Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
“The future is still so much bigger than the past.”
- Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web
For platform engineers, the future is bright. Commonly thought of as the next stage beyond DevOps, platform engineers are one of the most in-demand and well-regarded positions in tech. While there is a huge upside to being on the cutting edge of an industry, there is one major, potential drawback: A lack of tried and true wisdom you can apply to the role.
AI-powered ChatGPT has undoubtedly been the center of discussion for the past couple of weeks. Every person I interact with, every social media post I lay my eyes on, and every trending topic I scroll through is talking about this buzzword ChatGPT. (Not exaggerating, I promise.)
People are sharing different prompts for it, discussing its pros, criticizing it, and whatnot.
An Extract from my Paper "The Socially Acceptable Social Networks: A Reality Check for Information Engineering on the Internet"
Working Copy of the Paper — National Journal for Computer Science and Technology, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2014) - Narsinbhai Institute of Computer Studies and Management, Gujarat, India
Money talks, and there is an awful lot of money on the web these days. That is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it does seem to have hamstrung how websites are designed and financed. The pandemic — and the consequent collapse of an already warped online ad ecosystem — makes it all the clearer that the web needs to diversify the way it makes money, and who it ultimately serves.
The Internet is not in the best shape right now. Back in 2017, the founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, said:
“The system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy.”
I think it’s safe to say things have largely gotten worse since then. Ads everywhere, tracking run amok, clickbait, misinformation, net neutrality under siege... engagement is king — more important than nuance, ethics, or truth — because that’s where the money is. The average user sees thousands of ads per day. The World Wide Web isn’t exactly humanity’s shining light right now, at a time when a whole lot of things are compounding our general sense of inescapable doom.
In the midst of this dog-track-dog online culture, the common website has been browbeaten into meek, insipid husks of what they could be. Can we get another ad in there? What about a few more pop-ups? Maybe a few affiliate links. We’ve all experienced the insidiousness of the modern web, we’ve all seen the pop-ups saying ‘We care about your privacy’ before asking us to sign away our privacy. One tires of being lied to so often, and so casually.
Still, I’m not here to complain. At least, I’m not just here to complain. There are flickers of light in the darkness. There are other ways to pay for websites. It’s just as well too because legislation will catch up with the wild wild World Wide Web eventually and then ads will be worth even less.
That’s what this piece is about: alternatives, and why they’re worth embracing. There will always be ads, and up to a point that’s fine, but there shouldn’t only be ads.
Not every website needs to make money. Let’s get that out of the way. Making money is not the measure of a thing. Not every website needs to care about cost. Hobbies, blogs, forums, digital art… plenty of things are worth doing for their own sake.
This article is directed at sites or web apps that offer some kind of service, with operational costs and long-term financial factors that extend beyond a few dollars on a domain name. This article is about widening the horizon of the online economy beyond ads, ads, and more ads.
This is probably the most obvious alternative to ads, and trickier than you might think to implement. The principle of it is simple: a website does something of value and asks users to pay for it.
A major advantage of subscriptions is their simplicity. Want X? Pay for X. More and more people are wising up to the fact that few things online are truly free. More often than not when an online service is ‘free’ its users are the product. A valuable service reasonably priced is a welcome antidote to that.
A high profile example of this is Medium. Signing up for a few dollars a month gives members access to articles. It’s an increasingly popular approach in editorial circles. Some publications, like The Guardian, make their content accessible to everyone, while the likes of The New York Times use a paywall. In either case, the pitch is the same: help make what we do possible by subscribing.
Smashing itself does this well, having pivoted away from ads during the big site redesign a few years back. Ads still play a big part, yes, but they’re not the only part. Sustainability online isn’t about moving all your eggs from one basket to another — it’s about variety, about escaping the tunnel vision of advertising.
There are examples of subscriptions and donations working away from editorial contexts. Lynda charges for its courses. Wikipedia, mercifully, is ad-free, sustained by intermittent donation drives to its parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation.
The subscription approach isn’t for everyone. The above examples all happen to be household names, after all. Strange that. Trust is such a big factor, and if you’re new on the block how many people are likely to give you their moola?
And, of course, there is also the Catch-22 situation of paywalls making a site inaccessible to most of the Internet. It’s bad for growing an audience and at odds with the web’s founding spirit of openness and transparency. That doesn’t sit well with a lot of people — including myself.
I think the saving grace here is that the ‘subscription model’ is much more of a spectrum than it was even five years ago. You can have everything from paywalls to ‘buy me a coffee’ buttons depending on what a website does.
If you provide a service — be it quality editorial content, useful tools, open access to data, or whatever else — don’t be shy about asking for support. And don’t be shy about incorporating those requests into the website’s design. A variety of tools and platforms can be integrated into existing sites with relative ease. Patreon, Ko-fi, and plenty more.
This is not about making people feel guilty. Not everyone can afford to support the sites they visit, and not everyone will think you’re worth supporting. It’s on you to make a positive case for yourself. Crowdfunding platforms like Open Collective and Chuffed are especially good reference points for this, modeling behavior such as:
There is also the question of integration. Buttons, pop-ups, prudently placed CTAs. It all adds up, having started and pushed a reader patron scheme at a previous job.
It’s early days for this one, but something to keep an eye on. Web Monetization is a concept whereby Internet users have a kind of fund they top up regularly — let’s say $5 every month. When time is spent on a site, a fraction of the fund is transferred to that site.
The Brave web browser is a major example of this. Another is Web Monetization, which is being proposed as a W3C standard. Or Scroll, a kind of catch-all ad-free web package.
This approach seems to have struck a nerve, I think because it hits a balance between a Wild West Internet and a corporate one. The more people believe in it, the better it works. Three billion people use the web. If 10% signed up for three bucks a month that would still be a cool ten billion dollars up for grabs.
For the time being results are closer to pennies. But hey, nothing worth having comes easy. Supporting this approach is a two-way street. Depending on the system, implementation can be as simple as adding a line of code to the <head> of your website. It’s also a case of walking the walk.
Will this approach alone save the Internet? Probably not, but again, moving away from ads is about diversification, not finding a silver bullet.
Now obviously, free platforms are not the answer to large-scale applications and web experiences. They are, however, often a perfect way to have an online presence without being sucked into the engagement black hole of modern social media.
Places like Neocities — a homage of sorts to GeoCities — still have a lot of life in them. I know, I’m on it. Independent, playful non-corporate platforms feel like something from another time, but they’re still perfectly good ways of planting your flag online.
It seems marketing has hammered into people that the only website worth having is one you’re paying through the nose for. Not so. The DIY weird web is alive and well.
With the likes of Netlify and GitHub pages about it’s perfectly possible to piggyback along without paying for anything more than a domain name, and even that is optional.
Of course, there is a limit to this kind of approach, but that doesn’t make it any less viable. By the time a website is bringing in enough traffic to warrant a dedicated hosting plan, it’s likely well placed to be asking for support.
All this talk of diversification and sustainability ties into a broader discussion going on right now about privacy. Half the battle is messaging. Although awareness is growing, a lot of people still don’t know about the costs of ‘free’ online experiences. That’s not an accident. Take the time to explain that if someone subscribes to a website’s service, they’re not just receiving the service. They’re receiving priority, respect, and privacy.
Advocating for a less ad-centric web means taking an honest look at who our masters are online. When you make a site, who is the site for? Is it for advertisers? Affiliates? Clients? Or is it for the people visiting the site? How lovely would it be to have robust, ethical income strategies that made websites beholden first and foremost to the people who use them.
In a line of work where projects are increasingly fragmented, it’s easy to remove oneself from the moral failings of any given project. Edward Snowden said the same was true of the NSA spying programs he leaked in 2013. Just this year he identified social networks and apps as carrying similar risks.
Incorporate sustainability into your designs. Communicate what you do and how you survive and what people can do to help. Progress does not happen on its own. It never has and it never will. We have to be the change we want to see.
I think we can all agree that passwords suck. They’re difficult to remember, which leads to people simply reusing the same, weak, words/phrases over and over. They’re also easily phishable, with ever more subtle and believable attacks happening all the time.
WebAuthn (Web Authentication) promises to fix web passwords with a strong, simple. un-phishable standard for secure authentication. It is a credential management API built into modern web browsers. allowing web applications to strongly authenticate users. It is now a World Wide Web Consortium standard.
Web accessibility is often said to be a 'must' for the World Wide Web today. The term "web accessibility" defines a set of guidelines developers need to follow to make the interaction of people with disabilities and web apps more convenient. Any website should be accessible in terms of its content, UI/UX design, and layout. In this article, the Logicify team gives HTML/CSS developers a few practical tips to make web layouts more accessible — both for people and assistive devices.
Whatever markup you are using, structure it correctly and neatly, avoid skipping levels. Always favor native elements (if there are ones) over faking them. For instance, use the <button> elements instead of <span> or <div> in HTML. Use <nav> for navigation, <button> for page actions.
In honor of his brainchild’s 30th birthday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a bone to pick with the likes of Google, Facebook, Verizon, AT&T, and the FCC. Like any good parent, he’s not so sure these so-called friends have his World Wide Web’s best interests at heart, so he’s laying down some ground rules.
Introduced at last year’s Web Summit in Lisbon, but relaunched on this ever so joyous occasion, Berners-Lee’s Contract for the Web seeks to reverse the social, corporate, and governmental trends jeopardizing his creation’s future.
Don’t let the limits of language limit your website’s reach on the World Wide Web. People from all over the world visit your website. If you’re serving content in only one language, you’re pushing many interested visitors away.
Having a multilingual site has its perks. It lets you connect with an international audience and bring in new customers. A multi-language site also gives you a competitive edge. If there’s a potential multilingual market for your business, and your competitors aren’t taking advantage of that, you definitely need to go for it!
“Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Creating a multilingual WordPress site isn’t hard with so many plugins out there.
But not so fast, my plugin-addicted friends! For this feat, I’ve moved away from multilingual plugins towards the Multisite of things.
A WordPress Multisite is like a network of many individual WordPress sites, all distinct yet connected together by a single WordPress core. This means that you don’t have to fuss about endless WordPress configurations to add or tweak a new language.
The power of the building a plugin-less multilingual site lies in WordPress Multisite.
In this post, you’ll learn how to create your own multilingual WordPress site without plugins…from scratch!
And I promise, it’ll be as easy as pie.
WordPress Multisite lets you create multiple sites using the same installation. I’ll be implementing a French version (sacrilege!) of my website here, so I’ll be coding along with you.
Need help with setting up WordPress multisite subdomains? Go through our in-depth Multisite guide to get all caught up.
After setting up your Multisite, the next step is to set up a subdomain. A subdomain is part of your parent domain, while the subdirectory is a folder within it.
For instance, fr.ioanadragnef.com is a subdomain, while ioanadragnef.com/fr is a subdirectory. If you need a quick refresher, we’ve covered the differences between Multisite subdomains vs. subdirectories in another post.
I’ll setup my website so that my French users can see their language code as a subdomain (i.e. fr.ioanadragnef.com). And since I have set my WordPress site up for over a month, I have to use the subdomain option. However, this restriction is only for the initial Multisite setup. You can easily switch between the network types afterwards.
You can set up a subdomain from either your hosting provider or from within WordPress. If you do it from within WordPress, you must change some DNS records to allow creation of wildcard subdomains.
I will create a French version of my site by going to My Sites > Network Admin > Sites, and selecting Add New.
Enter the fields at the prompt and choose a subdomain for your new site. If you’re making a multilingual WordPress site, it makes sense to have the subdomain be the language code (e.g. fr for French), but you can make it whatever you want.
Be careful not to change the Site Language option here if you don’t speak the language. This will only change the language of your admin dashboard.
Once you’ve added the site, you’ll see it in the My Sites drop-down menu. You can manage it the same way you do the other by adding plugins, themes, and content.
Once you’ve configured your subdomain, you’ll want to install the theme of your main website to your other-language site.
Remember, both the sites have to look as identical to each other as possible, which means using the same theme, brand colors, plugins, menus, etc. This way it won’t be confusing to your visitors when they switch the language.
The next step is to translate and add my content.
My website is fairly succinct, so luckily there’s not much to translate. However, if you’ve got a lot of pages, there are shortcuts—you can use the Multisite Post Duplicator or NS Cloner plugins.
Now, I know I mentioned earlier that this will be a no-plugin multilingual WordPress site, but we’ve completed that already. The plugins recommended above are for helping you with laying down your translated pages and posts.
Now you have a Multisite, a subdomain, you’ve configured your content and website structure. It’s time to get translatin’!
Even with significant advances in machine translation tech, there’s still no match for human translators. If you want details and nuance in your translations (and you should), I recommend getting professional help. Upwork and Fiverr are some platforms where you can hire skilled translators in various international languages at a great price.
But if you still want to go for automated translations, there are a few WordPress translation plugins that you can use to get it done easily.
Once your website is ready and translated, all you have to do is add a link to it in your original-language website (i.e. your main network site). This way, your readers can switch back and forth between the various languages available!
To do this, we’ll be creating a custom menu. Since I’m only using a single language, I’ll link to the French version of my site in my menu.
To create a custom link within your website’s primary menu, go to Appearance > Menus, and then edit your main menu.
Under Custom Links, enter the URL of the subdomain and the navigation label. Now add the custom link to the menu via the Add to Menu button.
If you want to create a menu that contains multiple languages, create a new menu and add multiple custom links with the various language subdomains.
For example, if I want a Languages menu that has both French and Spanish, first I’ll create a new Languages menu.
I’ll then add my French and Spanish subdomains under different custom links, and use the name of the language as the navigation label.
Congratulations! You’ve now built a multilingual WordPress Multisite with no plugins.
A multilingual site enables you to reach more readers than ever before. It makes you look more professional and open you up to new opportunities. And since you’ve created your multilingual site via Multisite, you have more control over your sites than if you’d just used a plugin.
Using Multisite to do it has many advantages for you, the main of which is giving you ultimate control over your site. It allows you to create, tweak, and present your translated content however you want.
The trick here to avoid multilingual plugins is to use a Multisite along with a custom menu to direct your readers to the right subsites.
It’s never too late to add a new language to your site. After all, in the game of tongues, you either Spanish or Vanish!