Choose Kinsta for WordPress Hosting

When you’re considering WordPress hosting, it’s like picking a car rental company at the airport: there are two tiers.

Tier 1 is the credible, professional tier.

Tier 2 is includes the companies you’ve never heard of — or if you have heard of them, it’s late at night.

Unless you’re under financial duress or a penny pincher, you are going to choose a professional vendor. So for cars, that’s Enterprise, Avis and Hertz, right?

For WordPress, that’s WPEngine, Flywheel, Mediatemple — and, the latest entrant, Kinsta.

Tier 2 for WordPress includes, GoDaddy, Sitepoint, Bluehost… We have literally endured pain and suffering at each of these vendors. We will never go back.

Here’s why Kinsta crushes it by a mile:

One: they don’t make you wait in line for support. There is no line, in fact. You launch the chat widget and ask you a question. Wait a moment, and you get an answer.

Let’s have a moment of silence in reverence for this holy vendor.

Every other vendor we’ve used and tested makes you get in line and wait. Sometimes it’s a long time. Most of the time it is in fact a long time.

“You’re number 15 in line.”

No thanks.

Two: Kinsta has the most PHP workers available for its business tiers. Why does this matter?

PHP workers determine how many simultaneous requests your site can handle at a given time. WordPress’s pages are put together “on the fly” so concurrent requests happen 100% of the time. Practically speaking, this is about user experience — both inside of WordPress (as an admin or content writer) and outside of WordPress (as a visitor to the site). Kinsta’s business tiers start with 4 php workers. It has literally made working with WordPress a joy again.

WSL had considered moving off of Kinsta at the end of last year — to save a few bucks — but the moment I saw an announcement that they were increasing the number of php workers across the board, I aborted that endeavor. Why, because page speed is king. User experience is king. Everyone is accustomed to fast. So if you have a business that you care about, don’t pinch pennies on the one thing that matters most: customer experience.

Paul Rodriguez and Berner Chatting About Skating

Here’s a podcast we’ve been working on with Mosaic Media. It’s video though! Yes, ‘podcast’ is an ambiguous term — it encompasses both “talk radio” and “talk shows”. 

We’re testing Facebook embeds here. Do you use them? 

Our thesis is this: try everything. 

Digital Advertising Tsunami! Highlights from IAB’s 2018 Internet Ad Revenue Report

IAB just came out with their latest report on digital advertising. Staggering!

I’m not joking. Let me pull a few highlights out for you.

Due to a methodology change, the numbers could be even more… staggering.

What else?

When you work in this context, you kinda think that, yes, indeed, there are incredible shifts under foot. But when you see the data — it’s… yes, staggering.

One last one.

This is evidence that we are all, truly, walking around looking down — at our screens. 20% more time online!!

Who, the shift has gone to digital. But mostly to our phones.

So, is your business optimized for this?

Oh yeah, here’s the link to the report.

A New Data Product — drugadverseeventreports.com

We’re excited to announce that we’ve released the first version of our health data product: drugadverseeventreports.com.

What is it?

Drug Adverse Event Reports is a website that allows anyone to purchase low-cost reports on pharmaceutical drugs that are regulated by the FDA. The reports are focused on providing information about “adverse events” — the FDA set up a system to capture reports of reactions to drugs.

Who is it for?

Patients want information. They smart enough to get source data. We’re providing it. We think (and we’ve heard) that pharmacists want the information, too.

Why did we build it?

We built it because we think there are certain datasets to that need to be set free. Well, we are in business, so we’re not doing this for free. But we think the work we’ve done to pull down the openFDA data, to clean it, to organize it — is worth a lot to the community.

Head to drugadverseeventreports.com

The Simplest Way To Create A Bilingual Site Using WordPress and WPML

When our clients require a multilingual solution for their website Walnut St. Labs turns to WPML plugin for WordPress. Simply put, WPML extends the functionality of the basic WordPress CMS in a clean and simple way.

Ease of Setup

WPML allows for more than 40 different languages. Although, you will probably not utilize all of them the ability to choose from a wide range of languages makes this a very robust solution with an ease of setup not seen in other translation options. Select which languages you are going to be translating the site to and instantly all the plumbing for each language is already in place — with no coding.   

 

Ease of Use

The greatest feature is the integrated nature of the translation pages with core WordPress features you already know. On one dashboard you can see all translated versions of your pages or posts and their translation statuses. You can access any of the translated pages right from here (see below). Ordinary WordPress users can be made Translators. Translators can access only specific translation jobs which Translation Managers assign to them. And if actually doing the translations is a blocker, you can connect WPML’s powerful translation management with a translation service of your choice. This is very powerful and will keep all translations in sync by alerting your translation service to any changes made to the original language a page was translated from.

 

Fully Integrated Multilingual Website

For our client’s who service multilingual audiences WPML for WordPress has expanded their reach by providing communication options to engage users in their native language.  

 

 

If your site is need of a multilingual solution get in touch with us and we will detail how WPML for WordPress and Walnut St Labs can help you broaden your reach and deepen your engagement across the language barrier.  

Three Shopify Apps That Enterprise, High-SKU Stores, Need From Day One.

Managing and optimizing tens of thousands of SKUs while while maintaining agility is hard “af” as they say. We manage high-SKU stores mostly on Shopify these days  — and we do it with the help of these three app. These apps allow merchants to bulk optimize your Google shopping feeds, optimize shipping options, and the ability to edit just about any product or subset in bulk.

 

Google Shopping Feed by Simprosys InfoMedia

Integrating your Shopify store with Google Merchant Center is a critical channel to optimize for sales. Having a properly optimized Google Shopping Feed makes your ad spend efficient. This app offers some one-of-a-kind features like being able to bulk set Custom Labels or Google Product Categories.  

Google Shopping Feed by Simprosys InfoMedia

 

Bespoke Shipping by MZL Solutions

Shopify has great shipping functionality until you want to start mixing and matching calculated rates with weight-based rates — then throw in conditional rules and free shipping and you quickly find yourself searching for a tool… This tool allows you to build a decision tree based on rules you define to show what shipping options you want to show. This app is very powerful and MZL Solutions provides awesome support. There really is no more powerful way to handle all the shipping scenarios tens of thousands of SKUs from multiple suppliers bring to your desk to manage.

Bespoke Shipping by MZL Solutions

 

Bulk Product Edit by Hextom

Bulk Product Edit is Walnut St Labs’ go-to tool for making bulk changes to products in Shopify. Need to tag 4K SKUs with a vendor name? Done. Need to add disclaimer to the bottom of every product or just a sub set? Done. Need to changes prices on a vendor by a percentage? Done. This app provides so much utility and value that managing a store without it would be truly daunting, because 50K of anything is not fast.

Bulk Product Edit by Hextom

 

We believe these apps make managing a high-SKU Shopify store easy — so you can stay focused on sales! If you need help or want to talk through one of your problems, let us know.

Press Release: BVCS (Daily Local News)

Brandywine Valley College Specialists was featured in the Daily Local News this week for the recent launch of their online program which makes college admissions a breeze.   Founded by two experts in the field of admissions, we were approached in the Summer of 2017 to help transform their previously face-to-face consultative approach into a digital experience for increased accessibility.  Fast forward to Summer 2018 and we launched a fully produced platform experience with video and downloadable supplemental materials!

If you have someone in High School who is planning to go to college check out BVCS: https://bvcollegespecialists.com/

Press Release:  https://www.dailylocal.com/business/new–part-video-on-demand-course-is-designed-to/article_6a83c580-f49d-589b-a0d6-f130e420294a.html

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Client Spotlight: Forge

Forge needed visibility and brand awareness. We tackled it with ferocity and showcased their services to the exact market they needed.

Video, Demonstrations From Staff

Videos are the most compelling media. It gives the consumer a chance to see the product and the craftsmen behind it in a lively way. As a best practice, we always try to get our client’s faces on camera. In the case of Forge, we knew we could get great video of them working in the shop showing off the custom work they make.

High-Fidelity Photography

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Taking on a client means generating marketing materials that have versatility and longevity and good photographs are essential. We were able to take photographs that are being used in nearly every marketing avenue we have.

Digital Advertising

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This is one of our greatest strengths. We focused on reaching a specific audience to make conversions and distributed exactly how and to whom we choose. For Forge is was a matter of finding out who would convert to their services instead of going with a larger impersonal corporation.

Local Listing

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Many clients underestimate the importance of local listings. It is much more than simply having your hours and address posted on google maps. There are opportunities to fill these listings with content that compels visitors to continue to engage and potentially convert.

 

It’s A Wrap!

From the beginning, it was obvious that they were passionate and professional about their craft. They were hungry for additional exposure. They only required optimization of their social avenues to properly market their superior service. We built personal relationships with the staff and got to the core of their message. From there, it was a matter of putting our expertise to use. It wasn’t difficult for our team to bring their business up to date and see their leads increase. They have become an example that continually confirms what we know we do best.

Client Spotlight: DRG

A cutting-edge international brand needed a branding facelift. We brought the modern design and digital integration.

A New Website…

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Their website was simply out of date.  Your website is the home base and face of your business. It was up to us to bring their product line up to date and streamline the ordering process to keep their customers accessible.

That Was Optimized For Different Devices…

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With their website redesigned, modernization meant making it readily viewable on any device.

And Video of Their Team

Video is the most compelling media. DRG is renowned in its industry. Their many conventions and appearances at conferences allowed us the perfect opportunity to showcase their amazing team.

Digital Advertising (Facebook And Google)

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We don’t mess around when it comes advertising. With a large international brand like DRG out strategy was awareness and optimization. They are a very specific market so it was up to us to refine visibility by building great adwords campaigns and making them the first choice in search optimization.

Print Advertising

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Print is a crucial part of DRG’s advertising even though they are a recognizable brand in their industry. Attending conventions and conferences provides many opportunities to build on their brand awareness.
It’s A Wrap!

From the beginning, it was obvious that they were passionate and professional about their industry. It’s important when working with a large company to handle the brand delicately and transition them to into modernization while maintaining stability with their customers. The benefits showed immediately, sales went up and contact their clients has never been easier.