web

I do lots of things: I write, host podcasts, take photos, and more. I wanted a way to provide a simple overview of my work that I could link to from my Twitter and Instagram profiles, and put in my email signature. Dave Mark, who is the executive editor of The Loop, and co-hosts The Dalrymple Report podcast, with Jim Dalrymple, mentioned Carrd to me. It hosts single-page websites that you can use to present a profile, a product, or literally anything that doesn’t require a full website.

I have a website, of course; this one. But when someone follows a link in a profile to a website with a couple thousand articles, and a dozen pages, it doesn’t succinctly say everything I do. On my About page, I list many of the things I do, but it’s a bit wordy. And I also wanted a more personal domain, so I chose mcelhearn.me.

Carrd, on the other hand, cuts out the cruft. I opted for a pretty classic design: some words, a link to my website, and three icons, with links to Twitter, Instagram, and email. Below them is a list of podcasts I produce, with their artwork and links to their sites (and I’ll be announcing another cool podcast soon, so I’ll add it when it goes live). Below them is a list of my most recent books, with their covers, and, finally, a form through which anyone can send me email.

It’s fully responsive, has a couple of dozen templates, and has a design interface that is quite flexible, though it takes a while to fully understand how elements fit together. There are three tiers, priced at $9, $19, and $49 a year. I opted for the second one, Pro Standard, which allows me to use a custom domain, and has some other useful features. With these plans, you can create from three to 25 sites, using custom domains or hosted on carrd.co.

I may use this service for some other simple websites; it’s flexible and fun to set up. If you need a digital business card, or any other single-page website, check out Carrd.

(Yes, that’s a referral link, which will save me a couple of bucks on my next renewal. Thanks in advance if you do sign up for the service through my link.)

It took a while, but I finally got fed up with web hosts. I’d changed several times over the years, and, until recently, was hosted by NameCheap. This company had a serious security vulnerability that affected one of my sites, and their customer support is horrendous, but making the change on multiple websites is time consuming.

Since all my websites run WordPress, my options were to pay much more for dedicated WordPress hosting, or to move to WordPress.com, the hosting that is run by WordPress itself. I eventually opted for the latter, though this process was not without difficulty.

When I moved of this site, Kirkville, which has more than 2,000 posts, thousands of images, and a plethora of comments, I used the WordPress export and import features. I did this in late June, and expected the process to be smooth. I chose WordPress’s Business plan, which, at $25 a month, gives me a lot of options, such as the ability to use plug-ins and custom themes. It also is supposed to provide dedicated support.

What I found when I moved the site was that the paths of my images had not changed. As such, they were still being served from the previous site hosted on NameCheap. In addition, some didn’t display at all. Part of this was due to the fact that the path for my installation was not at the root level of the folder; for historic reasons, it was in a /wordpress/ folder, but part was because the WordPress import simply doesn’t seem to handle images very well.

To my disappointment, it took more than a week for WordPress support to fix this. My initial contact was via their online chat, but my issue had to be escalated, and there didn’t seem to be any “happiness engineers” available to fix it. I had to complain, over and over, every day, to get this fixed, and, in the end, it was resolved, but there was a lot of stress.

For two other sites I run, I chose less expensive plans. For a site I host for my friend Peter Robinson, author of the Inspector Banks mystery series, I chose the $8 Premium plan, to be able to use premium themes and some other features. And for my site about learning to play the shakuhachi, I chose the cheapest plan, Personal, at $5 a month, because I was happy using one of the basic themes.

One of the biggest problems with NameCheap was that their support for the XML-RPC protocol would break every few months, requiring a great deal of time to solve, as none of the support people really understood the issues. (They had something to do with security rules, and, while I told them to turn them off, they kept turning them back on.) I use this extensively, because I manage my blogs with MarsEdit, which communicates using this protocol. (Which is what WordPress’s own apps use as well.)

Now that everything is settled, I’m very happy. I don’t have problems posting or managing my blogs, and I don’t have to worry about server outages – which were frequent with NameCheap – or any of the back end stuff that I had to deal with in shared hosting. It was very stressful to know that every month or so I’d have to spend an hour in a support chat with NameCheap. In addition, the new sites are fast; much faster than NameCheap, even though I had a plan where my sites were hosted on SSD.

It’s always tough to move a large website, and I wish the move process had been smoother, but the results are satisfying. Shared hosting is a commodity, and most companies don’t care about their users, and support can be abysmal. I haven’t had any issues with my sites since those first bumps, so kudos to WordPress for their service.

As a middle-aged man, I have eyes that match my age, perhaps even a bit older. I have worn glasses since I was in my early twenties, and have worn reading glasses for a long time as well. I also only see out of one eye, having amblyopia (the other eye sees just a blur.) Since my work is done on a computer, I use special computer glasses – with lenses adapted for the precise distance between my eyes and the computer screen – so I don’t squint or tire myself out.

I have long railed against designers and developers who don’t offer font size choices in their apps. I recall a recent information-gathering app that I tried in beta. I launched the app, saw the tiny font, found no option to change the font size, and promptly deleted it. On the Mac, you can still zoom the screen (System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom), but on an iOS device, you don’t have that option. So whenever I try a new iOS app and see that the twenty-something designers didn’t correctly estimate their audience, I let them know. In some cases, this gets fixed – a couple of Twitter clients, for example – but in most, it is ignored.

I saw the most contemptible example of this yesterday. The Guardian newspaper recently did a redesign, altering the format of the paper (they went from a broadsheet to a tabloid), and slightly changing the layout on their website. As such, they released a new version of their iOS app. When I looked at it, I saw no way to change the font size. But I found this:

In other words, if you are visually impaired, you will have to pay to be able to read this app. This is an incredibly evil thing to do, and certainly immoral. How can a newspaper think that an adjustable text size is not a standard feature, but expect people to pay extra for it?

Guardian, I won’t pay you for that, and I think what you are doing is misguided, and, perhaps, illegal. But to all designers out there: don’t think that your eyes are the same as those of your users. The number of people who need glasses to read is much higher than you probably imagine, if you’re a millennial with 20/20 vision. Be careful; if you alienate your users like this, it could be very costly.

Update: interestingly, since the time I looked at the app and took the above screenshot (January 17, 5pm UK time), the Guardian has updated their app. There are now font size settings, and the premium tier makes no mention of font sizes. I’m glad they changed this so quickly, and wish all developers would make this sort of change.