BlueDreamer

I've never found a CDN that substantially improves performance. On one quite busy, image intensive, ecommerce site the best we could get was by serving assets from a subdomain with files stored on the same server. That was a site with a primarily UK/EU audience, certainly if you have an international audience a CDN might be worthwhile - testing is key here so you can evaluate cost/performance.

There are numerous ways to do this, two methods I use: 1. Grab the referring URL and insert into a hidden field in your form so that info is included in the email notification. 2. Create unique landing pages with unique URL's for each ad campaign with. You can then monitor how many visits each landing page gets against how many form submissions are made. Ad links can go to nearly any URL you want. Finally bear in mind a lot of people block tracking so your numbers will only be representative, not 100% accurate.

I totally agree limiting to one H1 on any page makes sense as that's the expected norm these days, usually "advised" by SEO's of course I have done pages with multiple H1's in the past, and it made no difference to search rankings. On one site we needed to pay special attention to screen reader visitors, after testing those visitors they actually suggested multiple H1's to help them tab to content area a bit easier, less keyboard taps was the main reason, so there's an accessibility angle as well. I'm up for starting a H1 revolution1

For clarity you can use as many H1 tags on a page as necessary, there is nothing in the HTML specifications documentation to say you shouldn't! Normally you'd only use one but if your page is split into 2 sections of equal importance then a H1 heading for each section can be appropriate. For example lets say you have a page about fruit n veg. These are two different things so you could organise your headings like this: <h1>Fruit</h1> <h2>Berries</h2> <h2>Tropical</h2> ...etc <h1>Vegetables</h1> <h2>Root vegetables</h2> <h2>Stem vegetables</h2> ...etc

1. Do people still bother with forums outside the big owns could I get members ? They're not as popular as they once were, social media took over, but they're still useful, especially for nice subjects. Also worthy of note a forum can run on very little PII, social media platforms suck up personal info like there's no tomorrow so you have a privacy angle. 2. Would I be just wasting my time and money ? Give it a go, it may go nowhere, but it may turn out to be useful for your local community - you will never know unless you try. 3. Would it need a lot of investment ? Not necessarily, for starters all you need is some good hosting and a forum system. You could start with shared hosting to see how it goes, if the forum starts to get busy then upgrade hosting to suit. 4. Would it need a lot of seo and money unlike in the past? If it's for a local area then use social media to get the word out. Write decent titles and meta descriptions for your key forum pages and search engines will index it. 5. would It be best to stay with a basic forum and not over do it ? Yes, start simple then add/enhance if/when you need to. It's easier to add than take away. 6. if you think its worth a go what would be a good software to start with I have a idea of a few but looking for suggestions. There's a lot to be said for SAAS forums like IPB (used by this forum), Discourse, vBulletin or Vanilla. Some of these have free plans that you can start with then upgrade as you need to. The advantage of using a hosted service is that you don't need to buy hosting and software is updated for you. The disadvantage is that changing services can be a bit of a chore though there are usually migration services to help. If you wanted to self host some of the above might offer downloadable versions. PHPBB was always the most popular self hosted. It does attract spammers but it does have anti spam extensions you can install. 7. too many big sites you can easily access which is my worry and people wont try a new site. Nothing gained, nothing lost. If we all just pondered about stuff we'd get nowhere. Sometimes in life you just have to go with an idea to see what happens.

haha yes good catch - there are probably a dozen more things that could be added!

Using SVG's shouldn't be a problem, there a several ways to use them in a CMS: 1. Use a file upload field - upload the file - call it into your templates wherever needed using an IMG tag or straight SVG tag 2. Use a textarea field - paste SVG code, call into templates wherever needed 3. Use template "snippets" or whatever your CMS calls them - useful for icons and other items that won't change often or where client doesn't need to change them - create a template snippet, add SVG code - call snippet template wherever you need in your main templates

Yes the web dev field is very broad nowadays, in the old days a "webmaster" would do everything but now roles have divided into logical roles such as: Back end developer (programming, databases) Front end developer (what the public sees, i.e. web pages, sites, Content Management Systems) UX/UI designer (how the site looks, feels and works) Marketing/SEO (getting the site noticed) And even then some roles have specialist areas, e.g. some back end people only do certain aspects such as database design. Ask youself what particular area interests you.

Yeah 1&1/Ionos are terrible - I'd recommend finding a decent host and uploading your site there.

I'd suggest looking at a flat file CMS like https://statamic.com/ - aside from being blazingly fast it has several API addons ready to use if they suit, as well as many other addons to do specific things you can't out of the box. You can also connect it up to a database if you really need to.

Sounds like you're a bit burnt out, that happens to all of us at some point. I think you're right, traditional "print" graphic design has been waning since the dawn of the internet. Gutenberg changed things radically half a millenia ago, now digital has caused another radical shift. Your options for web design (aka front end design) and UI/UX are really the same thing - a web "design" is a User Interface. Certainly as a graphics designer you'll have an eye for colour, proportions, typography etc. so that's a big plus. Couple that with learning about accessibility, usability, how HTML, CSS and Javascript work and you've got a start. There will be a market for [good] digital designers for the foreseeable future I'm sure. As early internet pioneers and adopters approach retirement (there are a lot of them!) someone has to fill those gaps.

Is that the same for commercial addon developers who run their own purchase/accounts? I'm used to be able to add details for each EECMS addon I buy: - product domain - staging/dev domain - general notes - plus of course access to licence numbers/keys + version downloads All it takes to transfer a licence is an email, job done.

I've always purchases addon licences separately for each project, that way I can renew them as an when, and also should the client leave it's trivial to transfer licences to another developer or the client themselves (easy to do an the EECMS world anyway, not sure about other platforms!). For addons that have annual usage fees I tend to bill the client annually, this includes a small fee to do updates. As far as how much to charge clients I normally add on a bit of to cover purchase, installing, and a bit of time for initial support.

Ah yes that could be a factor.

I thought only bot farms used Chrome 🤣 I get this all the time with clients who insist on using Chrome. When you clear history/cache Chrome defaults to only clearing the last hours worth so set that to "everything" and retest. If you use a different browser do you get the same problem? Can you test on a different machine with a clean Chrome install? Chrome tries to hang onto your history as much as possible by design, it's all part of Googles surveillance system. If everyone cleared their browsing history regularly then Google would get much less data to use to target ads at you.

Welcome to the forums! Yes "design" is only a part of the process, there's tons to learn, keep plugging away at it when you find new problems to solve. By the way, the learning never stops so don't feel you have to know everything! FTP has been around since the dawn of the internet - Cute FTP was the first I used in the 1990's. A few people scoff at FTP but it's perfectly fine to use at your level - though I would recommend using sFTP (the secure version) if you can, most web hosts support it. My tip: it's ok to make mistakes, when you fix them you learn stuff

Welcome to the forums! I'm not far from MK (Northants) 😀 So people on the forum know, what sort of things are you looking for?

I'd suggest explaining the hosting situation honesty and offer to transfer the site to a host of their choice. That'll be a nice gesture and a plus point in selling your services to them.

You'll probably need to start with the docs - https://developer.wordpress.org/

Welcome to the forums To replicate what Canva does think six figures at least.

So what changed? That might offer a clue: Are redirects in place for old > new URL's? Did content (text) change dramatically? How well does the site perform compared to the old site? In terms of page load speed etc. Apart from SEO are the sites visitors still able to complete their tasks easily? I've seen some redesigns that make usability/accessibility far worse that the original. Are the sites goals still being met? Exactly this. No two tools will ever tell the same story. Any tool that provides any sort of analysis will only give you a broad/general picture.

Age is no limit - go for it!

Welcome to the forums. Here's three things to try. 1. Add lazy loading to your Youtube iframe tag: <iframe src="[your_youtube_url]" loading="lazy"></iframe> This will tell a web browser not to load the video until it's in view. 2. When getting your embed code make sure you have ticked "Enable privacy enhanced mode", this stops some of Youtubes surveillance Javascript being loaded. 3. Don't load too many videos on one page. If you only have one per page that's fine but if you have 2, 3, 4 or more make a judgement call - the more videos you have on one page the slower things can get. Find a balance between presenting all the videos you want and page load times.

There are a few Jquery plugins that do world clocks, e.g. https://www.jqueryscript.net/plus/search.php?kwtype=0&keyword=world+clock

Welcome to the forums. One quick and easy way is to use Paypal "Buy now" or Cart buttons. Generate basic code at https://www.paypal.com/buttons/ to your liking then add to your products template. You can then optionally extend it by adding some custom fields to control price, size options etc to dynamically update various values in the Paypal form. I've used this method many times over the years for clients that need a simple low cost way to sell odd items like you're trying to.