Professional Web Design

In today’s digital landscape, having a strong online presence is crucial for businesses of all sizes. When it comes to creating an effective website, the choice of a professional web designer can make all the difference. While DIY website builders may seem tempting, partnering with a skilled web designer brings forth a multitude of benefits that go beyond aesthetics. Let’s explore the advantages of choosing a professional web designer to craft your online identity.

Customized and Unique Design:

Professional web designers possess the expertise to create a website tailored specifically to your brand. They understand that your website is an extension of your business, and through their skillful craftsmanship, they can design a visually captivating and user-friendly interface that represents your brand’s values, personality, and objectives. A custom-designed website sets you apart from competitors and leaves a lasting impression on your target audience.

Enhanced User Experience:

User experience is paramount in today’s fast-paced online world. A professional web designer excels at optimizing your website for seamless navigation, intuitive interface design, and swift loading times. By prioritizing user experience, they ensure that visitors can effortlessly explore your website, find the desired information, and engage with your content. A positive user experience leads to increased customer satisfaction, prolonged website visits, and higher conversion rates.

Mobile Responsiveness:

With the prevalence of mobile devices, a mobile-responsive website is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Professional web designers possess the knowledge and skills to create websites that adapt seamlessly to various screen sizes and devices. By employing responsive design techniques, they guarantee that your website provides an optimal viewing experience for visitors, regardless of whether they access it from a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Mobile responsiveness not only improves user experience but also will boost search engine rankings.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Appearing prominently in search engine results is vital for attracting organic traffic and expanding your online visibility. Professional web designers are well-versed in the principles of SEO and incorporate optimization techniques during the website development process. From optimizing site structure and navigation to ensuring clean code, fast loading times, and relevant meta tags, they lay the foundation for search engine success. With a search-engine-optimized website, you can increase your chances of ranking higher, driving targeted traffic, and gaining a competitive edge.

Scalability and Future Growth:

As your business evolves, your website needs to adapt accordingly. Professional web designers possess the foresight to develop websites with scalability in mind. They build flexible architectures that allow for the seamless integration of new features, functionalities, and content updates as your business expands. By future-proofing your website, they ensure that it remains robust, secure, and capable of accommodating your evolving needs and technological advancements.

Conclusion:

Partnering with a professional web designer empowers you to unlock the full potential of your online presence. From crafting a unique and visually appealing design to enhancing user experience, optimizing for search engines, and enabling scalability, their expertise helps you establish a solid digital foundation. By investing in professional web design, you set the stage for growth, increased customer engagement, and long-term success in the dynamic online landscape.

eCommerce Maintenance

Hi friends, I am Stefan, Media PRO Web Design lead programmer/developer. I have been managing (and also mismanaging) MY SQL databases for almost 22 years now. MySQL was the second programming language I learned and to this day it is still one of my favourites.

In all that time of wrangling databases, one thing has remained constant, you have to actively manage your database and at times, that means cleanup and maintenance. WordPress databases are no different.

Why you must Maintain your WordPress Database?

One of the most important reasons to do WordPress database cleanup is because your database is the second slowest part of your entire system. The only thing slower is the file system itself. So making sure that your database is operating at optimal speed is important not only to your site health but to your search engine rankings. Most of the major search engines use page speed as a factor in ranking a page. For optimum WordPress performance, you want to keep the database clean. Cleaning your WordPress database is part of an overall process of WordPress performance tuning.

The vast majority of WordPress installs use a MySQL (or MariaDB) Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). That is what we will focus on in this article. Even so, most of the advice will apply to whatever data store you are using for your WordPress database.

Steps to Take for an optimal WordPress Database Cleanup

Back-Up your SQL First

Before you embark on this journey, make sure you create a fresh backup. Yes, you should have nightly backups from the past 30 days nearby but things may have changed since your backup. You want to make sure that if you mess something up, you can easily restore things to the point where you started.

If your hosting partner offers an on-demand backup system as Irish Hosting does, make one now. If not, before you go any further, install a plugin that will allow you to create and restore database backups. There are many places online where you can get such plugins.

After you make your backup, go ahead and restore it so you can see what it’s like before you get in an emergency situation. Remember, if you have an untested backup system, you don’t have disaster recovery, you have hopes and wishes.

Leftover tables in the WordPress Database

Now that you’ve got your backup system ready, this first item is one that you may want to bring a developer in on. I’ma  big fan of bringing in professional help when I’m in over my head and this task may put a lot of people in over their heads.

If your site has been around a while, the chances are good that you have installed and uninstalled a lot of plugins. My personal site has been running WordPress since 2005. Many plugins, especially the older ones, did not clean up after themselves. This means that during install, they may have created tables in your database that they did not delete when you uninstalled them. Look at your list of tables – if you don’t know how, you don’t need to be doing this without help – and try and identify any that are no longer in use. Remove those tables from your database.

Once you’ve removed them, test EVERYTHING. It is these kinds of operations that make me recommend having a staging environment up and running and test these things in staging first. Still, if you have your backup, you should be good to go.

I looked at the database for my personal site a year or so ago. There are over 500 tables in it. The standard WordPress install has around 40. I really need to take the time to clean things up myself.

There are plugins that will help you with this task if you do not have a developer available. One of them is mentioned below, WP-Optimize.

Don’t be alarmed if when you try and remove a table it fails. The database user that your WordPress install runs under may not – probably SHOULD NOT – have table delete privileges. Still, you can show this list to your developer and they will know how to safely remove these tables.

Revisions

Next up, let’s talk about Post revisions. As you are working on a Post or Page, WordPress is constantly saving it in the background. To allow you to go back and restore one of these versions at a later date, each revision is stored as a separate record in the posts database. Once you have finished editing your Post and pushed it live, these revisions serve no purpose.

If you have a developer on staff, they can easily delete these records from the table without having to install any plugins. If you don’t have a developer, or you want to make a change that will keep this problem solved for you, check out WP Revisions Control. This simple plugin will allow you to set how many revisions to keep and it will keep your database clean for you, automatically.

Draft Posts

Another source of “cruft” in your database is old posts that you started but never released. Again, using my personal site as an example, I looked one time and I had well over 50 posts in DRAFT status. This means not only did I have 50 records in my database I didn’t need but I also had revisions for each of them just hanging around. Get rid of those old posts that you are never going to release.

Empty the Trash

As an administrator of a WordPress installation, you have deleted old posts, pages, and other things. WordPress doesn’t actually remove these old entries from your system, it moves them into “the trash”. (From a technical perspective it changes the status of these items.)

The Trash is great if you need to go back and retrieve something later on but after a certain amount of time, you can be fairly confident that you aren’t going to need what you trashed. So empty “The Trash”. When you do this, you actually delete the items that WordPress has marked as trash. This gets them out of your database and keeps them from hanging around and cluttering things up.

Things Not To Worry About

There is a lot of advice on what you should do to clean your WordPress database out on the Internet. Some of it is well-meaning but not all that useful. Here are a couple of things that you don’t need to worry about.

WordPress Database Cleanup.jpg

Cleaning Transients

Transients are little pieces of information that WordPress and plugins need to store temporarily. Transients have an expiration date. Some people will advise you to make sure you clean up expired transients every once in a while. Don’t bother. WordPress’ cron system will do this for you every night. At best, you may delete a few hundred records a few hours early. The effort you put into managing transients is an effort you could better spend making your site prettier, faster, or more useful to your readers.

Optimizing Tables

A lot of places will tell you to “optimize your tables”. Some might even explain what this means while others just used it as a magic incantation that is supposed to make you feel better about your database. The truth is that there was a time when optimizing database tables was important. Thankfully those days are long gone. These days most MySQL databases use tables that don’t require optimization. Even my crusty old personal site’s database no longer needs to be optimized. Technically, it is no longer necessary to do this for 99.9% of WordPress installations out there. If you are part of the other .01%, instead of optimizing your tables, move your site to a modern version of MySQL with a table type that does not need optimization

Plugins that do all of this for you

Yes, there are things you need to do on a regular basis to keep your database clean and healthy. Yes, you or a programmer working for you can do these things manually on a regular basis. However, if you are like most of us, you don’t like having to remember to clean things up. For those cases, there are plugins that can do all of this and much more for you, automatically.  Think of them as the Roomba for your site. These plugins will come out while you aren’t around and take care of cleaning up the dusty corners of your site for you on a regular basis.

Here are four options you can consider:

Advanced Database Cleaner

This plugin is available in both free and premium. The free version will do all of the basics you need to be done. You can even schedule it to run on a regular basis so that your database stays clean. The Pro version will give you many more options. I recommend starting with the free until you understand what it does and then if you feel the need, move to the Pro.

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

This is another good choice although it does offer “tabel optimization” that I just got through telling you was unnecessary. It will keep your database clean of old posts, comments, revisions, and a bunch of other things. There aren’t as many options as Advanced Database Cleaner but the ones you really need are there. This plugin is free and there is a link to donate to the author if you use it and find it useful. (and I always suggest you donate to the authors of free plugins if you use their plugins)

If you do choose to analyze the tables, it will attempt to run analysis on them but if you are using a table type that doesn’t require this feature, it will tell you that. It won’t harm your database or any of your data.

WP-Optimize – Cache, Clean, Compress

Probably my favourite option though (and the one I have loaded on my personal site) is WP-Optimize. This performs all the functions we’ve discussed here plus a lot of other things. Like the previous two, you can schedule this plugin to run automatically. However, since this is written by the same team that wrote the very first plugin I recommended, UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin, it integrates with that seamlessly and gives you the option to automatically back your database up before it performs maintenance. This is a nice feature. Like Updraft Plus, WP-Optimize comes in a free and paid version. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you need the features present in the paid version.

Wrap Up

Keeping your WordPress database clean is an important step to making sure that your site always runs quickly. Either invest the time to manually clean your site on a regular basis or install and configure one of the recommended plugins to do it for you. Either way, it is time well spent.

How to remove Are you enjoying Advanced Flat Rate shipping for Woocommerce Plugin?

How to remove Are you enjoying Advanced Flat Rate shipping for Woocommerce Plugin?

This great little plugin helps many websites offer Flat Rate Shipping. However, it comes with a very annoying message in the dashboard that is visible on all website pages.

To have that nasty little message removed, go to your hosting account and go inside the file path below and edit the file.

Simply add the comment tag  “//” before the line at aproximatively positon 125 to 130 ”

//require_once plugin_dir_path( dirname( __FILE__ ) ) . ‘includes/class-advanced-flat-rate-shipping-for-woocommerce-user-feedback.php’

File path: “wp-content\plugins\woo-extra-flat-rate\includes\class-advanced-flat-rate-shipping-for-woocommerce.php”

After you do that you will not see that banner. It should be gone from all the pages.

For more tips and how-to tutorials, visit or blog more often.

Web Design Services Galway

MEDIA PRO WEB DESIGN

The dark mode web design is a low-light user interface that uses a dark color as the main background color. It’s the reversal of a typical white layout that designers have used for many years. In response to the increasing number of hours we spend on our phones, designers have discovered that dark theme layouts help with eye strain, especially in low-light surroundings.

Already a massive trend in 2020 and 2021, dark mode is ready to become more even popular in 2022 too. Here are some reasons why Media PRO Web Design Galway loves the dark mode:

  • It looks super-modern. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple are just a handful of brands that offer alternative themes on their platforms;
  • It highlights and allows other design elements to pop;
  • It incorporates a stylish and mysterious appearance that contributes to a website’s unique appearance;
  • Easier on the eyes than traditional brighter screens, especially in a low-light environment;
  • Reduces eye strain in low-light conditions;
  • It can even save your mobile device’s battery power!

web design

The dark mode is being implemented more and more, in mobile apps as well as website layouts. Not all website users prefer dark mode and some will want to switch back and forth between dark and light. Irrespective of how or why you are using dark mode, users should be able to toggle the feature on or off. The dark mode should be a preference, not a requirement.

It’s important to note, whether or not you decide to cross over to the dark side, the decision should be based on the requirements of your audience, your brand’s message, and how people interact with your website. We suggest that people focus more on SEO, (Search Engine Optimisation), usability/functionality, and on marketing the website rather than the overall look of a website. Web Design trends are precisely that: Trends…

There’s no denying that dark mode is an emerging trend. Expect this trend to continue well into 2022 also.