Since January 2024 Shopify sent out a flurry of emails to warn store owners to authenticate and add a DMARC record to continue sending branded emails from their domain, as per the screenshot cover picture of this blog post. I received an inundated amount of requests for help from my clients and people around the world from a reel on Instagram and YouTube that I posted. Many Shopify store owners saw the warning but due to the technical barrier they failed to fix the problem themselves.| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #10: Create a mobile first website. To any business that reads this blog post I encourage you to stop reading, go view your own website on a mobile phone, and then come back to this post. Alright, now answer the following questions: Did my website load fast on mobile? [yes/no] Did my website look good on mobile? [yes/no] Did my website work well on mobile? [yes/no] If you answered no to at least one of the above questions then let me tell you 2 critical things:| Sanico Software Blog
For those that use TinaCMS I will show you how to add hidden fields to the metadata of your content files. I utilise several default fields within the YAML of my content markdown files and I wanted to add them with TinaCMS when a user creates a new entry to a collection. After I read the well written TinaCMS docs I noticed that no option existed to add default values and hide them from the user interface of TinaCMS.| Sanico Software Blog
I will show you 4 beautiful websites that recently caught my attention. Every now and again as I surf the web I come across a few websites that make me say: “dammmnnnnn that’s nice”. Just like a car enthusiast when they see a classic and rare car go past, as a web developer well designed websites catch my eye. Without any further ado, here are the 4 websites. Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the organisations mentioned, I earn no commissions, I added no affiliate link, and I ...| Sanico Software Blog
Myself and my brother Dom created one of the most particular and unique websites for a local wine label called By Fabiano. Fabiano, a local SA winemaker and his business partner Alex wanted to create a custom ecommerce storefront for their unique new wine label called By Fabiano. Based in Mclaren Vale South Australia they produce a high quality wine with roots to their Italian heritage as described by this excerpt from their website:| Sanico Software Blog
Once upon a time a fake, cunning, and wretched SEO salesman approached one of my clients. He ran a questionable report, with a questionable analysis, and with a questionable video of him explaining SEO concepts. My client signed up for $500 a month for this service as she honestly wanted to improve her website. This bloke charmed her with his magic and promised her the thing everyone wants but can’t have without payment, a spot at the top of Google.| Sanico Software Blog
I wrote a program to transfer 496 ecommerce products from Wix to Shopify. We performed this transfer for Rachel, the owner and operator of Essence & Soul on King William Road in Adelaide, South Australia. She previously utilised a Wix store to sell her catalogue of over 496 products but we recommended she move to Shopify as we flat out refuse to build ecommerce stores with use of Wix due to its inferiority.| Sanico Software Blog
The good old solution. Just run an ad, get the business. What folly. “Just run an ad”: the dream that social media companies want to sell businesses to get their greasy fingers on their money. Oh you haven’t heard? An ad a day keeps the doctor away. Says the fake doctors called social media companies that bully and pester you until you buy their ads. Before you get your pitch forks and knifes out I want to clarify that I am not against ads, value exists in them as I explain towards the ...| Sanico Software Blog
The start of any new project normally weighs up questions such as “What’s the expected ROI (return on investment) of this project?” or “If we provide this feature, what’s the increase in cost going to be?”. These are excellent questions. But how do you answer these when it comes to maintenance? What do you do when you have a piece of software that works, but has not been worked on in years?| Sanico Software Blog
View the published website We recently published a new custom Shopify ecommerce website for the very popular and well known strawberry farm Harvest the Fleurieu in South Australia. Allis reached out to us on Instagram after she saw us complete a website for another awesome South Aussie called Within the Candle Chaos Co. I am not sure why but the pronunciation of Fleurieu always sends me to a world of confusion, I think it’s the mix of characters that throws me off.| Sanico Software Blog
EDIT: 31/10/2023 The competition is now closed, out of all the entries no one successfully guessed the sentence which was quite interesting. I have a screenshot of the sentence at the end of the blog post for any curious cats out there. Feel free to read the post and see if you can guess the sentence without looking at the screenshot below, good luck! Thank you again to everyone that entered the competition.| Sanico Software Blog
I hear the word algorithm a lot. The Instagram algorithm, the Facebook algorithm, the Youtube algorithm or even Google’s ranking algorithm. There is a lot of misinformation regarding algorithms, especially since many people consider it black magic. I want to shed some light on algorithms from the perspective of a software engineer. What is an algorithm? Good question. Let’s start out by stating that it is not witchcraft. An algorithm is a process that performs operations based on a set of...| Sanico Software Blog
Many years ago when I interned for a large software organisation I spoke up about bad code. On my first days as an intern I received my assigned project. I pulled the project from GitHub and opened the file, a monstrosity of over 2000 lines of poorly written, undocumented, uncommented, and untested code of an ExpressJS application. I spent literally 2 months in an attempt to refactor the code to allow me to add new features.| Sanico Software Blog
In the software industry I meet many people who deem themselves as technical wizards, those who live and breathe software for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They know and understand things about software that others know nothing about. Most of these technical wizards, in my experience, lack people skills so when people enter their dungeon to ask a technical question they give what I call, the scoff of superiority. The scoff, you know, that exhalation of breath.| Sanico Software Blog
I hear this one a lot, the complaint that to start a business you must do something new or different. BS. One person I know told me of their concept for a business but reeled back on it when they discovered someone already created a similar business. So what? Who said there wasn’t room for another business to do the same thing? Who said it had to be different to succeed?| Sanico Software Blog
Software costs both time and money to write and create. It’s not some magic fairy dust that you wave a wand and earn a butt ton of money. You just wake up with an idea in the morning and earn a billion dollars by nightfall. No. An idea sometimes serves as a start point but an idea alone won’t put food on the dinner table tonight. A friend of mine tells the story of their original idea to customise a car to add a stereo system, people love music so why not add it to a car to enhance the dr...| Sanico Software Blog
In one software audit a few months ago I worked with a small business here in Australia that hired software developers from a developing country. Within the first three hours of my analysis of the codebase I noticed I lacked the majority of the code necessary to execute the application. Not only that, I uncovered that the software developers hosted a significant part of the code on the internet, visible and accessible to the public.| Sanico Software Blog
Did your Shopify store go down? You’ve tried everything but you still fail to connect to your online store? No stress, we help fix, maintain, and create Shopify stores on a daily basis. Problems with Shopify stores happen regularly, you are not alone, I promise. Today I will share 7 troubleshooting steps to help fix your Shopify store and bring it back online. The steps range in technical ability from basic to advanced.| Sanico Software Blog
Emails: something almost everyone uses. Love them or hate them they reign king of modern day communication. Tons of apps exist for communication such as iMessage, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Reddit, Google Meets, and many more. From phone calls, text messages, status updates to forum posts and yet email, in my opinion, sits at the top. As a website developer many clients of mine asked if I am able to help them with their emails.| Sanico Software Blog
Yes you read it right. I love Software. Software is my passion, something that I lose myself in. Call me a weird geek but I love me some zero’s and one’s. When I write Software I come to life, I feel exhilarated. Whether I program in the morning, afternoon or the middle of the night, time loses meaning. I write Software for work, for pleasure, and for a challenge. Whether paid or unpaid, I am writing Software.| Sanico Software Blog
Shopify is a superior ecommerce platform that helps small businesses sell their products online. It has an ongoing cost to use but this cost is offset easily if you have a thriving store. If you are not a developer, you are required to use one of the several free template themes on offer which has its goods and bads. The major good is that you can have a passable website that allows selling online.| Sanico Software Blog
You may have heard of ChatGPT but if you haven’t, ChatGPT is an interactive generative pre-trained transformer built on advanced language models… WOAH, let’s make that a bit easier to understand. It is essentially an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that can provide human-like responses to any question you may have. For example, the image below shows the response if I asked ChatGPT to “write a product description for a montessori toy that is colourful and for kids”.| Sanico Software Blog
A majority of the businesses that I work with ask me if I am able to integrate their systems with Xero, the software they use for accounting. Most businesses manage several software systems for their daily operations such as a CRM, ecommerce website, inventory system, appointing booking system and much more. However, the software platforms fail to communicate with one another which leads to wasted company resources and inconsistent, incorrect and duplicated data.| Sanico Software Blog
When my brother and I founded Sanico Software we started to freelance website design jobs. We began with websites because we knew a market existed for handcrafted, well designed, and well engineered websites. We immediately boomed with business and decided to double down harder on websites. However, the small businesses that we worked with began to ask for more than just websites: “Can you manage my domain?” “Can you set up my computer network in my home office?| Sanico Software Blog
We recently worked with an Adelaide based electrician contractor that works on significant projects around South Australia to help customise their quotes, invoices, and job cards in simPRO. I heard several clients mention this software simPRO since I work with other local tradies in Adelaide such as SIMAC Air Conditioning and RP Connections. However, I never directly worked with the software myself. simPRO allows businesses, in particular tradies, to manage their jobs much easier.| Sanico Software Blog
When someone starts a business they go straight on the internet and buy a domain name. Usually they buy both the general .com version and the regional version such as .com.au in Australia. They purchase the domain for a multitude of reasons but the major one of course, to prevent its purchase by someone else. Once they establish their business overtime they use the domain for their website, to set up emails, and so on.| Sanico Software Blog
As a software engineer I am not required to work from a particular location, in other words, no office required. I started my first software business with my brother called Infinity Mural back in 2019 that then morphed into Sanico Software. Since we just started as a new business we wanted to start with low overheads so we took the obvious choice and decided to work from home. We saved a ton of money as we required no rental of an office or co-working space, no money spent on fuel or car main...| Sanico Software Blog
I attended the Collective Markets earlier this year located in Civic Park, right across from SA’s well known Tea Tree Plaza. This is where I came in contact with The Naked Soap Company, a small business dedicated to hand making eco-friendly soaps and skin-care products. Elise is the owner of the company and runs the business with her family. I had the privilege of meeting Michelle (Elise’s sister) at the market stall and mentioned I help locals like herself develop their websites.| Sanico Software Blog
On the 27th of November 2022 I went to the Bowerbird market on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to support some local Australian creators. The Bowerbird is a well known market showcasing Australian designers and makers held at the Adelaide Showground in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia. I love to go to the markets and support locals because I get the chance to meet small business owners face to face.| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #8: Write descriptive, clear, and concise titles for your products on your ecommerce website to rank higher on Google. I wrote this tip because I noticed many ecommerce websites in my hometown of Adelaide fail to write good product titles. I thought what a shame. What a missed opportunity. Many people pay an SEO specialist like myself to improve a website while many just miss factors like this that they possess the ability to modify themselves.| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #7: This tip may seem pretty straightforward but I constantly see missed opportunities for businesses sharing their website with new customers. Picture your website like a castle in the middle of the woods. Sounds random but stay with me here. You have gone to the effort to get your website published online and it now exists in the middle of nowhere. How does anyone know where your castle is?| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #6: Avoid putting important text in images as it makes it difficult for Google to understand. User’s can’t easily copy text and accessibility readers lack the ability to read the text aloud for people with a disability. Although this tip is subtle it is something that helps boost the SEO of a website. When Google or other search engines index your website they ingest a variety of information, one critical piece of information is the text.| Sanico Software Blog
Dom and myself recently landed our biggest client ever with an Adelaide based company called Jobs Statewide. They came to us with a critical and short deadline handed to them by the Government. They needed to set up their new offices in Sydney and Melbourne and they wanted us to handle the set up of their IT infrastructure in each of their new offices. After negotiating a deal we hit the ground running on a trip to get their tech up and running with an sensitive deadline.| Sanico Software Blog
By god this is sort of controversial. Google provides many free services that I use daily but there was one tool that ruled them all… the TIMER! Figure 1 shows the timer in all its former glory, so simple, so elegant and now so non-existent. That’s right, when I searched up the classic word “timer” into Google last week my heart wretched at its disappearance. Close Figure 1: The free timer tool provided by Google when using their search engine.| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #5: Do not forget to add a favicon to your website. I say forget because it seems people usually forget to add the poor little favicon to their website and in doing so they miss out on an opportunity to increase brand recognition and verify the legitimacy of a website. I created this web tip because I am so surprised at the sheer number of websites that I see that forget this little impactful addition.| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #4: Speed is an important SEO factor that needs to be considered by the website owner. I mean, how often do you access a website and wait a million years for it to load? I don’t know about you, but this happens to me more often than not and it really grinds my gears. I have a theory behind why many websites load slow and will share how you can test your own website speed for future fixes.| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #3: You might not know it but using HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) on your website is actually a page experience factor Google uses to rank a website. Many people think black magic, voodoo or casting spells helps a website rank better on Google, when in reality Google publishes a wide range of informative documentation to help websites rank better. Many misconceptions exist and people chase unusual tactics to rank better while they miss basic factors such as HTTPS.| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #2: A very common strategy websites use is acquiring newsletter signups via email addresses. However, the mistake many websites make is in the form of large popup windows. What do I mean by large? It is large enough to disallow a user from accessing content on the page as seen in figure 1. These pesky popup windows sound good to prompt users but can actually have negative effects on the website’s search engine optimisation (SEO).| Sanico Software Blog
Website Tip #1: You might not have expected it but the file name of an image actually helps Google understand your picture so that it indexes both the picture and your website better. Before I explain further I want to start with a few examples that will demonstrate the difference more clearly: Example of bad image names: image39_9394.png IMG_39382.png download_image_50053.png Example of good image names: dog-in-a-garden.png cat-playing-with-a-ball.png me-and-my-friends-at-the-park.png If you...| Sanico Software Blog
Anyone can create a social media account. You can be in adolescence, a baby boomer or even a business. The fact is, if you have access to the internet then you can create an account. Applications such as Facebook and Instagram provide platforms at the initial cost of $0 and this is enticing from a business perspective. As any business owner that is just starting, they quickly become aware that the bills can add up in multiple areas.| Sanico Software Blog
We, Dom and myself, built a custom ecommerce website for Pup Hub Cafe, a local pet food company founded by Jo Rugless and based in Adelaide, Australia. Jo Rugless and her company Pup Hub Cafe sell homemade pet food with use of local ingredients from South Australia. I will discuss how we met Jo, our approach to build the website and some of the key things that we implemented. The Origins of the Job We met Jo at a local market in Adelaide where we saw her very unique homemade pet food.| Sanico Software Blog
I have been told that I am lucky I love software. However, many do not realise that I have invested much time and energy to feel these emotions. Software has been a growing passion of mine but the love did not start grand. I happened to program for the first time in a year 12 subject. They pushed the students to use a basic website-building program and I hated it, so I found an alternative by programming the website from scratch.| Sanico Software Blog