'Digital Dispatch'

Welcome to the MCC blog!

Royalty Free Pixabay Image

Keywords:
resolution, website, articles, reviews, clients

Key Takeaway:
This is where I’ll be posting shorter updates, comments, and rants that don’t really fit anywhere else on the website.

Category Insights:
ANNOUNCEMENT — This article shares an update, change, or important announcement.

Purpose

This is where I’ll be posting shorter updates, comments, and rants that don’t really fit anywhere else on the website. For now, I’m calling it the "Digital Dispatch," though the name might change if I come up with something better. The website design will continue to evolve. I am always looking for ways to better manage the website and add new features.

If there’s a particular topic you’d like me to cover, feel free to reach out! I’m always open to fresh ideas. At least half of the article ideas have come from clients who ask questions.

Why have I redone the website?

• It's improving the website and growing traffic at the same time.
• The articles are beneficial to my clients.
• It's generating new customers
• I am teaching myself new SEO skills!
• I am teaching myself new coding skills!
• I am teaching myself AI skills.
• I can offer these skills to my clients.
• The learning process is easier when there is an actual project and you can show results of your work.

Recent changes to main website:

• TOTAL REWRITE! - The entire site was rewritten to remove older code and to modernize the site. This has resulted in major performance improvements and visual enhancements.
• Homepage optimization - The total number of bytes was reduced by more than half.
  
• The original template was completely replaced with a new custom design, optimized for performance.
• Eliminated Bootstrap and JQuery libraries
• The MCC home page now renders in approximately 1 second!
• Updated the content security policy (CSP) to make the website much more secure.
• Logo change!
• The website fits cellphones and tablets better.
• Restored the broken functionality of top banner.
• Added outline around title text for better visibility.
• Darkened the background slides for better visibility of the page titles.
• Fixed Google map sizing when viewed on cellphones.
• Created a new button system for entire site
• Graphic enhancements everywhere
• Random spelling & grammar mistakes are being fixed as they are discovered.
• In page links didn't always land in the correct spot on the home page, services page and networks page. We think these are all fixed except for a couple that are stubborn.
• The reviews directory has been removed from the home page as it was getting to long. It now has its own page.
• Added a new review directory page and restructured the site accordingly for easier management going forward.
• Many of the review pages have been updated with new content.
• All schema issues with the embedded JSON within the review pages have been resolved.

Recent blog section changes:

• Correct issues on selected pages that caused the navigation menu to extend past the right of the screen.
• Improved loading speed of blog pages by optimizing images.
• Changed to a slightly larger font for all blog articles and the directory.
• Added a master directory page.
• Articles are now listed by category and by number.
• Search function on the blog directory page.
• Blog articles were moved to individual pages for clarity.
• Article reordering
• Deprecated the old multi-article pages. They were too much work to maintain and terrible for SEO.
• Created new section 'Pinned and Frequently Asked Questions'.
• Additional cross reference links between articles
• Added at least 1 image to every article
• Added credits to most photos
• Removed unintentional/unwanted border on all blog pages caused by a CSS error.
• Many of the blog pages have been updated with new content.

In-House Content Management System

I have developed our own homebrew content management system (CMS). This continues to be a FUN project. It's being written in Python with some additional libraries. We even created it to have its own GUI. It's still a bit rough at this point but its already creating a positive impact on our Google results. The goal was to use it to make sure all website pages are consistently in the same, proper format while meeting SEO requirements for Google and other search engines.

This custom utility makes it possible to write code to manage the pages of the site and even implement mass changes. It's already showing promising results with increased impressions and increased click through rate.

The entire project started as a learning exercise. Expand my knowledge of CSS and SEO, learn Python, and learn local AI. What a better way to do this than to work on the website where I can combine all of these things into a single project.

Key features include:

• Keyword Analysis - Examine each page for keywords and suggest additional keywords.
• Weak Page Analysis - Use a local AI to generate reports to identify weak or stale pages content. Then suggest opportunities for improvement.
• Sitemap Generation - automatically generate an up to date sitemap.xml file
• Schema Generation - Generate the proper breadcrumb schema for every page to satisfy SEO requirements.
• Summary Box Generation - Creates a summary box for each blog page article.
• Page Description Check - Check page description and offer better ideas using local AI. Change meta tags as required.
• Image Management - Implement a system for managing images and captions across the entire website.
• Additional features are still being added.

Display Testing:

All webpages should display correctly for nearly all mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop size screens with Chromium based browsers.

• 2960x1440 Resolution
• 2560x1440 Resolution
• 1920x1200 Resolution
• 1600x900 Resolution
• 1440x900 Resolution
• 1366x768 Resolution
• 1280x1000 Resolution
• 1024x768 Resolution
• 848x480 Resolution
• 800x600 Resolution
• Kindle HD10 1920x1200 Resolution
• Samsung GS9+ 2280x1080 Resolution
• Samsung GS24+ 2340x1080 Resolution

Technology stack used on this website:

This list continues to grow. Some items have been replaced with newer and better tools and methods. Blog post #76 (link below) discusses the hardware I use.

• Hosting: Linux based Apache
• Theme: Self created
  --- Original theme was outdated.
• HTML 5 / CSS 3
• XML (sitemap is auto generated via python script)
• Java Script
• Python (CMS, breadcrumbs,keyword analysis, and summary box generation)
• Python tinkter (CMS GUI)
• BeautifulSoup (website scraping tool for blog summary generation)
• JSON (schema auto generated via python script)
• PHP (selected pages)
• VSCode with 30+ extensions
• Chat GPT (writing, vibe coding, images)
• CoPilot (writing, vibe coding, images)
• Gemini (writing, vibe coding, images)
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) / Ubuntu
  --- Likely to be eliminated.
• Gemma 2:9b local AI running on WSL / Ubuntu
  --- Likely to be eliminated.
• Gemma 2:9b local AI running on Windows Ollama (CMS)
• Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B local AI running on Windows Ollama (vibe coding)
• Qwen 2.5 Coder 14B local AI running on Windows Ollama (vibe coding)
• Microsoft Excel (data analysis)
• Google Search Console (website analysis)
• Multiple website quality auditing tools (10+)
• Website is heavily documented

Reference:

Reviews

If you haven't done so already, please check out our product reviews! We started making mini reviews of products we have either used ourselves or have implemented for clients. The reviews are NOT sponsored, and items were acquired with our own money. They are intended to reflect our actual experience. We'll let you know if it was easy or difficult to use or if it met our needs. The reviews are often updated to reflect any new experience or problem we may discover along the way.

REVIEW PAGE

Planned website additions:

• There are ideas for many more articles which will be added as time allows.
• Update and expand all articles as necessary (ongoing process).
• The addition of guest articles. Who's interested?
• Addition of a blog comment section.
• Ability to take customer payments from the website.