Web Design & Development

Free trials you can’t cancel, surprise fees at checkout, pre-checked boxes and buttons that say “No thanks, I hate saving money.” These are dark patterns, and laws like California’s CPRA and the EU’s GDPR now restrict them. Here’s how to spot them when you shop online and how your business can keep them off its own website.

A good-looking website still has to get visitors to act. This guide covers setting clear goals for your site, the awareness, consideration and decision stages a customer moves through, common sources of friction like slow pages and long forms, personalization, and using analytics and feedback to see where people drop off.

Big agencies often build websites from the same template, whether the client is a medical office, a ranchland realtor or a pool equipment store. Here’s what that one-size-fits-all approach costs industry-specific businesses in SEO, usability, compliance and brand identity, and what to ask an agency so your website is built around your customers.

Keyword research often means scrolling through thousands of spreadsheet rows. Wild Iris built a free tool that plots your SEMrush or Ahrefs keywords by search volume and difficulty, so you can filter out the junk, spot targets you can actually win and export a clean list or PDF. Your data never leaves your browser.

A website farm in another state or country doesn’t know your town’s landmarks, events or the words your customers search for. This 2024 post compares that approach with hiring a local web developer: real photos instead of recycled stock images, local SEO, face-to-face support, and a site that can grow with your business.

The social icons on your website might send visitors to your website builder’s Facebook page, or to a platform that shut down years ago. This short post explains why those icons should link to your own active, up-to-date profiles, and what a neglected feed tells potential customers about your business.

Should a graphic designer build your website, or someone who also knows SEO, conversions, lead generation, ADA compliance and interface design? A good-looking site that nobody finds or uses won’t bring in business. Here’s what each of those skills adds and why a website that works for you needs all of them alongside good design.

Would a cluttered shop window make you keep walking? Your homepage works the same way. This short 2024 Tuesday Tip asks you to look at your homepage the way your ideal customer would, with plain language instead of jargon, answers to their questions and an obvious next step, for better SEO and more conversions.

One Wild Iris client, a tax professional, skipped managed hosting to save money. Then an insecure plugin let hackers put pornographic content on the site, and the cleanup cost more than years of hosting would have. This 2024 Tuesday Tip explains what managed hosting covers, from security patches and plugin updates to backups and server monitoring.

Domain registration, DNS, email, managed and unmanaged hosting: most businesses need several of these and rarely know how they fit together. This 2023 guide explains each service in plain terms, why one company for everything isn’t always wise, which providers Wild Iris recommended and avoided, and why it offers only managed hosting.