Home page updates and Articles section on main forum? (1 Viewer)

[Jon]

I had an idea yesterday about what to put on the root part of the site. i.e. in the non-forum section. Apart from listing stats from this forum, is it worth having like an articles section? The idea is that if anybody here wants to write and article and post it there, so long as it was of ok quality, they could do so. It's just an idea and no clue what anybody here thinks about that. A link back to your website allowed in article footer and your details. e.g. I am an access developer blah blah, or whatever.

Thoughts on a postcard!

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Access Articles
I already have a couple of articles which could go on there, if they meet your criteria of course! There's one on Excel in Access and the other on Subforms ...


Excel in Access

Excel in Access

Excel in Access (Part 1) Unfortunately photobucket have decided to shove all of their pictures behind a paywall rendering this blog practically useless! I have a copy of it on my website which I have kept up to date you can find it here:- http://www.niftyaccess.com/excel-in-...access-part-1/...

www.access-programmers.co.uk

Subforms
https://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/threads/ms-access-your-data-with-sub-forms.217880/


They need a spring clean!

 

[Jon]

An additional idea is that at the end of the article, you can have a link to a forum thread that says, "Discuss this article here."

 

[isladogs]

Jon
I'm happy to contribute. There are several lengthy articles on my website that could be slightly tweaked for publishing here.
If you want to have a look at the Access Articles link in my signature line, you can get an idea of those I already have.

 

[Jon]

The adjudication of what makes a good article would be left up to you guys. Perhaps the VIPs and mods. I would not be a good judge of that nowadays, since I have only done limited Access development in recent years.

It's just an idea. I need to do something about the root part of the site, since I want to make the whole thing mobile friendly. So that means I'm going to need to invest some time in building the structure of the home part of the site. I need a new Wordpress theme, but there is also a Xenforo/ Wordpress bridge that you can buy, to help link the two. I like the idea but I don't like the extra $60 per year renewal they want to charge for the privilege!

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I want to make the whole thing mobile friendly.

I use WordPress and a page builder called Elementor for my Nifty Access website.

My website is not a very good advert for Elementor because with it you can create some excellent looking webpages, whereas I just create a very Blocky simple design, which suits the way I do things!

Elementor also handles all of the mobile aspects. It's very easy to make the minor modifications that you might need to do, to improve mobile readability, but mostly it's just automatic. I've never had to make any alterations to the mobile appearance, not yet anyway.

 

[Jon]

Looks pretty nifty Uncle (*chuckles*). I'm never keen on anything that keeps you committed to paying each year. Probably why I'm not married.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I'm never keen on anything that keeps you committed to paying each year.

The free version of Elementor is very powerful, it's probably all you would need.

 

[Jon]

I've got the Genesis framework and may extend that. I hate having to choose themes because you run them for a long time. I am not genius at aesthetic. In any case, I hope to get something up so at least Google thinks we are modern. And if we got some articles up, some people might even look at that part of the site, heavens forbid!

 

[vba_php]

I need a new Wordpress theme, but there is also a Xenforo/ Wordpress bridge that you can buy, to help link the two. I like the idea but I don't like the extra $60 per year renewal they want to charge for the privilege!

Jon,

I don't know what you're tinkering with in regards to wordpress, but i can tell you from experience that it's horribly structured. But my needs might be a bit too complex for it. I've explored the source files of it, including the CSS and they don't link their structural files with their style sheets in the traditional manner, which makes it extremely difficult to find out "what is pulling from what" when you have to make a change that can't be done through the back-end dashboard. I don't know if you would get a dashboard tool with the package ur talking about.

 

[GinaWhipp]

Hmm, I like this idea and perhaps some of the Stickies could be moved there? <thinking out loud>

 

[Jon]

I am still working on this. I've been researching the wonderful world of WordPress page builders and themes. Things move fast in the online world and there are a plethora of different options. I have narrowed it down to one option. What I don't like is it is a $240pa gig. I prefer to pay one fee and then be done with it. But a lot of the new pricing models require annual membership. They want to bleed me dry! In any case, the software suit can do all sorts of things, like create the webpages easily, help split test different headlines or contact forms. It means I can try to work out what type of funnel best converts visitors to members who sign up. You can also do surveys and a host of other things. Yet another steep learning curve for me.

The current home page is quite frankly rubbish. And it was all my own work too! Modern webpage design is always mobile responsive, and mine isn't! So, I expect to have something a lot snazzier soon. It might have popups and all sorts, just to annoy everybody!

On the home page, I want to have a "call to action" that steers people towards signing up or using the forum. I am likely to also have an RSS feed of the latest posts shown on the home page.

If anybody else has ideas of what might be good to add to the homepage, let me have them!

 

[Jon]

Yesterday, I went for a ThriveThemes annual membership for $240. It looked like a really good choice. Then, after signing up, I noticed that their website ran dog-slow. Whaaaat?!! I've spent ages trying to get this site super-fast. The last thing I want to do is have the WordPress section to be slow. I looked at the source code for the ThriveThemes homepage and it looked very heavy and inefficient. Huge blocks of css rather than separate files. It was messy. On Googles Page Insights, their hompage mobile score was 9/100 and their Desktop score was 46/100. OMG!

So then I had another look at Divi. When you get more knowledge, you have a different vantage point. What I liked about ThriveThemes was it is a website conversions based approach, where the software is geared to getting people to act. But then I thought perhaps Divi could do something similar, even if they are not marketing it that way. Poor page load speeds affect conversions for a start! Checking the Divi homepage Page Insights scores, at the time of writing they are 64/100 for mobile and 99/100 for desktop. Yes!! Looking at the page source code, and they don't have these huge blocks of css. Everything is much more efficient.

Next, I checked the Alexa scores for Divi vs ThriveThemes. Divi appears to have a way higher Alexa rank, which means much more traffic. Then I used builtwith.com, which can give some excellent insights. I found this: https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Divi

The framework is on the up! 1.4M websites using it.

Then I looked at ThriveThemes: https://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Thrive-Themes

They have 112K websites.

So, given this, I figure going with the big player might be the wise thing to do. I also used the site Uncle mentions when comparing AWF vs our competitiors, SimilarWeb. Divi gets 3.6M visitors pm while ThriveThemes gets 619K.

Divi charges $250pa for lifetime access, while ThriveThemes charges $240pa. Today, I went to the Divi site and a popup said buy through their affiliate link and get a 20% discount, so it is down to $200 for lifetime access. I will do a bit more research but there is a very strong chance I will seek a refund from ThriveThemes and switch to Divi. I hate asking for refunds but I was shocked when I saw how poor their page speed scores were.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

ThriveThemes annual membership

I built a website with thrive themes, but I just couldn't get my head around how to set up it's conversions based approach, as you term it.

 

[Jon]

I've been doing even more research, and some are saying Divi is bloated as well. I still don't know what to do and it is sucking up days of time.

Yes Uncle, these things are not easy. Did you go for an annual membership or something?

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Did you go for an annual membership or something?

I had an annual membership with thrive themes. Initially, I very pleased with it. But it just didn't seem simple to set up. They also said they had a theme they were developing for WordPress where you could do video lessons, which I was interested in but it never materialised. I don't know if they've got it yet or not. I subscribe to this chap Adam, wpcrafter ( WordPress crafter) he's done a few in-depth looks at various WordPress software including thrive themes. I've always found his reviews very honest. https://www.wpcrafter.com/review/thrive-architect/

His YouTube Channel HERE:-

WPCrafter.com WordPress For Non-Techies

WPCrafter.com is dedicated to learning and leveraging WordPress. We offer simple to follow tutorial videos on WordPress that covers simple topics like instal...

www.youtube.com

In the end I went with Elementor, it was sort of the new kid on the Block... The main reason I went for it was because I could display my YouTube videos with some text nicely presented against them, it all works on mobile, you don't have to do anything really, although you can fiddle about with the mobile display if you want to. What I really liked, was once I had set out the video and text as I liked, I could save it as a template and just pop the template in, add the video URL, the descriptive text I wanted to display next to it and there you go, a blog! Example HERE:-

Generate Multiple Reports - Nifty Access

Generate Multiple Reports This blog came about because of an answer I gave to a particular OP's question. Therefore the code isn't generic, it is designed for a specific situation, like most examples! However I hope there's enough information here for you to follow what's happening. Multiple...

www.niftyaccess.com

 

[Jon]

I like your cartoon on your site. Hehe.

Elementor has a good reputation too. I've just been through a video comparing several theme builders. Elementor has an annual subscription while Divi has a one off payment for lifetime access. That strongly steers me towards it. I am still researching the page speed or Divi though. There is an Oxygen theme which is supposed to focus on page speed, but it is far less popular than Divi and is also an annual license.

Thanks for the link. I will take a peek.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I like your cartoon on your site. Hehe.

My office looks like the one on the left!

 

[Jon]

I'm in mental turmoil. Been reading articles saying that these page builder type themes tend to be slow. And then reading other articles about how to speed them up. But I am not sure how much you can speed them up! I want a fast zippy site, I want a great popular page builder. It seems like Divi might not be the solution. I don't know.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I'm not 100% sure Elementor is the correct tool for you, as I think you will have to use other products to develop your Sales Funnels... Mind you, from what I've read you are better off having separate things, a separate page builder and separate Sales Funnel software because if you buy/use software which is specifically designed for creating a Sales Funnel, then if the provider starts doing something you don't like, you can be trapped/stuck with them! If you keep things separate, then it's easier to change to a new Sales Funnel provider.

What prompted me to post was that to get an idea of the speed of a page builder, and in the case of Elementor in particular. Elementor have a monthly gallery of top websites built with Elementor. This is the current month January 2020 - what I was thinking was, you could open each of the sites in turn and use some online software to measure/report on the speed. Might give you an idea of the performance of Elementor...

I actually don't agree with their listing of the top site, they are all very good, but I think number two should be number one --- it's brilliant!

To qualify my answer,I have very little experience with various page builders except Elementor, which I like very much, but I suspect it might be a bit slow sometimes. I have absolutely no experience with sales funnels. (I do watch a lot of Adam "wpCrafter" videos) - I just noticed - Adam's website is s*** hot it practically loads before you press the button! -