January 21, 2020 Recap

The January 2020 “Let’s Fix Your Website” meetup was absolutely jam packed with interesting challenges. At this meetup several interesting milestones were reached:

  1. The Lokaal meeting space is now sponsored by the Canadian Management Consortium. Thank you to Amy L. Lee for getting this arranged! Thank you to Kevin McIntosh, our host at Lokaal, who does an amazing job making sure we are comfortable, fed and safe.
    Weglot continues to sponsor our food, and we appreciate their help. If you haven’t tried Weglot for translations please do give it a go.
  2. The meetup had an all time high attendance of 25 people.
  3. We had a full recording and pictures taken. Thank you to Robin Macrae for the recording and highlighting the event topics. Thank you to Dan Stramer for helping with the organization and taking several pictures.

The next “Let’s Fix Your Website” meetup is on February 18, 2020. RSVP now to reserve a spot.

January 21, 2020 audio recording
0:03    Start at 18:37.
 1:18    Row call. Who is here. RSVP question explained.
 19:49    Sandy Feldman and her trial of Gutenberg on a WP.com site to assess its accessibility. Check out the several relevant Slack channels and research study conducted.
 23:57    Alex on a new host he's trying, MDD. He recommended [someone] for migration support.
 25:51    What's Alex's opinion on GoDaddy as a host? It's managed offering is good but if you have 20-30 plugins and a resource intensive site, then he doesn't recommend it's managed service. 
 27:08    Jetpack? Alex: it's horrible. It's a resource intensive plugin. It's useful but perhaps too many components. Each of its many components can be turned on and off as required. 
 32:29    Back to GoDaddy, it packages and provides various capabilities to address security issues and you don't have a choice but to use them.
 34:35    Dan recommended learning about security best practices so that you have some basic understanding of your site's requirements.
 35:30    Homework assignment: restore your site from a backup to ensure that your backup procedure is working properly. Dan: it's like changing for a tire, something you need to know how to do.
 38:55    Netlify question. (It's a site hosting service with a free tier which includes free SSL and a custom domain.)
 39:15    Jonathon and updating and then checking his site's admin email address because he isn't receiving the emails to that address. Dan said to try the WPSMP plugin and noted the WP mail module in core.
 46:47    Robin on creating Gmail alias email addresses (add a "+" sign to left side). Can filter using that address.
 48:27    Alex: site health diagnostics is a recently added set of capabilities worth using. Two tabs, Status and Info. Nothing on email being properly configured.
 51:45    Mark Segal. Has an ancient site which he may convert to WP. 
 54:02    WP.com vs self-hosted sites. What are they and what does each offer?
 63:45    Mark recommends using 72 DPI images with one dimension of 1,000 pixels or more and optimized. He uses Lightroom.
 64:59    Sanjoy's performance question.
 65:07    Sergio. How can I convert an HTML and CSS [static?] site to WP. Yes, use a child theme but that isn't the issue. Use a framework, starter or base theme such as _s ["underscores"] or GeneratePress. Robin: the Pinegrow, a desktop website builder, can convert a set of HTML and CSS or PSD files into a WP theme and site which can be uploaded and run. It may be able to convert Sergio's site.
 77:01    Use of the WP theme editor. (Not recommended).
 77:52    Key WP resources: Lynda.com (TPL subscription). On Lynda.com, try Morten Rand-Hendrickson's intro video. Alex thinks that the quality of this content is as high as any resource. O'Reilly's Safari service is also useful and available through the TPL.
 86:23    Use the new block editor (Gutenberg) or the Classic editor? Check out the MRH videos on Gutenberg. Try the former out on a free WP.com site as Sandy did.
 88:24    Elementor vs Gutenberg? [They perform different functions.] Alex believes that pagebuilders add excessive overhead when measured on a service such as GTmetrix, a free performance measurement service. 
 98:34    Pizza has arrived. The formal part of the session is over.