David Martin Design

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Author: David Martin Design

Instant SEO Boost: How Compressor.io Can Drastically Improve Your Site’s Exposure
This search engine optimization tip goes way back to the early 90s – back when I first started building websites. In the 90s, it was essential to build websites that were quick and optimized because people still had dial-up internet connections. In order to build a fast loading website, you had to be very careful not to use too many large images. If you did include bigger image files, then it would take forever for the website to load, and we all know that we only have a fleeting amount of time to capture somebody’s attention.

What does Compressor.io do?

With Compressor.io, you can easily upload your images in a variety of formats – including PNG, GIF, & JPEG – and this program will try to condense them without losing too much quality. As you can see from the featured image of this post, I was able to capture an image of myself taking a picture in my car’s rearview mirror that was over 8 megabytes and compress it down to a much smaller size. The image has maintained it’s quality without causing my site’s load speed to slow down every time a visitor clicks on this page.
Whenever you upload your images to Facebook, Instagram, and other sites, they automatically apply compression to your images to make them load faster for a better user experience. When you run your own website though, WordPress doesn’t automatically include compression functionality out of the box. There are different plugins that you can use to help compress your images when you upload them to the media library, however, I like to compress the images before I upload them by using Compressor.io.

How do you use Compressor.io to condense images?

It starts out with you getting your original image from your camera. Then, once you have it downloaded on your device, you can upload it to your website. Then, after Compressor.io compresses your image, you can download it onto your local machine again. Once it is on your local machine, then you go into your WordPress media library and upload it. It’s as simple as that!

How does this application impact my website’s SEO?

Compressor.io works to condense your website images to help them load faster. In turn, this ends up increasing the load speed of your entire website. With no bulky image files eating up bandwidth, your pages can refresh quickly for visitors, greatly increasing user experience. Perhaps most importantly, it will improve your website’s SEO. Because page speed is such an important factor for the algorithms that rank your web pages, your site will reach closer to the top search result when load time is optimized Using Compressor.io is a simple change that can work wonders for your website’s performance.

Whether you’re looking for ways to improve your site’s exposure or you want to build a site from scratch, David Martin Design can help. I’ve spent decades building, editing, and optimizing websites, and I’d be more than happy to support you in your business ventures. Feel free to reach out to me to learn more about what I offer.
February 10, 2021
What’s Microsoft Clarity and How Can It Help Improve Your Website?

Picture this: You build an amazing site for your business and set it live. A few weeks pass by, and you eagerly check to see how many people visited your site. Despite receiving some decent traffic, you want to take immediate steps to improve these numbers but…you have no idea how to do it.

Many site owners find themselves in the exact same position. Even with ample data about their site performance, they’re still not sure how to iron out the kinks to offer users a seamless experience. Microsft Clarity just might be the tool to help solve this problem.

Here, we’ll take a deep look into what Clarity offers and how your website can benefit from it.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

Microsoft Clarity is a specialized analytics tool designed to help site owners gain a better understanding of how visitors interact with their site. With informative features such as heatmaps and session replays, Clarity can offer a unique view of your site’s performance that other popular tools such as Google Analytics simply don’t offer.

By tracking user behavior on your site, Clarity collects basic information regarding engagement, interactions, and sessions. This data is conveniently summarized in the dashboard, giving you quick and up-to-date statistics about your site. Users are broken down into various categories such as country and device type for more detailed insights.

What does Microsoft Clarity offer?

It’s no secret that some site analytics tools can take some getting used to. Fortunately, the simple layout of Microsoft Clarity and its relatively straightforward function make for a more user-friendly experience.

To get a better idea of what this newer tool offers, let’s dissect Clarity’s primary features.

Dashboard and Insights

The Microsoft Clarity dashboard acts as a central hub where all of your site’s data is collected and organized. Here, you can find standard metrics that most analytics tools provide including total sessions, unique users, pages per session, and engagement.

A quick glance at the Clarity dashboard will reveal some intriguing markers that you might not be familiar with. Dead clicks, rage clicks, and excessive scrolling are special insights designed to help site owners pinpoint problem areas that might be preventing visitors from having an optimal user experience.

If you’ve ever had a webpage freeze or refuse to load quicker than dial-up, you understand why “rage clicks” and “excessive scrolls” are the perfect indicators of user frustration. Identifying and fixing these problem areas might just be the key to boosting your site’s engagement and conversions.

Session Recording

While distinctive features such as rage clicks do a great job of setting Microsoft Clarity apart from well-established competitors, we’ve just taken a peek into this tool’s diverse bag of tricks. One of the most attractive features of Clarity is its comprehensive session recording application which records user behavior for each and every session. Everything from clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements are recorded and stored.

You can review these clips at any time to get a clear picture of your average user’s behavior. This data is available for each page. For an even deeper understanding, Clarity organizes these recordings by specific browsers to help determine browser-specific issues. With advanced AI, you can even tell whether a particular session is part of a larger pattern or an outlier. This is useful for ruling out anomalies and addressing routine problems.

Heatmaps

While more general analytics can offer a good idea of how users bounce between your site’s pages, Microsoft Clarity takes it a step further by allowing site owners to see how visitors behave on individual pages. With the heatmaps function, you have a clear and informative view of where users tend to click.

This information is further divided by devices such as mobile, tablet, and desktop so you can see how behavior varies between each category. You can use this thorough tool to see how your visitors move around your site, where they’re getting hung up, and what can be done to improve their sessions.

How much does Microsoft Clarity cost?

You’ll be pleased to know that Microsoft Clarity is currently offered as a free service. There’s also no cap on traffic. This means that whether you need to track a newly built site or you want to switch analytics tools on a site that’s already successful, you’ll be paying the exact same amount…nothing!

Is it a replacement for Google Analytics?

While Microsoft Clarity is advertised as an analytics tool, it serves a very specific function. It can give you some insight that Google Analytics can’t, but that doesn’t mean you should say goodbye to your current applications. It works better as an excellent supplement to more comprehensive tools than it does as your primary resource.

Interested in making a site for your next project? Reach out to David Martin Design to learn more about the process. David has decades of experience building sites for business owners and can make a site based on your unique needs.

January 26, 2021
Grammarly Is Like Orthodontics For Your Writing

Slowly, I believe that Grammarly is changing my writing behavior and improving my writing style. It provides great statistics and gives you information on what are the most often mistakes that you make. As I find myself writing more emails, web content, and social media posts, it’s important to me to make them grammatically correct.

I wrote that entire first paragraph without any sort of green or red lines underlining my work! That’s an accomplishment in my book.

I believe that Grammarly is a fantastic data tool that analyzes your writing and makes helpful AI-driven suggestions to help you make better writing choices. Over time it will help me align my writing more with what I am thinking and help me convey messages in a much clearer language for readers.

Try out the Grammarly apps on your operating system of choice
(MacOS, iPad, Chrome, Your Phone, or Microsoft Word).

Grammarly is an American-based technology company that offers a digital writing assistance tool based on artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The software was first released in July 2009 in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Let me know what you think of Grammarly and please share some of your writing.

January 11, 2021
A New WordPress Website for Artist & Musician Henry Leck
David Martin Design has launched a new WordPress website for Arts Alliance of Greater Bloomington member, Henry Leck at https://henryleck.com.

Henry Leck – Artistic Director & Internationally Recognized Choral Director
Visit https://henryleck.com

It was a challenge at first to figure out how to best work together due to the Covid-19 pandemic and technology restrictions. We began with a Google Meet and it was great to meet online. It was really easy to use and helpful to see Henry face to face and to be able to share screens with each other.

Henry’s New WordPress Website

Henry and David discussed where it was best to store information for the new website. Using a shared Google Drive folder, Henry could upload photos of his artwork, an Excel spreadsheet of inventory, and a Pages file of painting information. After securing the digital workspace folder it was time to work on developing the website content. Henry & David created a very organized Google Sheets spreadsheet, assigned SKU numbers, and developed product descriptions, captions, and filenames based on the shared online inventory catalog.

Optimized Filenames with Keyword-Rich Information

David renamed all of the images with the sku number and hyphens between keywords that would describe each one. Instead of uploading an image from the camera with a default name like “IMG6480.jpg”, it’s important to rename the image henry-leck-art-195-Harbor-Scene-after-C-Curry-Bohm.jpg so if someone were searching for this type of image it would be more relevant and come up in a search.

Organized WordPress Pages, Posts, Tags, & Categories

After learning about search engine optimization (SEO), Henry understood the importance of optimizing images with keyword-rich file names, optimizing title tags, using headings, meta tags, the taxonomy of WordPress pages, posts, tags, and how to name categories. After organizing all of this information, it was clear that David could begin building the website.

Preferred Domain Name: HenryLeck.com

Henry let David know that he had worked with a web designer previously and they decided to try and recover the old domain rather than starting out with a new one. This was an important decision because not only is it better for branding, but how long a domain name has been registered for is definitely a search engine ranking factor.

Fast Web Hosting with David Martin Design

After transferring the domain registration and updating the contact information, David set up a new cPanel business web hosting account and pointed Henry’s domain to his new web hosting server. The web hosting service that David Martin Design provides includes a FREE SSL certificate, email service, spam filtering, and lots of other great features.

After installing WordPress and configuring the optimal settings David built all of the pages, posts, categories, and tags. David installed the WordPress Twenty Twenty theme and worked with Henry to choose the preferred layout and colors. David set up plugins for website security (WordFence), spam (Akismet), SEO (Yoast SEO), and others to add more options to his WordPress website.

Tracking to Understand How Customers Use The Website

In addition to building the website it’s important to track how it performs. David setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Microsoft Clarity for Henry in order to see reports about how people interact with his website.

David & Henry have built a great website at https://henryleck.com and we hope that you’ll go check it out and see what you think.

About Henry Leck

An internationally recognized choral director, Henry Leck is a professor emeritus in choral music at Butler University, where he served on the faculty for 27 years. He is the Founder and Conductor Laureate of the Indianapolis Children’s Choir where he served for 30 years. He has conducted on podiums throughout the world, and still finds some time to teach, conduct, and edit.

Since Henry’s “semi-retirement” in 2016 he has taken up painting …. oil painting to be specific. While continuing to conduct, teach, and edit music, painting has quickly become one of his passions in life. He is an active member of the Upland Plein Air Painters and the Indiana Plein Air Painters Association.

We invite you to learn more about what Henry likes to paint.

Art (97)
- Architecture (15)
- Figurative (4)
- For Sale (40)
- Landscape (42)
- Portrait (5)
- Seascape (4)
- Still Life (27)
November 29, 2020
What is an SSL Certificate & Why Is It Important For Your Website Success?

An SSL Certificate is vital for your website’s success. If you accept e-commerce orders, it helps you secure credit card numbers, passwords, and other sensitive data your visitors submit through your site.

Even if you don’t sell products via your website having an SSL certificate in place will increase customer confidence, improve SEO ranking, & protect your data.

How Do I Setup an SSL Certificate?

If your website is hosted with David Martin Design, it includes a shared SSL certificate for the sites on our server. This covers the basics of security and will take care of complying with security requirements.

If your website is hosted elsewhere, then you will need to check with your hosting provider. A lot of times GoDaddy, BlueHost, GreenGeeks, or another hosting provider will offer you an SSL certificate from a 3rd party company that will be installed on their end. Check with them to see what your options are.

Do I Really Need an SSL?

That depends on your risk tolerance. Are you OK leaving your car doors unlocked at night? Are you OK with leaving your front door unlocked?

I think we both know the answer to this. Take the time to set up your infrastructure the right way and you can avoid a lot of headaches in the future. Yes, set up an SSL certificate.

For more information on this, please visit this excellent Google resource: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/7630973?hl=en

December 5, 2019
The Top Plugins To Enhance Your WordPress Website
These are the top FREE plugins for WordPress according to WordPress.com. This data is from September 2019.
- Akismet Anti-Spam – Used by millions of websites, Akismet filters out hundreds of millions of spam comments from the Web every day. Add Akismet to your site so you don’t have to worry about spam again.
- All in One SEO Pack – Use All in One SEO Pack to optimize your WordPress site for SEO. It’s easy and works out of the box for beginners, and has advanced features and an API for developers.
- All-in-One WP Migration – This plugin exports your WordPress website including the database, media files, plugins and themes with no technical knowledge required.
- Classic Editor – Classic Editor is an official plugin maintained by the WordPress team that restores the previous (“classic”) WordPress editor and the “Edit Post” screen. It makes it possible to use plugins that extend that screen, add old-style meta boxes, or otherwise depend on the previous editor.
- Contact Form by WPForms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for WordPress – WPForms allows you to create beautiful contact forms, feedback form, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site in minutes, not hours!
- Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
- Duplicate Post – This plugin allows users to clone posts of any type, or copy them to new drafts for further editing.
- Elementor Page Builder – A page builder that delivers high-end page designs and advanced capabilities.
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics (formerly GADWP) – This Google Analytics for WordPress plugin enables you to track your site using the latest Google Analytics tracking code and allows you to view key Google Analytics stats in your WordPress install.
- Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights – With over 2 million active installs, MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.
- Jetpack by WordPress.com – Jetpack is a popular WordPress plugin created by Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com. The plugin brings many of the most powerful features available on WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress sites and thereby contributing greatly to the improvement of WordPress powered blogs and websites.
- Really Simple SSL – Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum.
- TinyMCE Advanced – TinyMCE Advanced introduces a “Classic Paragraph” block for the block editor (Gutenberg). If you are not quite ready to switch to the block editor or have plugins that cannot be used there (yet), using the Classic Paragraph block is your best option. It lets you continue to use the familiar TinyMCE editor for most tasks, and at the same time gives you full access to all blocks and new features in the block editor.
- UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin – simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest-ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!
- WooCommerce – With 80,876,475 downloads, WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform for building an online store (stats from Builtwith).
- Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan – Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that was built from the ground up to protect WordPress.
- WordPress Importer – The WordPress Importer will import the following content from a WordPress export file: Posts, pages and other custom post types, Comments, Custom fields and post meta, Categories, tags and terms from custom taxonomies, & Authors.
- WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
- Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin. It handles the technical optimization of your site & assists with optimizing your content.
December 5, 2019
How To Setup A Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, & Disclaimer For Your Website

I just had an outstanding Google Meet with Hans Skillrud from Termageddon. He helped get davidmartindesign.com all set up with a compliant Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, & a Disclaimer for my website.

Hans & Donata from Termageddon. This picture was taken from inside the birdcage @ The City Museum in St. Louis at WordCamp 2019. What a great place to meet!

I met Hans & Donata at WordCamp in St. Louis recently and we immediately hit it off. They run an awesome web service that helps businesses with websites comply with data privacy laws.

In a Google Meeting with Hans, he walked me through the process to set each one of these up and we were able to build these rich data policies without needing a super expensive law firm. Their service was easy to use and we were able to generate the policies and get them live in under 1 hour!

I can rest assured that my policies will automatically be updated with the newest language and I am compliant even if the laws change. I can trust that they’ve got my back!

It’s SUPER important for anyone with a website to pay attention to these things. It’s going to be the law soon & it’s important for you to be aware of these things.

Do a Google search for “California Consumer Privacy Act” to learn more.

After you do that, let me know if you need some help with this!

December 4, 2019
How to set up a secure spam-free email contact form using Google forms
Yesterday, I had a client tell me that he had a little over 115 submissions on his website contact form. He was very happy with the results and I asked him how many of those contact form submissions were spam?

His answer was, “None of them.”

Out of all of the submissions that he had received, none of them contained spam or junk information. They were all from potential customers asking questions about his services and products.

I was really happy to hear that the solution that we built together was so successful at eliminating spam and producing relevant leads for his business.

Here is how we did it:

To create a Google Form:
1. Sign in to your Google account and go to Google Forms.
2. Create a new form. Give it a good name. Set it up very simply with only the info you will need for your purposes. I usually use the fields: Your Name, Your Email, Your Phone, and Your Message.
3. Take a moment to adjust the appearance and upload a custom header.
4. Click on the hamburger 🍔 menu (the 3 dots make a bun and burger) and click add-ons.
  
  Choose the add on called Email Notifications for Google Forms. It allows for the entire form to be emailed and attached as a PDF. It’s great that you can store your Google form details in a spreadsheet and also attach them to your email as a PDF.
5. Follow the instructions in the help files on Amit Agarwal’s website and you will find that it’s very intuitive. If you’d like me to record a screencast or follow up with more information just let me know!
I hope this technology tip was helpful and if you end up building a new form because of it please let me know!
November 19, 2019
New Custom Website Kicked Off for Ava’s Waste Removal
It’s been a pleasure working with Steve and Mary over at Ava’s Waste Removal in Ellettsville (pretty close to Bloomington) since the beginning of February 2019.

Mary, Ava, & Steve holding hands

We’ve built each page by handcrafting each web page title, each web page description, the canonical URLs, the open graph meta tags for social sharing, and important information for a high performing business website.

Steve and Mary agreed that in addition to a custom website, we needed to make sure that other important accounts were also setup. In addition to building a responsive website for Ava’s, David did some additional account setup including:
- setup a shared workspace for content planning
- registered a domain name (https://avaswasteremoval.com)
- setup a Google calendar for Recycling
- connected Google Analytics to keep track of website visitors and statistics
- setup Google Search Console to see keyword queries that people are searching for
- setup Google Photos for sharing photos to put on the website and improving them
- built helpful content for customers that also accurately described Ava’s Waste Removal and their services (weekly trash pickup, dumpster rentals, roll off containers).
After developing some great content, we turned that into structured semantic HTML with Schema data for good results and high ranking on the search engine ranking pages. I tested the website for valid HTML and pagespeed and was very happy with the results. There was a tradeoff when we added the Facebook Messenger widget into the website. It caused two errors and also made the pagespeed score go from 99 out of 100 to 41 out of 100. The pagespeed decrease is worth it in my opinion so that customers can message them on Facebook Messenger.

Steve & Mary from Ava’s wrote a great review about our work together and it’s so nice to have that happen.

“David did a great job! He’s responsive, organized, and generally cares about helping us grow our business. From beginning to end David was attentive to our needs and delivered a great website. Highly recommend his services!”
Google Review from Steve @ Ava’s Waste Removal

I look forward to seeing their progress as they build a great small business. It’s been great working with them and if you need trash service in Bloomington, Ellettsville, or the surrounding area, definitely see if you are in their service area.
March 27, 2019