What’s the catch? No catch.

Every Wednesday, he will offer a (free) 30 minute session. Just find a 30 minute time slot that works for you, and get your WordPress questions answered. Think of it like open office hours, but virtual.

Our doors open. We’d love to help you. So come on in! Schedule your session and get your initiatives off the ground today.

Note: We are not asking for any monetary contributions for this service. However – if you would like to spread the love, please consider making a contribution to World Central Kitchen ahead of our 30 minute session. They have been helping individuals throughout the pandemic, and are continuing relief efforts for Ukrainian refugees.

About Jaki Levy

Jaki is a 15 year WordPress veteran. He’s helped build websites for MoMA, MTV, Sotheby’s, and other global brands. In addition to building custom WordPress websites, he’s taught small business owners how to optimize their websites (and businesses) for maximum performance. In some instances, he’s helped business double their revenue, year over year.

You might have noticed this earlier this morning – many users were automatically logged out of the service (including me). Yeah, I know. Pretty annoying. But it’s a big deal.

Here’s a few things you should do start doing today and over the course of the next few days to keep yourself and your friends safe online –

1. Update Your Facebook Password, Like Right Now
When doing this, make sure to use a unique and secure password. This means that you should use a totally unique password on Facebook, and that you should not use that same password on any other site. It should also be a very long and difficult password to remember. Like so long and complex that you probably have to write it down with a real pen.

2. Use a Password Manager
We use Dashlane to manage passwords. Password managers are very helpful because they remember your passwords for you. They also help you set very secure passwords that you do not have to remember. There are other password managers such as LastPass and 1Password. For those that are shopping around or want to do more research, here’s an article from LifeHacker that reviews the various password managers.

3. Use 2 Factor Authentication (2FA)
If you’ve got a cell phone, you can setup 2 Factor Authentication for your important accounts (think bank accounts, email, and twiter). When anyone (including you) tries to log into those accounts, you’ll receive a text message confirmation code before you can login. This helps prevent unauthorized login attempts, and is pretty cool. Google has a pretty nice overview of why 2FA is important and how to set it up for your Google Account.

For more info about Password Managers and this specific Facebook hack, check out the blog on Dashlane. And if you have any questions, feel free to post a comment or contact us directly

Good luck, and believe me, after setting up that password manager, you won’t worry as much next time Facebook (or another site) gets hacked.

This 2 day conference brings together leaders of the digital landscape, who are developing cutting edge solutions to today’s problems. We’re certainly looking forward to connecting with companies such as IBM, Google, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, along with organizations like the New York City’s Mayor’s Office, and agencies like R/GA.

The WP Engine Summit website has a full list of speakers along with the full agenda.

We’re also proud to be an ongoing WP Engine Agency Partner. We’ve been working with WP Engine for quite some time, and seeing them create such a robust summit is highly encouraging, not only for the field of WordPress, but the entire digital world.

The conference happens on September 26th, so if you’re interested in joining us, you might want to hit that Register button, like right now. Or you can follow along on the blog. And hey, maybe we’ll even revive our twitter account for this event. No promises, tho

California is known for its competitive tech landscape. Arrow Root Media is known for our responsive web design and development. What do you get when you put the two together?

We’re proud to say that it’s an announcement naming us a Top Web Designer and Top UX Agency in San Francisco!

Last week, the DC-based ratings & reviews firm, Clutch, listed us as one of their top B2B Service Providers in California.The site gathering client feedback via in-depth interviews, which is then combined with analysts’ market research to create verified listings of the best service providers in the digital space.

We’re not alone in emphasizing the importance of responsive web design, and now we’re happy to say we’re not alone in priding ourselves as a top agency.

On top of that, Clutch’s sister site, The Manfiest, also named Arrow Root a Top San Francisco Web Development Company!

We pride ourselves in helping organizations create transformative digital exeriences, and we’d love to hear from you. Hit us up, say congrats, or start planning your next project with us.

Link To Register? Click Below

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cartier-womens-initiative-awards-informational-session-tickets-48377070119

There are clear requirements for anyone wishing to participate in the Initiative.

To be considered for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, the project must be an original for-profit early-stage business (1 to 3 years old) led by a woman.

• For-profit: the business should be designed to generate revenues, non-profit project proposals not accepted.
• Early stage: the business should be in the initial phase of its development (between 1-3 years)
• Revenue generation: the business should currently be generating revenue. It being understood that a business that is generating revenue is not necessarily profitable in its first years of operations.
• Women leadership & ownership: The main leadership position must be filled by a woman either in the capacity of Director, General Manager or CEO. She must also own significant stake within the company. The ownership of the business is evaluated based on the position of the candidate in relation to other stakeholders

Hopefully, we’ll see you at the upcoming networking event!

Here’s a direct link to the entire Flickr Album.

Ever since I’ve been attending WordCamp SF, Matt Mullenweg would deliver his “State of The Word” , summarizing key concepts and developments in the WordPress world.

You can watch this year’s State of The Word Below :

Slides are here :

Brian Krogsgard from Post Status posted his thoughts here.

And the folks over at WP Engine put together a nice infographic summarizing the State of The Word.

Arrow Root Media recently re-designed a website for Daxor Corporation, Inc. After we finished our re-design, we performed an SEO Audit on the site to identify any errors and warnings that we may have missed during the process. We uncovered several issues, submitted these findings to them with a game plan on how to improve their new site’s performance in the search engines and immediately got to work correcting these issues. We optimized every page on their site including news posts and blog posts.

Here are some important things that need to be looked at after any website re-design:

Redirects

Redirects are one of the most important things to think about during a website redesign. Ensuring that proper pages are redirected to the correct location is vital to your existing SEO. These redirects tell search engines to rank the new page instead of ranking the old one that doesn’t exist anymore.

• Redirects should always be 301 redirects. These will tell the search engines to pass the rankings from your old pages to the new pages. In addition, they will send your users to the correct page.
• All pages that are redirected should be redirected to a similar page and not just to the home page or a non-relevant page

When redirects are not done at all or done correctly, Google will reset the value of the new pages that were created. These pages will go to a 404 page not found and drop out of the rankings. A lot of times this causes a loss in rankings and in traffic.

Site Architecture

Site Architecture is the process of how the pages are organized on the site and linked together to make sense. Google passes value from one page to the next based on where the pages are located on the website as well as internal links. Pages that a closer knit to the home page or other major pages on the site will rank higher than those that are lower in the hierarchy.

Each page has a topic or focus keyword/phrase that Google values it for and ranks it for that keyword/phrase that has been assigned to that page. Each target keyword/phrase requires a certain amount of value, or a certain score to compete with other websites in the search results targeting that same target keyword/phrase.

When a website changes how the site architecture is set up, it can cause some pages to have less internal links, or be linked to pages that may have less value to pass on. It is important that your SEO professional make the necessary changes to the site’s architecture properly as to get the best ranking from the search engines.

Content

Changing content on your site after a website design can cause Google to re-evaluate the relevancy of the page for the target keyword/phrase. If priority keywords are removed from important areas (Title, Body content, meta description and SEO titles), the relevancy score will drop and overall rankings and traffic will drop as well.

Having an SEO professional go through your site with a fine tooth comb to uncover where all the errors and warnings may be hiding after your re-design is the best way to prevent any loss in traffic. In fact, with your rocking new site and SEO re-integrated, your traffic should actually improve.

Let Arrow Root Media help you with your SEO and ensure that your site is functioning properly.

Sign Up for a free site audit to see how you can improve your site!

From day one tech companies have been making a real difference. Facebook activated the  Safetycheck feature that helps people find out if their loved ones are safe. Facebook also stepped up to the fundraising raising plate. Over 750,000 people donated via Facebook, contributing over $15 million to support the International Medical Corps relief effort. Facebook donated an additional $2 million to local recovery efforts to help those in affected areas. Facebook did not act alone. Skype and WhatsApp also made call to the area free to place for days after the disaster.

We would like to remind you that all Skype calls from Nepal to landlines and mobile remain free: http://t.co/FoY3BkFvJ3

— Skype (@Skype) May 15, 2015

More than $415 million is required for the 8 million+ people affected by the earthquake in Nepal. As of May 19th, there has been only 17% of required aid met.

After almost one month, only 17% of aid requirement for the #NepalQuake was funded: https://t.co/tUP3mLXNzf pic.twitter.com/S6pPE4fsYM

— UN OCHA Asia Pacific (@OCHAAsiaPac) May 19, 2015

To address these unmet needs, we asked “How might we support those who are committing to innovate, fundraise and help using #techforgood in Nepal?” It is in this spirit that we’ve created this resource guide.

Whether you want to get involved directly or understand how social media, crowdsourcing and technology are making a difference, we hope this is useful for you. Below is a collection of our favorite tools and efforts that are making a difference today.

  Learn to map!

For Nepal, map data is key to humanitarian missions. Opensource maps are giving critical information to groups on the ground. Read about the movement of thousands joining to map around the world. MapGive helps new volunteers learn to map and get involved in online tasks.
Start an account and learn here. And make sure to take a look at the Open Streetmap in action.

  Share data!

The Humanitarian Digital Exchange

Anyone can logon and share data sets about Nepal to keep the public and relief teams informed. Launched by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Humanitarian Digital Exchange is an open source platform where data comes to life.

  Explore

Nepal 2015 Earthquakes

A picture is worth a thousand words. This picture, though, is likely worth alot more. Take a look at this to view the continued  tremors visualized. The number of lives impacted is simply heartbreaking.

  Give!

Gift guides recommend giving cash over in-kind donations. So what kind of giver are you? We’ve seen a lot of momentum being built by crowdsourcing campaigns that aim to give directly to people and combat corrupt local officials that may misuse funds. NGOs and relief groups are also very helpful. They bring years of experience and are set up to release funds before you donate so they can respond quickly.

Give to  NGOS

UNOCHA’s Giving Guide

The UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) has already released $15 million to kick-start immediate life-saving relief work in Nepal. CERF receives contributions year-around so that humanitarian partners can act quickly when and where crises strike.

UNICEF

UNICEF is on the ground working to reach 1.7 million children and their families with critical aid in Nepal.

And via twitter, you can see direct appeals, get information & start helping very quickly.

What we need, & where you can donate, all you need to know here. #NepalQuakeRelief PlsRt pic.twitter.com/LkL0qKl7II

— Raheel Khursheed (@Raheelk) April 27, 2015

Help people affected by Earthquake in India & Nepal. Donate generously in PMNRF online at https://t.co/Czi8gEpnoX pic.twitter.com/bmtzoS9LGF

— BJP (@BJP4India) April 27, 2015

Join the  Crowdfunding

Looking to support untraditional disaster relief teams? Life IndieGoGo, Ketto.org, and #WeHelpNepal all have very successful crowdfunding campaigns to participate in and take note.

We’re also seeing individuals expand their reach by starting crowdfunding campaigns for large NGOs! By acting as ambassadors for the organizations, individuals are increasing the organizations’ impact. And it’s all based on telling personal stories that cause like minded people to take action.

Share Your Story

Let us know what you find inspiring. How are you making change? Have you seen anything noteworthy worth sharing? What ways are you using #techgood to make a difference?

The article reviews Google’s new search algorithm. This time they have been so kind to announce it before it happened. Much thanks to the guys at Google…we greatly appreciate the heads up!

Basically Google will now be using “mobile-friendliness” as a ranking factor for websites. For the web savvy – this we’re talking RWD (Responsive Web Design).

We all use mobile devices and scroll the internet in any given place at any given time. It only makes sense that Google would eventually “grade” websites based on their “mobile-friendliness”. Google announced that this change in algorithm will be released on April 21, 2015.

Be sure to check out the article to see how you can ensure your site is “mobile-friendly” and ready for this next update. And – as always, if you need help getting your site “mobile-friendly” ready, please be sure to contact us and we can help!

Huh?

The Brooklyn Country Cantina is an annual party produced by The Defibulators and friends. The event features loads of bands and is an unofficial party that happens during the annual SXSW festival held in Austin.

This year, we were on hand to help setup, tweet, post some videos, and provide some on site tech support. Here’s a short clip of The Mastersons – one of the many bands we shot – on video – during the earlier part of the day.

The Mastersons at #bkcantina. Yummy harmonies.

A video posted by Jaki Levy (@jakilevy) on Mar 21, 2015 at 12:46pm PDT

As we wrapped up the day, we posted a few photos to our Twitter feed. Overall, we were on site for almost 18 hours. That’s a long day.

We're wrapping up the day at #bkcantina with a set by Bandito Royale. Thx for a great day everyone! pic.twitter.com/yl5B0bTeT5

— ArrowRootMedia (@ArrowRootMedia) March 22, 2015

If you want some more good stuff, definitely check out the photos posted by The Bluegrass Station. They’re a fantastic set of images shot by a local Austin photog!

Overall, there were about 30 bands over the course of the day. So we went ahead and made a little playlist for your enjoyment via Spotify. Hope you enjoy that music! We did.

There’s loads of parties and bands that come to Austin for SXSW. According to Operation Every Band, there’s over 2,100 bands playing in Austin over just 1 week! That’s an average of 300 bands every day. Some bands we met played over 10 shows in just a few days.

So we’re thrilled that some folks think this is the best party during the festival. Aw Shucks. Now we’re blushing.

Last night at #BKCantina. Best #sxsw party.So much love to @thedefibulators for putting it on & making great music! pic.twitter.com/hxW46b7aPG

— Michaela Anne (@MyMichaelaAnne) March 17, 2014

For even more SXSW musical goodness, make sure to check out NPR’s SXSW short list. It features 100 songs from musicians that played at SXSW. Some of those musicians played at our very own event. And all the songs are downloadable. Thanks, NPR!!!

And many many thanks to The Defibulators for putting this whole shebang together! We’ll see you next year at SXSW!