WordPress Content Managers and Marketers and Small Business Owners who use WordPress may need this tip. And even experienced developers and Website Builders should know about it. For any free plug-in downloaded via the WordPress Admin, such WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, My Custom Functions, Header and Footer Scripts Inserter, Use Any Font (all of which are plug-ins we use often), as well as hundreds of thousands more, there is an easy way to roll back to previous versions. Why would you want to roll back? Well, plug-in updates are 99% of the time good, but 1% of the time can cause things on your website to break. You may deactivate plug-ins to to determine which one(s) caused the issue, but that still leaves you without the intended functionality that the earlier version of the plug-in brought to the table. This is where WP Rollback - yet another plug-in whose sole purpose is to let the WordPress Admin (aka - you) rollback to previous versions of other plug-ins. This plug-in has saved me a couple times, as you can imagine - since we manage hundreds of client sites here at Data Driven Design.

What is "Advanced Floating Content?" Well, it's the name of an amazing WordPress plug-in, and it's a great way of describing content that can be added to a WordPress site to either float, animate, or stick in place as a user scrolls your website. It can be used to create any number of design features, including Lead Generation overlays, Calls to action that stick as your user scrolls, and even links to your company's phone number that follow your user around your website. But more than that, the Plug-in, Advanced Floating Content, is $23 on Envato Market, and is worth every penny. You can style it to make it look exactly like your web design, with gradients, borders, images, and you can control the exact placement on all devices in a pixel perfect manner, with NO CODING. I'm all about this. In this video, I show you a couple examples of what you can do with this plug-in, and how to get started using it! Happy marketing and web designing peeps! Here is the link to Advanced Floating Content.

Data Driven Daily Tip 291. As a marketer, haven't you ever wanted to make your content more personal to your audience? The data says that the more you can personalize your content and make it relevant to the user reading it, the better you can increase your engagement and conversion rates. As, such, I've found the least complicated way to display unique content to your audience based on geolocation. In the past, this would have either had to have been done via some complex coding or via an expensive third party tool like Visual Website Optimizer. Now, using WPEngine's GeoTargeting Capabilities, you can create an account with WPEngine and upgrade your account for $150 for the year, to get access to a premium plug-in called WP Geo-IP, that allows you to use shortcodes to only show content to particular geographic regions such as cities, states, zips and countries. In this video, I break down exactly how to do this, and use an example where I only want to promote the Nashville Voice Conference on our website to people in the State of Tennessee.

Data Drives Design. The Proof Is In The Data. Data Over Opinions. Stop wondering how your business is doing. Google Analytics is powerful stuff. Here's how I get my Google Analytics, and how you should too. Spend 10-15 minutes (or 30) a month looking at Audience, Acquisition and Behavior reports.

I asked Amazon Alexa Skills Marketing Employee #1 Dave Isbitski about Alexa Blueprints. What are they? Essentially they're a way to use a free, visual dashboard to create your own Alexa Skill. This is something all businesses should be aware of. What is an Alexa Blueprint? Dave says “one of the things I’m most excited about that has been happening in the last 18 months or so are Alexa Blueprints.” You can go to https://blueprints.amazon.com and create an Alexa Skill in minutes. Blueprints is a visual tool for creating a Skill. Now you can share them and publish them to the Alexa Skills Store for anyone to download and use. This can be a great tool for brands and businesses to connect with customers. So an Alexa Blueprint is a visual tool for creating an Alexa Skill. Brilliant.

You may have previously read some of my blogs about GoDaddy Webhosting. They have an amazing managed migration tool, as well as the ability to spin up development / staging servers, however, the Proof is in the Data, WPEngine has better Uptime and Speed than GoDaddy Managed WordPress. Both solutions are "Managed WordPress" which means you don't need to be a Web Developer or WordPress Developer to manage your webhosting, from set up, to back-ups to staging environments and SSL, it's all taken care of for you. We are solutions providers at Data Driven Design, and the data is starting to tell us after 3-4 years of hosting our clients' websites on GoDaddy Managed WordPress, that it may be time to upgrade to WPEngine. WPEngine costs significantly more, and we're willing to eat that cost for our clients to have a better experience. As a result, I wanted to show all of you out there how to migrate your WordPress sites to WPEngine. I hope this helps! Best, Paul

Attention Marketers and Small Business Owners: the data is overwhelming that you should not bombard users with pop-ups that prompt them for their email addresses upon immediately accessing your website. To many it feels intrusive. They've visited you, and you're already asking them for something. Gross. BUT, there is a web design / digital marketing tactic that the data says works EXTREMELY well, that is non-intrusive. If you've ever been to a website, browsed around for a minute or three, then moved your mouse to close out that browser tab or enter another URL into the address bar, there is a slight chance that you are prompted at that moment - the moment you try to exit the site - for your email address. This, my friends, is called an "Exit Intent" pop-up, and this video shows you how to install one on your WordPress website. Things you'll need: 1. A WordPress Website 2. The Pop-Up Builder Plug-in for WordPress 3. The Gravity Forms Plug-in for WordPress We always say that high school kids can build websites. Why would a small business or mid size brand with a small marketing team pay a professional team like Data Driven Design to do it for them? This is one of the many reasons why. We are thinking about how to help you use data to grow your business and acquire new customers.

The physical act of launching a website is kind of like changing the oil in one's car. It's SUPER EASY if you've done it multiple times, or do it every day, like a Quick Lube place or something. But it can be really intimidating, nerve wracking and even scary if you've never done it before. And just like the possibility that you put the wrong kind of oil in your car, there's always the possibility that you look in the wrong spot for your DNS settings, which most times are hosted in the spot as your domain name, but not all the time.  Case in point, Cloudflare and GoDaddy. Your domain name and maybe even Webhosting, might be with GoDaddy, but your DNS settings might be with Cloudflare. This video explains the how to launch your website if this is in fact your scenario.

In this episode of the Data Driven Daily Tip, I get super passionate about Marketers and Small Business Owners getting into their Google Analytics accounts and understanding what’s happening with their web data to make data driven decisions. While I’ve put out plenty of content in the last few years about what business owners and marketers should look at in Google Analytics (in just 30 minutes a month you can make a huge difference), this Data Driven Daily Tip makes it even easier to check your web data. 1. It’s about how to set up automated email alerts from Google Analytics Web Properties. You can get your web traffic updates sent directly to you. 2. I talk about our new Alexa Skill called Ask Data Driven Design, where you can now just ask Alexa how your web traffic is doing. Now there’s even less of an excuse to know how your website is performing!

What Is Alexa For Business? “While Alexa was started as a Consumer Product, it has evolved into a couple different areas. Business Skills, like the one Data Driven Design has built to allow clients to ask Alexa how their web traffic is doing… Skills that are only available to employees of a particular business. This is what Alexa For Business is.” Alexa For Business gives the IT department of companies a way to manage and control access to a company’s internal only Alexa Skill or suite of Skills to employees that need/want access.