Your Head for the Hills Here

New Website Challenge

Creating a brand new website is a daunting task even if you are using the most popular website development tool, WordPress [29.3% of the world’s websites are done in WordPress]. First, WordPress tools and features are developing rapidly – in a 2016 Podcast review we cited 41 essential WordPress plugins. Today 21 of those plugins have been replaced on the list of essentials.Change is occurring rapidly in the WordPress ecosystem. Second, although some portions of WordPress website development are relatively easy, especially with great free WordPress PageBuilders; nonetheless some of the image/media tools  and backend admin are  tricky.

The third WordPress challenge is the famous borrow from Apple’s “there is an app for that”, there are “47,000++ WordPress plugins for that”. Problem – keeping track of the best among so many. The fourth  challenge with WordPress for DIY-Do It Yourself users is getting familiar with the admin and edit interface so you can build a website that works well for you.

This is exactly what self-admitted newby  Stephanie Sansen has done, created a classic small business website which is superbly designed and filled with great content.

We judged Stephanie’s website to be the best CSI Member’s website for 3 reasons. First, on the Home page there is a full width slider that clearly describes the mission of the website in great style. Second, the website Blog posts and Recipes are consistently updated giving a fresh feel to the website. But most important of all the overall styling of the site is outstanding. If Content is King, the recipes are most alluring.

But on the other side of the fence Stephanie’s Website.Grader scores of 21/30 for speed, 30/30 for mobile readiness, 20/30 for SEO status, and 0/10 for security adding up to an overall website rating of 71/100 are average. This is close to the mean  for all CSI websites.  Most of these are scores which could be improved by some fairly simple tuning and fixes [this true for many new CSI websites].  Still give credit where it is due – this is a top notch website on the first try.

Summary

The basic website strength is the good recipe display and easy navigation among the different savories. For a first time website Stephanie gets the essentials remarkably right.