I believe staying social, in person, is essential to our health and happiness. It is even good for business. Sam Adams is a client I met at a friend’s house. Sam owns the businesses, Cherry Design + Build and a subsidiary Seattle Basements. He hired me to work on his business identity. Seattle Basements is a completed online identity design, and my design for Cherry Design + Build will launch the summer of 2025. As the name says, Seattle Basements is a general contractor that renovates and builds out basements in the Seattle area.
Continue reading “Client Showcase: Seattle Basements”Blog
A Step by Step Guide to the WordPress Photo Gallery
Table of Contents
After I have built a WordPress website for my clients, they often want to update and edit the site themselves. This step by step guide focuses on instructing business owners on how to edit their WordPress photo gallery. There are some key details to be aware of. Once I’ve pointed them out, editing your own WordPress photo gallery will be a breeze.
Important Non-Tech Tip:
The Gallery Module is like a carton of eggs and the images are the eggs. When editing, you need to be aware of which view you are in—the gallery view or the image view. When there are two icons showing (the gallery and the image icon), you are in Image editing. One icon only, the gallery icon, you are in Gallery editing. The right column settings change in relationship to whether you are in the gallery or an individual image you clicked on.
Continue reading “A Step by Step Guide to the WordPress Photo Gallery”10 WordPress Web Design and Business Identity Clients In 2024
This is my annual look back, to thank the 28 web design and business identity clients I worked with in 2024. I’m grateful to you all, but have a top ten list that describes the main services I provided and showcases what kinds of clients I work with. I also hope to give these clients a little boost of visibility.
1. Seattle Basements
My newest client is Seattle Basements, subsidiary of Cherry Design and Build, owned by Sam Adams. I appreciate Sam trusting me to design and build Seattle Basement’s business identity and online presence. From the logo to the website, photo editing to search engine optimization. It was my intention to build a business identity that presented his portfolio of previous basement projects in a way that any home owner would trust that the next basement remodel or build-out could be theirs.
2. Dr. Keith B. Wong, Orthodontist
Keith B. Wong, DDS, MS, is an orthodontic specialist who treats adults and children with Invisalign aligners, invisible Brava lingual appliance, and digital precision braces. Dr. Wong has been my client since 2011. This year, the main focus was web maintenance, updating content, and modifying the page structure to improve the site’s search engine optimization. We finished up the year with a holiday card that Keith illustrated himself!
3. Anita Nowacka, Photographer
Anita Nowacka is a very talented and hard working photographer in Seattle. She specializes in family photography and portraits in outdoor environments. In 2015, Anita asked me to redesign her website. This year, I’ve been maintaining her site, helping write her blog articles, and managing her site’s search engine optimization and Google My Business profile. The photography field is very competitive, so I’m continually working on new ways to keep Anita “in front of her customers” in the Seattle area.
4. The Seattle Series
The Seattle Series is a classical chamber music series featuring world-class Seattle-based artists and their special guests from around the nation and globe. Bi-annually the organization has typically 3 concerts that are intimate, affordable, and of the highest quality. This client merges my love for classical music with my skill at coding in WordPress. One of my biggest professional challenges is being responsible for building a ticketing system that can be bought on the website and provides the music patron with tickets to go to the show.
5. Camp MoxyJo’s
Camp MoxyJo’s is a private campground in Federal Way, WA providing stays in several retro style campers and rooms. I built a WordPress website for Camp MoxyJo’s from 2023 to 2024 with a reservations section. Building a site that takes payments is an extra challenge. The way I accomplished the task was to look at Camp MoxyJo’s like it was a small motel and treat every camper like a room in that motel. Although they use HipCamp and AirBnB, our intention was to add a third hub for reservations and payment to add to their income.
6. Christopher Wright, Architecture
Christopher Wright is a Seattle architect with a modern Pacific Northwest style that focuses on the craft and process of designing homes. His work reminds me of my father’s architecture from the 1960’s and 1970s, that has evolved into spaces we wish to live in today. I appreciate the opportunity to design and maintain his website and help promote his online presence. This year we built an In the Works section and made a more user friendly site navigation.
7. Northwest Dharma Association
The Northwest Dharma Association is a non-profit that provides a one location online presence for Buddhism in the Pacific Northwest. Their website promotes Events, provides News that is edited by a skilled writer, and dedicated Buddhist practitioner, and lists most Buddhist Groups and organizations in the Pacific Northwest ranging from Alaska to Oregon, Theravada to Zen. The Northwest Dharma is one of my longest clients going back to 2008 when I opened the business.
8. Lane Engineering Consulting, P.C.
Lane Engineering in is an engineering consulting firm in New York and New Jersey. I designed and built their new online presence with a logo, several digital illustrations, WordPress website, and print collateral. This year I simply worked on their business cards for their growing team.
9. Johnny B Painting, LLC
Johnny B does high quality remodeling, interior painting, exterior painting, and wood finishing for homes in the Seattle metro area. Starting several years ago as their web designer, I have branched out my services to architectural photography and photo editing for the many home interior photo portfolios on his website. I also occasionally design his newsletters with a custom illustration. I appreciate that the owner, John Bridenstine gives me the opportunity to exercise my creativity in the fields I am highly skilled, like illustration, while also expand into new fields like architectural photography and photo editing.
10. AFM 689 Musicians’ Association
AFM 689 is the Musicians’ Union for Eugene. Thanks to the AFM Local 76-493 in Seattle who I’ve worked for since opening my web design business, the Eugene local asked I build a similar payment system for member’s dues. Any time money transactions are involved, my work becomes purely technical having to strictly plan out every detail of the process including a lot of conditional logic questions until you reach the correct amount of payment. Finally, setting up a stable and secure system that processes the payments. Once again, my love of music merges with my professional work.
The Benefits of Annually Reviewing My Web Design Business
This top 10 list should give you some ideas that you might desire for your online presence. It is a great way for me to thank my clients, but also see the patterns behind who I work with and the services I provide. The people I work with tend to have a profession or aspect of their process that I relate to. And, while I call myself a web designer, you can see from the variety of skills I have, for most of my clients, I create an online presence and business identity.
Looking Back at 2023, Looking Forward to 2024
Illustration created for Johnny B Painting
Looking Back at 2023
2023 was personally, and for Schildbach Design, a great year. With the COVID pandemic behind us, and having spent my first full year living in a rural environment in decades, I’m able to focus more on my business and creative projects. Half way through the year, I developed a clearer picture of what my clients were needing. I’ll explain this with a percentage breakdown of what kind of work Schildbach Design did last year, including some personal work projects.
46% Web Design
WordPress sites continue to be what my clients need, or they are flexible and agree that because it is my specialty, I should build and design within a framework I know well. Almost half of my time at work is building websites, redesigning old sites, or adding additions to old sites.
19% Administration
Anyone who runs their own business knows how much administrative work is required. Almost 1/5th of my time is email, cleaning and organizing my computer and office, digital paperwork, record keeping, taxes, estimates, applications, and invoicing. All of this mundane work is essential for running my business.
17% Illustration
Partially separate from Schildbach Design, is my previous career of being an illustrator. Website illustration is an alternative to stock art if you have the budget. Unrelated to my client websites, I also create product illustration, children’s book illustrations, and editorial illustration part time.
8% Fine Art
Entirely separate from Schildbach Design is my fine art. Occasionally, I have art patrons who will commission me to create a painting for them. Or, I occasionally will create drawings for group gallery shows. In keeping with my attention to client work, the percentage of time I put toward these creative endeavors is small.
4% Graphic Design
I’ve been doing graphic design professionally for 30 years but there was very little request for it in 2023. The hardest part about this digital download economy we live in is fields like graphic design have been replaced by templates and downloading existing designs. Starting in 2023, AI has replaced creatives by typing a command line to create a logo. I am deeply saddened by this. I miss the times of David Carson and Milton Glaser, two graphic designers who taught me to think creatively and take risks.
4% Photography
It is quite laughable that I did as much architectural photography as I did graphic design considering I’m not a photographer. But, one of my web design clients needed architectural photography for his website portfolio, and I have a camera that can do wide angle shots for home interior photography.
1% Videography
Occasionally I will do videography for my clients. They are simple videos for social media and YouTube posts. I shoot the videos with my mirrorless camera, and do editing in Adobe Premiere.
1% Marketing Schildbach Design
Most of my clients are referrals and repeat clients, so I don’t need to market Schildbach Design very much. Marketing includes SEO, social media, newsletters, and print and online advertising I do to attract new clients. I’m grateful to my clients for all the referrals and repeat work!
Looking forward to 2024
Starting today, January 3rd, 2024, my rates for hourly work is going up from $75 an hour to $80 an hour. I will still offer the same web maintenance packages at 5% and 10% off my hourly rate.
About half way through 2023, I made a change to my business strategy that I will be continuing through 2024. Prior to July of 2023, I was putting a lot of energy into trying to get graphic design, illustration assignments, and new website builds because these are the most creative projects. I’ve become more of a realist in that I’m focusing more on what my clients need. The most important things I’ve found that my clients need is consulting, web maintenance, systems administration (hosting, domain, and email setup), production (posting site content), and increasing their visibility (SEO, newletters, social media). So, in 2024, I’m focusing on cleaning up existing websites and working on the peripheral tasks associated with a website (like search engine optimization), and utilizing the best tools to serve my clients.
Happy New Year!
I look forward to working with you in 2024.
Upgrading to Google Analytics 4
Do you need help upgrading to Google Analytics 4? Contact me.
Upgrading to Google Analytics 4 is necessary for most of us. Google will stop processing data through Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 3) and has been sending email reminders to anyone using UA to upgrade to Google Analytics 4. UA will be replaced by GA4 on July 1, 2023 (less than a month from now). The shock to many is that UA data does NOT import into the new GA4 system. You will only be able to access your old UA dashboard for about 6 months after July 1, 2023 and then some time after December 2023, your UA data will be deleted! I’m here to remind you, and you have options.
If you decide to do it yourself, here is “a how to” from a web designer. There are several ways to do this, I’m showing the approach that works for small businesses needing simple analytics to track their website traffic.
Exporting Universal Analytics
The good news is that you can export and backup data from Universal Analytics, but the bad news is you can’t import it into Google Analytics 4. All instructions are best applied while on a desktop.
- To export UA data, start in the main UA dashboard. Click on Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in the left column.
- Change the Data Range in the upper right and corner to fit your needs, I suggest selecting the current year to have data for that year, then repeat this procedure to create a report for each of the preceding years.
- Scroll to the bottom of this data and choose the amount of Rows you want in the report.
- Now choose Export in the upper right hand corner, and the type of export. I’ll suggest Google Sheets, Excel, or CSV because you can clean up and modify the spreadsheet.
- There is so much more you can do customizing reports, there are several experts on Google Analytics you can refer to. I like Loves Data.
GA4 Migration and Setup
If you are still using Universal Analytics in June, 2023, you have less than a month to migrate to Google Analytics 4. Universal Analytics stops collecting data July 1, 2023. When going to Google Analytics, while in Universal Analytics, you will see a count down to the time remaining that UA collects data. You will have the option of “Go to setup assistant“, accepting the auto install of GA4 by clicking the button, or choosing “no thanks“. Either choice is fine, but I get far more articles I’ve read saying it is better to set it up yourself, so choose “no thanks“. The biggest reason I can come up confirming why so many articles suggest setting it up yourself is the auto setup uses your old Universal Analytics tag (script) on your website which has been known to cause problems loosing or reading certain kinds of data. One may never notice the problems, but I’m taking the advice from the experts. You want to have a new GA4 tag (script) on your site. Even better, you want to use Google Tag Manager to implement your tracking tag.
Using the Set Up Assistant
There are two ways to set up GA4. First, lets do this using the GA4 Set Up Assistant. Start in Universal Analytics. You know you are in Universal Analytics when there are 3 columns (GA4 has two).
- Click on GA4 set up assistant in the top middle column.
- Click on the Get Started button to create a new GA4 property.
- Uncheck the “enable data collection...” button so that you have a new (and better) tag on your website. Whether you keep or remove the old UA tag on your website has no importance because data collection stops July 1st, 2023.
- Click “create and continue“.
- Select install manually and copy your new GA4 Google Tag (script).
- Place this tag in all of your pages on your website in the <head> similarly as you did for Universal Analytics. Now, or after July 1, 2023, you can remove your old UA tag on your website pages.
- While still looking at the Tag code in Google Analytics, click the “confirm” button in the upper right hand corner.
- Then, click “Go to your GA4 property“, this takes you to the GA4 area of Google Analytics.
- Select “Data Streams”. If you just have a website, you will see your one website data stream.
- This completes the GA4 set up process using the assistant.
GA4 Setup Using the Google Tag Manager
- While in your GA4 property, select the “data streams” tab in the second column.
- Select the data stream that was created for us.
- Copy the “measurement id“.
- Go to Google Tag Manager (essentially a different site)
- Click on “Tags” on the left
- You will probably see a Universal Analytics tag. Whether you do or not, you will be creating a new tag. Click on the “new tag” button on the top right.
- Name it “GA4 Tag” or whatever you plan on tracking.
- Select “Tag Configuration“.
- Choose “GA4 configuration” as the tag type.
- Paste the measurement id we copied from our data stream in Google Analytics.
- Select “Triggering” and choose the “initialization – all pages” trigger. this will fire the tag on all the pages of our website (as long as the new GA4 script successfully embeds on the website).
- Save the tag.
- You can “Preview” the tag to make sure all pages are firing on the the website.
- Click “Submit“.
- Give your update a name and click “Publish” changes.
GA4 Wrap Up and Clean Up
- Head back to Google Analytics in the GA4 property.
- In the data stream, look at enhanced measurement. This area has options worth researching and apply to the data stream. For example, select the configuration icon (the gear) in enhanced measurements. Enable features that apply to your tracking needs.
- Save your enhanced measurements.
- Go back to the set up assistant, and look through the Property Settings. This is another area that you could research and choose the settings that you need.
- There is also an area to set up your connection to Google Ads.
- There are so many options for customization and set up of GA4, that I recommend going to someone like Loves Data for a GA4 checklist.
Cleaning up the setup of GA4
- Head back to Universal Analytics.
- In the GA4 Setup Assistant, deselect “automatically set up a basic GA4 property“.
- Head forward to GA4. In order to get the alert to be removed saying the setup is not complete (0/7 marked complete), mark all the items in the setup assistant as complete. Click the arrow of an item and mark as complete. Once you have marked all items complete, update warnings will be removed.
Conclusions about the separate GA4 Property
As we’ve mentioned Google can set up a GA4 property automatically for you, but most of my research from data experts says not to. You do not want to connect your new GA4 property with your old Universal Analytics tag. Google may have already created a GA4 property for you and connected it to your old UA tag. You may want to remove it, and start fresh. But, if you just look at page views and basic information from your data, the automatic setup Google does is fine. Most important is to know that these two options exist and to choose the best option for you and your business.