Jun 21, 2024 News 4 min read

Website Design Updates - June 2024

Jeff here. It's been a hugely productive week. I don't know if it's the microdosing shrooms, or it's just that I really love what I'm working on. I think a mixture of both.

Today I just want to give you an update on what I'm working on and share the excitement and good vibes with you.

Jeff Finley working at his laptop — It's your boy working on a new site for you all

New website updates

I finally took the plunge and bought the various tools and plugins needed for my website rebuild project. This is huge because I've been deliberating for what seems like ages (see my past newsletters all the way back in November).

I'm sticking with WordPress and going with Bricks Builder as my page builder. Also going with the combination of Kevin Geary's AutomaticCSS and Frames plugins.

Honestly, I have been super inspired by Kevin and it's his incredible amount of education content on web design and best practices that convinced me. I signed up for his paid Inner Circle community a couple weeks ago and have already received some great support from others. There are several other designers and web devs in that community that have also been making great content and I just feel a lot of positive momentum here. I can't thank them enough for the value I've received from them.

I installed and activated the new tools and played around on a local dev environment (Using LocalWP). I decided to move online to InstaWP for my staging site. There, I can work on my new site from anywhere. I decided to start from scratch and only import old content as needed instead of put a new skin on the 10+ year-old site.

I only had time to get my plugins installed and set things up. I played around with some dummy content to get familiar with things, but it's going to be a learning process as I go. Not much else to report here.

Now before I get too deep into my rebuild, I made some improvements to my current site that you can see right now.

Improved checkout experience on my current site

WooCommerce 9.0 came out this week and made some changes their outdated checkout design. It looks almost identical to Shopify, who many say has the best checkout experience out there. I updated my shop with this new feature, but had to make some CSS tweaks to get it looking good. It also got a bit faster which is nice. See for yourself. Try adding a product to your cart and going to checkout. Let me know if you have any issues.

improved checkout experience on jefffinley.org

Cara website updates

I made a simple 3-page website for Cara a couple years ago for her copy editing services. She wanted to update the text on her site this week to reflect her new offerings. The site was built back when I was still using the classic WordPress theme Salient (a great theme back in the day, but is outdated and is a legacy product at this point).

I update her plugins and got rid of unecesary clutter. Cleaned things up on the front and backend and got it looking pretty nice. Looking at it now, with everything I've learned, I would do things differently. But it got the job done.

By the way, if you need a copy editor, give her a shout! EditingByCara.com

made some improvements to editingbycara.com

Fighting spam & trying out Google Workspace

I was getting tons of new spam sent to my website email. Not through my contact form, but through regular mail. I must have got put on a list or something. Ugh. I kept marking it as spam, but it wasn't helping. I was in touch with support with my host Cloudways, which uses Rackspace for email hosting. Even with their help, I couldn't stop the spam from coming through. Blocking the emails did nothing because they were all unique email addresses.

The spam settings in Rackspace are pretty limited and the UI is still stuck in the early 00s. I wondered it it was still meeting my needs. I started looking for alternatives.

I asked for advice on Kevin Geary's Inner Circle and many of the folks there say they use Google Workspace for business email. After looking into it, along with other options like Zoho and MXRoute, I though I'd give it a try. Currently on a trial period. I hope their spam filters work better. Another plus is that I also get better email deliverability. Transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets) won't go into my customer's spam folders.

Other Stuff:

Microdosing Shrooms Update: I took my 5th microdose this morning. As you know from my last newsletter, I'm taking 100mg every three days. It's a very small amount, but I feel the effects.

The dramatic highs or lows have passed and it's more evened out now. I feel great and my anxiety levels are very low. I feel like I'm doing exactly what I need to be doing right now. Super grateful.

Shipping Orders on Etsy: I never mention it, but I still get orders through my Starseed Supply Co. shop on Etsy. I love packing and shipping my orders every week. If you haven't seen it, check it out!