Web Design & Development

The social icons on your website might send visitors to your website builder’s Facebook page, or to a platform that shut down years ago. This short post explains why those icons should link to your own active, up-to-date profiles, and what a neglected feed tells potential customers about your business.

Should a graphic designer build your website, or someone who also knows SEO, conversions, lead generation, ADA compliance and interface design? A good-looking site that nobody finds or uses won’t bring in business. Here’s what each of those skills adds and why a website that works for you needs all of them alongside good design.

Would a cluttered shop window make you keep walking? Your homepage works the same way. This short 2024 Tuesday Tip asks you to look at your homepage the way your ideal customer would, with plain language instead of jargon, answers to their questions and an obvious next step, for better SEO and more conversions.

One Wild Iris client, a tax professional, skipped managed hosting to save money. Then an insecure plugin let hackers put pornographic content on the site, and the cleanup cost more than years of hosting would have. This 2024 Tuesday Tip explains what managed hosting covers, from security patches and plugin updates to backups and server monitoring.

Domain registration, DNS, email, managed and unmanaged hosting: most businesses need several of these and rarely know how they fit together. This 2023 guide explains each service in plain terms, why one company for everything isn’t always wise, which providers Wild Iris recommended and avoided, and why it offers only managed hosting.

When a browser security flaw becomes public, attackers can move fast, sometimes before a fix even exists. This 2023 post explains zero-day vulnerabilities and gives step-by-step instructions for checking and applying updates in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari on desktop, plus browsers on Android and iPhone or iPad. The menu steps reflect the browsers as of 2023.

On May 25, 2023, an internet outage in Silicon Valley made sites like Shopify, Reddit and Roblox hard to reach. Our servers were fine, but the network around them wasn’t. This post explains what we could and couldn’t fix that day, how to check Downdetector, and how our hosting is set up across several datacenters.

A Colorado non-profit client lost every image on its website when a plugin it was testing deleted them. Because the site had managed hosting with us, we restored just the affected files from offsite backups within the hour, without losing newer content. Chris Hanson explains how that differs from calling a big web host’s support line.

That few-dollars-a-month web host may be costing you more than it saves. This 2021 post explains how crowded discount servers slow your site and hurt your SEO, why support is so hard to reach, and how managed hosting with updates and a real person on the phone compares. It also names the budget hosts clients find most frustrating.

Websites can fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act too, and in 2020 predatory law firms were sending settlement demands even to sole proprietors with home offices. This post explains why an automatic accessibility plugin is rarely enough (and can even mark you as a target), and why a proper audit beats paying a large firm $5,000.