Kilobites by Sanico

Google provides an excellent tool to assess your website’s key metrics and identify core issues. More specifically, PageSpeed Insights provides a report assessing the performance of your website loaded on both mobile and desktop devices.

For quick reference, I have linked the docs here if you are interested in the technical aspects of PageSpeed Insights.

Below are a few steps on using the tool and improving your websites poor speeds, poor accessibility and poor vitals.

Step 1: Get the website url you want to test

Go to the website you want to test and highlight the entire url in the url bar. Right click the entire url and click copy to have it ready to paste into the PageSpeed Insights tool. For privacy of the company being tested, I have blurred the first part of their name.

Step 2: Go to pagespeed.web.dev

Click here to go to the PageSpeed Insights tool and paste your url into the input field. Then, click Analyze. Ensure you stay on the page as the test runs.

Step 3: View the scores on Mobile & Desktop

Commonly, your scores for mobile will be noticeably different than your scores for desktop. PageSpeed Insights simulates the mobile with limitations such as CPU power and internet speed. This is an important distinction. We often use our mobiles on 4G or 5G and have less CPU power than the average computer. It is imperative to get scores up for both screen …

Keep Reading...

Managing a large range of products can be tedious work. It can become time consuming navigating through each product and editing them individually.

This is a quick guide on how you can bulk edit your products faster which is built into Shopify.

Step 1: Navigate to the Products tab from the Shopify Dashboard

From here, select the products you are wanting to edit. In this case, I have clicked the check box that selects all available products. However, if you want to edit specific products, check the boxes next to the products names you want to edit.

Step 2: Select Bulk Edit on the Interface

You should see a button appear that says Bulk edit. Shopify continually updates their interface so it may have changed places but this is the button you’re looking for - click it.

Step 3: Begin Bulk Editing

If you have ever used Microsoft Excel in its most basic form, the bulk editor is representing the same thing. This is an editable spreadsheet that increases your speed of editing products.

Please note, you may have to scroll to the right to view further columns that are not viewable on the screen.

Step 4: Add Missing Columns to Bulk Editor

If you can’t see a field you want to edit on a product, click the columns button as seen in the above image. Scroll through the list of available columns and tick the checkbox that you want added to your spreadsheet.

Step 5: Make sure …

Keep Reading...

Does anyone else on LinkedIn get their inbox filled with a boat load of spam? I want to know the people that would reply to a message like the one below.

Hi Sav, In the tsunami of identical messages bombarding you, here is a flamingo swimming in a yard of pigeons. But seriously…

If I could show you a way to help the conversion rates for the team, would you be open to learning more?

PS: 1 helped 388 tech companies bring consistency to the story, core message, and value proposition… using a new sales deck.

PP x2: Here is what I had in mind -> https__[WEBSITE LINK REDACTED]___.com

Let’s break down her message…

Paragraph 1: Say something exaggerated to get my attention. “A tsunami, flamingos, and pigeons”, I have never met anyone start a conversation like that in person. She’s going for shock factor.

Paragraph 2: She insinuates she knows how to get higher conversions and asks if I am open to hearing about her secret sauce. Who would answer no to that question? In other words, she attempts to ask an irrefutable question to get someone to say “yes”. Yuck.

Paragraph 3: She quotes an oddly specific number “388” in an attempt to increase its realism. She is no longer beating around the bush but instead is affirming she has the secret sauce to land more business.

Last sentence: A link to her website, therefore, for …

Keep Reading...

This is a personal opinion and perspective from a software engineer. Given, maybe doing this to unsuspecting and less tech savvy individuals may work, but this is a big no in my books.

If God (or whoever you believe in) makes everyone powerful, in reality, no one is powerful. Tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Perplexity, Jasper etc. are great for particular situations but they should not become replacements for general communication between humans.

It can make a human feel degraded and less than important if they realise your responses lack authenticity. There is very little incentive to respond to a robot.

Recent Example of Frustration

We had multiple individuals recently provide their resume to work for our company. I took quite a liking to a particular individual, had met them in person and interacted with detailed responses. I then began receiving large responses generated from an AI tool. Maybe this individual thought it was clever but instead it felt instantly impersonal and showed a lack of respect.

My opinion on this topic may be unpopular and others may enjoy communicating through automated responses… Just remember, if everyone is generating their responses through AI, it will only make the authentic responses stand out clearer. Spelling mistakes, misuse of grammar and styles of writing are becoming more prevalent in identifying the authenticity of responses. …

Keep Reading...

No long intro, instead a question.

If you look at the server rack below would you say the previous IT contractor took pride in their work?

100% you would say no. If in doubt, I will shortly show a clean version but first I want to show you something else.

Can you see it? Yeah, right there at the bottom, the CISCO box. The good old CISCO 870 Series. Let’s get a zoom on that:

Ok now you see it. What’s its purpose? If it’s in the server rack it must be important, right? No is the answer I eventually discovered. Another IT contractor left this CISCO box powered on doing nothing for over 5 years. Yeah 5 years! Plugged in, doing nothing. It was part of an old VOIP system that another contractor replaced but they left behind the CISCO box.

When I discovered this I thought about it for a while. Who would leave a CISCO box for that long? Then it dawned on me, people that take less pride in their work.

I now want to show you another picture:

Same same, but different. This is the image of how we left the server rack when we finished upgrading the devices inside for my client. Clean, easy on the eyes, and with clear separations between the devices. Even a person that knows nothing about the devices inside would look at it and say: “now that’s neat”.

Now the same experiment, but with the before and after of the server rack. I want you to tell me, which one looks like someone took …

Keep Reading...

It is hard not to predict the future from the past. The whole basis of our judgement often comes from our past experiences. Even public resources explain in gambling, say the roulette table, that just because red was rolled 10 times straight doesn’t mean black’s chances have increased - the events are independent. However, majority of people think that a number or colour may appear since it hasn’t appeared yet - this even has a definition named The Gamblers Fallacy.

My curiosity runs deeper to the predictions we make in day to day life.

Are gambling predictions different to the real world predictions?

If we talk about casino games, these have extremely clever win ratios that are stacked against the player - they are calculable. For instance, most people don’t realise that placing a bet on red in roulette has less than a 50% chance of winning (see image below).

Therefore in the case of casino games, it is an artificial world with calculable odds - this does not reflect the real world.

However, when we wander outside of the bricked fortress with no windows, gambling in the real world becomes odds determined by past events and pundits. Similar to real life, I would argue each person is a pundit in their own way and creates odds for predictions in their day to day life. The two suddenly share many similarities.

Can you give an example please?

Alright, my …

Keep Reading...

Everything you do adds up.

That blog post you wrote. That website page you added. That Instagram Reel you made. That YouTube video you published. That client you made happy. It all adds up.

In an airport in Rome, Italy I ran into an ex-coworker from IBM that upon discovery I ran my own software business asked immediately: “How did you find your clients?”

Well… that was a complex question to answer in a short span of time as we awaited our baggage at the airport.

In my eyes a thousand paths led to me finding clients. For example,

• One client found me through a blog post I wrote.
• Another through a Google Search.
• Someone else watched an Instagram Reel I published.
• A previous client recommended us to another client through Facebook.

… The list goes on endlessly.

In other words, the more doors you open, the more pathways open for clients to discover you.

Patience, A Lost Virtue

In a world with an attention span of 60 second vertical videos, I meet many people with a lack of patience that focus on immediate results.

I want the client RIGHT NOW.

I want a successful ad campaign NOW.

I want that blog post to convert NOW.

I want that Instagram Reel to go viral NOW.

To use content creation as an example, I try not to focus on the now but instead I focus on the creation of excellent and helpful content with the thought that a potential client may find me through it tomorrow, …

Keep Reading...

There you have it, folks. I don’t want to write this blog post.

Is that too blunt? Too rude? Too… lazy?

Perhaps, it’s all of the above. But, what’s the one thing that it definitely is? Honest.

A round of applause for me. Just kidding, please don’t do that. Not yet, at least.

Let us track a little further back. Sav (The ‘Sa’ in Sanico) reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a reflective piece for their blog about some contract work I did for them, which included some IT Maintenance work, such as Hardware Installation - my fancy way of saying ‘I set up computers’.

I said ‘Well, gosh darn, diddly squat, cut me a block of cheese and slap it on a platter, because I’ll do it!’ (Liberties have been taken as to the correct response I had given Sav when he had asked… it was a couple months ago, okay?)

Simply, I agreed. I had initially expressed my desire to write a piece about ‘Management’, reflecting on my positive experience being managed by Sav and Domenico (the ‘nico’ in Sanico) during the contract, compared to some positive and negative experiences of being managed in other jobs throughout my life. These other jobs included:

• Working as a kitchen hand for seven years
• Editing both small and large format videos (videography and films)
• Packing boxes of shoes at a warehouse
• Bartending at multiple venues for large amounts of attendees
• Working with sheep on various …

Keep Reading...

As a web developer I create blogs for many of my clients and constantly send out a list of guidelines to help them on their journey to successfully write blog posts. The guidelines consist of tips, advice, and criteria. In these guidelines I consolidated all of my learnings into a single referenceable source of information for myself, my clients, and the general public.

I sourced the tips, advice, and criteria from renowned sources such as the Google SEO team and my own expertise after 4 years of writing various blogs. I follow the same set of guidelines when I write my own blog posts.

Below I added a concise list of all of my guidelines with more in depth explanations further down the page:

• The blog title: clear, concise, and descriptive.
• Never write about topics or posts that you dislike.
• Never rely on automatic image optimisation, always crop and optimise images by hand.
• Never, ever, ever use generative AI to write posts.
• Never use Heading 1, only Heading 2.
• Prefer using headings over bolding.
• Never draft a blog post in the application where you publish it.
• Organise well from the start.

The blog title: clear, concise, and descriptive

Want to know the best title to write so that your blog post receives the highest number of views? I’m sorry but the answer might provide little gratification… no perfect method exists. Countless people on the internet attempt to …

Keep Reading...

Since January 2024 Shopify sent out a flurry of emails to warn store owners to authenticate and add a DMARC record to continue sending branded emails from their domain, as per the screenshot cover picture of this blog post. I received an inundated amount of requests for help from my clients and people around the world from a reel on Instagram and YouTube that I posted.

Many Shopify store owners saw the warning but due to the technical barrier they failed to fix the problem themselves. I wrote this post to help explain the problem in more detail and discuss some paths to help resolve the problem.

Shopify also sent out several notifications to store owners on their Shopify stores as seen in the screenshot below which stated “Action required to continue sending branded emails”. In this post I will explain DMARC, why you should authenticate to avoid being marked as spam, and link to Shopify’s documentation for those technical enough to fix the problem themselves.

Why has Shopify persistently warned all users about domain name authentication and DMARC policy?

In October 2023 Google and Yahoo, two of the biggest email service providers in the world, announced that to help fight against spam and fraud that they will require bulk email senders to authenticate their identity through an authentication technique called SPF, DKIM, and a policy called DMARC on their …

Keep Reading...