to our clients. Lately, we’ve been focusing on creating custom blocks for the Gutenberg Editor to give our clients even greater control over how their WordPress site performs, looks and functions. If your WordPress site launched before Gutenberg was released, then there are likely a number features that you are missing out on.
We design, develop, and manage WordPress sites for clients located all over the globe. If you are looking to modernize your WordPress site and start taking advantage of the Gutenberg block editor, get in touch with Valier.
