Kilobites by Sanico

I recently spoke to the founder of an innovative email service company called Buttondown Email. No, I don’t know the founder. No, this was not an interview for my blog. This was a sales enquiry. I contacted the sales staff as I required a custom premium feature and to my surprise the founder of the company, Justin Duke, responded to me. What the heck!!!!

This guy runs a decent sized technology company and personally responds to sales requests. It felt like the equivalent of me walking into a local McDonalds and being served a burger at the cash register by the CEO. Unheard of.

I discovered Buttondown Email on my search for a superior email service at a reasonable price. I wanted to ditch my previous newsletter provider Mailchimp because I find their product inferior and difficult to use. I even contacted the support staff of MailChimp recently with a problem and I received help from an overseas team that sent me around the merry-go-round. I wanted to get off that ride ASAP.

Boom! Buttondown showed up on my doorstep.

I came across it as I saw Basecamp, a product I use, said that they send email with Buttondown. I poked around and loved what I saw. A simplified product, built with privacy in mind, and easily extendible by a Software Engineer like myself. So many simple but powerful features tucked into a reasonably priced product. Please take my money.

So I went to sign up …

Keep Reading...

Website Tip #10: Create a mobile first website.

To any business that reads this blog post I encourage you to stop reading, go view your own website on a mobile phone, and then come back to this post.

Alright, now answer the following questions:

1. Did my website load fast on mobile? [yes/no]
2. Did my website look good on mobile? [yes/no]
3. Did my website work well on mobile? [yes/no]

If you answered no to at least one of the above questions then let me tell you 2 critical things:

1. Around 60% of people use their mobile phones to view your website.
2. As of October 2023 Google now discovers your website exclusively on mobile first.

If you built your website around 8 to 15 years ago you probably failed to consider mobile phones and rightfully so, the desktop computer reigned king of the internet.

Today the majority of people utilise mobile devices to browse the internet. Google noticed the rise back in 2015 and changed how they crawl websites for Google search. Only recently in October 2023 they announced they finally changed the default crawler to use the mobile first.

So, what the heck does that all mean?

In layman’s terms, Google discovers your website through its mobile version therefore if your website sucks on mobile then Google knows about it.

Not only that, if 60% of people globally use mobile phones to view your website, what impression do you think a customer will have of …

Keep Reading...

For those who use TinaCMS I will show you how to add hidden fields to the metadata of your content files.

I utilise several default fields within the YAML of my content markdown files and I wanted to add them with TinaCMS when a user creates a new entry to a collection. After I read the well-written TinaCMS docs I noticed that no option existed to add default values and hide them from the user interface of TinaCMS.

I required these fields as they help me perform unique behaviour for specific types of collections such as the ability to disable the render of a content file. Whatever your reason to add default hidden values I will show you how I solved the problem.

To help illustrate the end result, I desired the fields in the code snippet below to ensure my static site generator skipped the rendering of a specific page without the end user in TinaCMS ever seeing this information:

---

_build:
  render: never

---

I will not explain the inner workings of TinaCMS, instead I will show you how to add default values to hidden fields in the steps seen below.

Step 1: Configuration of the project

You must install react and import it into your tina/config.* file otherwise you will run into errors when we will add JSX later in Step 3. The process to import JSX depends on the type of your config file, I created my TinaCMS config in pure JavaScript, therefore, I required a react import. For …

Keep Reading...

I will show you 4 beautiful websites that recently caught my attention.

Every now and again as I surf the web I come across a few websites that make me say: “dammmnnnnn that’s nice”.

Just like a car enthusiast when they see a classic and rare car go past, as a web developer well-designed websites catch my eye.

Without any further ado, here are the 4 websites.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the organisations mentioned, I earn no commissions, I added no affiliate link, and I am not endorsing any of the websites or their services. I like beautiful websites and that’s all.

Gumroad

Website: https://gumroad.com/ - Viewed on 07/11/2023

Gumroad homepage.

I found Gumroad because a client of mine wanted to create an online membership system with a tight budget. I found Gumroad and fell in love… with the design! Whoever led the design team for Gumroad created an excellent home page. It flows very nicely and really leaves an impression of how much effort the designers put into it.

Design choices I liked:

• Parallax Scroll: Tasteful parallax scrolling that makes the page seem alive.
• Contrast: Excellent contrasting with the colour scheme.
• Tells a Story: As you scroll the page section by section it flows as if it tells a story of the company.

Unsplash

Website: https://unsplash.com/plus - Viewed on 07/11/2023

Unsplash Plus landing page.

I found Unsplash …

Keep Reading...

My brother Dom and I created one of the most particular and unique websites for a local wine label called By Fabiano.

Fabiano, a local SA winemaker and his business partner Alex wanted to create a custom ecommerce storefront for their unique new wine label called By Fabiano.

Based in Mclaren Vale South Australia they produce a high quality wine with roots to their Italian heritage as described by this excerpt from their website:

“Working amidst a distinctive terroir, including ancient soils, Fabiano’s range is deeply rooted in his Italian heritage, with the aim to inspire a legacy within the McLaren Vale region. This merger between wine cultures ultimately becomes a new tradition with the goal of handing it over to future generations. It is not the fruit that is to be adapted to his style, but rather his style that adapts to the fruit’s expression.”

Alex from By Fabiano reached out to us from a recommendation and explained his plans for the website. As a local South Aussie I felt quite excited to bring this project to life. We came to an agreement to create the website and immediately broke ground on the new project.

Every client I work with possesses a different set of requirements they desire for their website. Some clients provide me with a list of websites they want me to use as inspiration, some give me a logo with a variety of pictures and leave …

Keep Reading...

Once upon a time a fake, cunning, and wretched SEO salesman approached one of my clients. He ran a questionable report, with a questionable analysis, and with a questionable video of him explaining SEO concepts.

My client signed up for $500 a month for this service as she honestly wanted to improve her website. This bloke charmed her with his magic and promised her the thing everyone wants but can’t have without payment, a spot at the top of Google. Oh yes, he promised.

After several months of paying she questioned the legitimacy of his services. The website went down suddenly and her clients complained. She reached out to the SEO magician and he appeased her worries: “No problem I will fix it ASAP, all good”. My client waited and waited, and… waited some more. Then suddenly, after all this time waiting, he still did… wait for it… absolutely nothing.

My client began to question the authenticity of his services especially because the SEO salesman stopped responding as quick once he received his handsome monthly payments, funny that. Then my client bumped into a friend of mine that recommended our website services. She reached out to us and explained the issues.

After we spoke with her we searched up her website and by golly it looked like frankenstein. She went through so many so-called web developers that put bandaids on top of bandaids, temporary fixes that …

Keep Reading...

I wrote a program to transfer 496 ecommerce products from Wix to Shopify.

We performed this transfer for Rachel, the owner and operator of Essence & Soul on King William Road in Adelaide, South Australia.

She previously utilised a Wix store to sell her catalogue of over 496 products but we recommended she move to Shopify as we flat out refuse to build ecommerce stores using Wix due to its inferiority.

Therefore, on our recommendation she required a full transfer to the new Shopify powered store that we built for her.

Screeeeeech, pull the brakes.

One big problem: to upload 496 products by hand would consume a significant amount of time and Wix provides no native way to automatically transfer to another vendor.

Luckily this was not our first rodeo to automatically transfer a significant amount of products, we previously transferred around 30-50 products for another client of ours called Portrush Flowers. However, it consisted of a transfer between WooCommerce and Shopify, not Wix.

We built a custom program to transfer the products for Portrush Flowers to help automate the majority of the transfer. I say “automate the majority” because very few systems perform a perfect transfer, I will explain why later.

WooCommerce made it easy enough to use their API to transfer products to Shopify. However, Wix is notoriously difficult to transfer away from, they love to keep you as a …

Keep Reading...

The good old solution. Just run an ad, get the business.

What folly.

“Just run an ad”: the dream that social media companies want to sell businesses to get their greasy fingers on their money.

Oh you haven’t heard? An ad a day keeps the doctor away.

Says the fake doctors called social media companies that bully and pester you until you buy their ads.

Before you get your pitchforks and knives out I want to clarify that I am not against ads, value exists in them as I explain towards the end. Instead I want to highlight that I see many companies just run an ad and outright neglect their website conversions.

If conversions suck… well, you guessed it, just buy more ads. The endless ad pit that makes social media companies handsome rich. Have you ever heard of a social media company that recommends you run less ads?

Imagine this conversation:

Me: Hi Mr Social Media Company, I want to run more ads please.

Social Media Company: Wow, hold up, you have run enough, have you not noticed your website conversions aren’t up? You probably should focus on fixing up your website or working on your product instead of running more ads.

A level headed response that would never happen.

Some people brag to me that they land business purely from ads. Sure, traffic driven to the website through ads makes sense. However, if people struggle to checkout or fail to purchase a product then …

Keep Reading...

The start of any new project normally weighs up questions such as “What’s the expected ROI (return on investment) of this project?” or “If we provide this feature, what’s the increase in cost going to be?”. These are excellent questions. But how do you answer these when it comes to maintenance? What do you do when you have a piece of software that works, but has not been worked on in years?

That old faithful, the thing that keeps the lights on while the rest of your company is trying to think of new ways to innovate and increase your gross margins. She was there making you money when that last idea only boosted MAU (monthly active users) by 1%, but cost 5 times more to implement. You didn’t have time to update to the latest LTS (long term support) but you got that new feature out on time. Onto the next idea, and on it goes until you are so far behind it’s now going to take longer to update. But what’s the return on investment of updating software?

Keeping software up to date is easy when all you have to do is bump the version number, but when it requires a code change, there never seems to be a good time to do it. How do you tell your product team that you need time to update software so you can’t work on that new feature they want? No, patching a security vulnerability isn’t going to increase revenue, but it may …

Keep Reading...

View the published website

We recently published a new custom Shopify ecommerce website for the very popular and well known strawberry farm Harvest the Fleurieu in South Australia. Allis reached out to us on Instagram after she saw us complete a website for another awesome South Aussie called Within the Candle Chaos Co.

I am not sure why but the pronunciation of Fleurieu always sends me to a world of confusion, I think it’s the mix of characters that throws me off. However, no stress, on confirmation from Allis I am happy to share the correct pronunciation is: flu-re-o.

The Old Wix Website

Allis reached out to us as she first attempted to create an ecommerce website with Wix during the pandemic to service clients from a distance. The old website utilised a template that she customised to suit her brand. She wanted to take the website to the next level so she reached out to us and contracted us to build something unique and custom for Harvest the Fleurieu. I put a few pictures of the original website below.

The top part from the original Harvest the Fleurieu website.

The contact us form from the original Harvest the Fleurieu website.

The original Wix website contained several contrast issues as seen in the contact us section above, misaligned text, unoptimised images, poor load times, and many other problems. The problems stem from poorly designed templates produced by …

Keep Reading...