Wrapping Up 2022

This year we began with a blog about revamping our services on all managed websites. Some of those changes were followed by a secondary change, and some went very well. This blog post recaps what the revamp was all about and what the results were when the dust settled. But, of course, we will always be in a state of improvement, so these blog posts are never intended as a conclusion but more of a rolling update of our services and what we're doing behind the scenes to promote your business on the web.

We started the year with a carefully planned move to WP Engine for our website hosting. That went well for a few months when they notified us by email that they would make Cloudflare Polish a default service for their managed hosting platform. We had to make another decision to move. The reason is that the Cloudflare service strips metadata from images to reduce the file size. If you've been working with us for a while, you know that file size and functionality always require balancing, and, in this case, metadata was not negotiable for us. So, in the end, we moved to Google Cloud.

Because we had planned to move over to WP Engine for our hosting, we were relying on their security solutions. When we moved to Google Cloud, we had to decide another plan for securing managed websites. We decided to use a combination of security tools on the server available to us. So, we now manage the hosting ourselves and install BlogVault on all driven websites. BlogVault provides a Firewall, Security Scans, and Real Time Backups. The service works well with Google Cloud, and this has been a fantastic product.

Part of the plan for this year was to replace our analytics software with something off-site but still compliant with privacy laws. We did indeed find such a solution and have implemented Statcounter. This product has far exceeded expectations and is an exceptional service we will continue to use for years.

We utilize uptime monitors internally to intervene when something goes wrong. Our managed hosting platforms provided this service prior to the move to Google Cloud. While I was shopping for a replacement for this service, it seemed a good idea to provide this information to our clients. To solve this, we began using UptimeRobot to keep an eye on managed websites. You can find a link to our uptime statistics by clicking the link in the footer of this website.

We planned a move to Greatmail earlier this year. However, this move was interrupted by planned improvements by Rackspace to their Cloud Office platform, including email of online documents. In the end, we decided to stay with Rackspace.

We planned to begin utilizing Termageddon at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately, this rollout never took place after a test run revealed dependency on Javascript to load the content, which is not the best practice for accessibility. The solution on this topic was to continue providing a basic template for managed websites based on guidance from software vendors on the products and services we utilize. Please seek legal advice if you have any questions about privacy and the law.

This year we implemented a new pricing strategy. There was no change to our line-item pricing, but we did move to a single monthly fee tier of $100 that includes a 400-word blog post and image optimization for two images. If you are still at an earlier price plan and would like to take advantage of the included monthly blog post, which is down from $175 per month for the same service last year, please contact us, and we'll update your invoice.