Let’s face it – creatives are brilliant at coming up with new graphic design ideas and dazzling clients but tend to be less effective on the technical side of websites. When you’re not in a position to outsource these tasks to a colleague or a third-party service (or you just don’t trust them to do it right), it’s incumbent on you to discard your reservations and improve in new areas.
This article makes some suggestions to help our creative audience face this challenge.
Focus on Learning One New Thing Each Day
When the mountain seems too high to scale, just focus on taking one step at a time.
Your progress will be slower, but when you look back 365 days from when you started stepping up your technical knowledge, you’ll see a huge improvement.
Also, your confidence to learn other technical things will increase significantly. This will become invaluable as time goes on.
Understanding Who is Visiting the Site
Any creatives that are still using website stats provided by the web host need to reassess. It’s far superior to use Google’s online analytics package instead. And, it’s also free.
If you need help understanding Google analytics, it’s worth checking out this guide by Operating Technology, which takes you step by step through signing up for the service. If you’re using WordPress as your content management system, it also explains how to integrate analytics with WordPress too.
When using Google Analytics, you have access to a huge amount of useful data. This includes the number and type of visitors, where they’ve come from, how long they spent on the site, what pages were most frequently visited, and more. It’s vastly superior to any statistics page offered by a web host.
Want a Faster Website? Choosing Better Web Hosting
When you feel that your creative designs aren’t best represented because the website is too slow, it’s time to understand web hosting better.
Most creatives already appreciate that web hosting involves a computer server and a fast connection to the internet backbone, but beyond that, it’s a bit of a mystery. Grasping the basics is useful if you wish to organize an upgrade to your hosting plan and understand what you’re buying! So, here are some basics:
- Shared Hosting – Web servers hosting hundreds or a thousand of websites. They’re overcrowded and have fewer resources. Often sluggish but inexpensive.
- VPS Hosting – Virtual private servers host fewer websites with faster technology. Their customers select how much server they can afford and gain access to its resources. Quicker hosting and greater reliability.
- Cloud Hosting – Hosting in the cloud is different from Dropbox or Google Drive. The idea with cloud hosting is that the site is configured to run from several servers. Because of this, should one server fail, the site stays online. As well as better uptime reliability, it’s also scalable for traffic spikes or special sales without the website going offline.
- Dedicated Hosting – A server just for your site is rarely needed and often the most expensive option.
Whatever way you plan to improve your technical expertise, just know that all progress is good progress! You’ll fail along the way and may need assistance, but growth is valuable, and expanding your comfort zone only supports your creative endeavors by removing stumbling blocks.
