Below are web design and development articles.
When we write articles we try to make them as helpful and informative as possible for the businesses we serve and for potential new customers. We also cover news items if they are likely to impact on our customers websites. If there's something you'd like to know more about why not get in touch with us at newsletter@webdandy.co.uk.
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Securing Your WordPress Site
In 2020 over 455 million websites use WordPress, a market share of around 35% of all the websites in the world. As WordPress's market share has grown so have the number of attacks. Find out how to secure your WordPress site.
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Schema Markup (Rich Snippets)
Schema Markup helps Google better understand your web page content and separate out this content from other information on your web page. Schema Markup could give your web page(s) more prominence in the search results.
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WordPress 5.5 "Eckstine" Major Release
On 11 August 2020, a major WordPress version, named WordPress 5.5 "Eckstine" after Billy Eckstine (William Clarence Eckstine born July 8, 1914, an American jazz, pop singer and a bandleader during the swing era) was released.
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Google Core Updates & The E-A-T Metric
Google has recently published information on its metric called E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) which explains that website owners should focus on offering the best website content they can.
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Google Mobile-First Indexing For New Sites
Yesterday Google announced that mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new websites starting July 1, 2019 as their analysis has shown that new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling.
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WordPress Plugins — Safe or Sorry?
Not all WordPress Plugins are created equally. WordPress plugins vary wildly in terms of reputation, quality of coding, security, reliability, when they were last updated (compatibility with the latest WordPress version), reviews and support.
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WordPress But Not As We Know It
A new editor called Gutenberg is being created for WordPress that should make page and post building easier than ever. The question is how will it impact the millions of sites already built on the WordPress platform?
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Will Your Website Be GDPR Compliant?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on May 25, 2018. While many business owners may consider it an additional legal burden, it should be a way to make your marketing more targeted and increase your customers trust.
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How to Determine The Ideal Content Length
Many of our clients have asked how long a blog post or article should be to get the best results. Unfortunately, as with many things in business, there is no 'one size fits all' answer. We reveal what you should be doing to help you produce successful content.
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WordPress Maintenance Is Important
Over 90% of website owners don't notice that their site is being abused to send spam, host phishing pages, or distribute malware. In this article we take a look at a client's site that was hacked, what we found and how it was resolved.
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Google Hawk & Your Local Search Position
When you search for something on Google it uses an algorithm. However the algorithm is not perfect and Google are making changes to the program all the time. Has the latest change affected your local search position?
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How To Move Your WordPress Site to HTTPS
As Google and WordPress place more emphasis on security and the need to move all sites to https we look at how to move your WordPress site from http to https in a step by step guide.
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How To Clean a Hacked WordPress Website
In recent months we've seen a number of hacked WordPress sites. It's not that WordPress is less secure but more a case of website owners not keeping their site and plugins up to date or having easy to guess username/password logins.
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Malwarebytes (Anti-Malware & Anti-Exploit)
With the ever growing risk of malware the web can be a dangerous place to visit without the right protection. Keep your Anti-Virus software (if you want to) but install that extra layer of protection with Malwarebytes.
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Mother's Day eCommerce Habits
Taking a seasonal approach to eCommerce is important. By building dynamic, fresh content on your website relating to Mother's Day and similar events, it's easier to channel traffic and secure website conversions.
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Automattic Kismet (Akismet)
Akismet is a web service that filters spam from comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages from WordPress websites using the Akismet plugin. It's constantly learning and evolving, effectively improving spam detection over time.
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WordPress Security — Issues & Vulnerabilities
WordPress, first released on May 27 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog is a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPLv2 (or later).
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PageSpeed — Could Your Site Be Faster?
Page speed and how quickly your site loads on desktops, tablets and mobiles has been important for some time. Therefore it's essential to look at ways to improve your site's performance and download times.
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Trustmarks — How Trustworthy Are They?
Trustmarks are the logos that many eCommerce web shops place on their sites to show that they have passed security and privacy tests to reassure customers that it is safe to shop on their site BUT can all trustmarks be trusted?
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Mobile-Friendliness As A Ranking Signal
Google webmaster central blog has announced plans for website mobile-friendliness as a search engine ranking factor. This change will affect mobile searches and will have a significant impact on Google search results.
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WordPress SEO and WooCommerce Plugins
No time to rest on your laurels! Two of the biggest plugins in WordPress — WordPress SEO by Yoast and WooCommerce by WooThemes had security vulnerabilities and, more importantly, fixes announced, in the last week.
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WordPress Security — Does It Affect You?
WordPress, used by millions to host their websites and blogs has suffered from highly distributed, global, brute-force attacks in the past. More than 117,000 WordPress blogs were attacked and affected in 2012. That number grows each year.
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Your Customers Shopping Cart Experience
In 2010, Forrester Research reported abandonment rates of 55%. More recently SeeWhy and Fireclick stats show abandonment rates are now around 72%! It's therefore important to analyse the shopping experience of your customers.
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Who Controls Your Domain Name?
If you don't already have your domain name under your control it's worth considering transferring the domain to the registrar of your choice. The process for transferring domains differs depending on the domain name's extension.
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Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
Mobile phone users are increasingly using their mobiles to access the web and email. Having a mobile site is becoming increasingly important. Customers will keep looking for a mobile friendly website until they find one that works for them.
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Spam Emails — Your Response?
Yesterday we received spam emails from a number of companies. These spam emails were not only sent to us but to numerous other people. The problem? We didn't sign up for these emails and we didn't subscribe to the companies newsletters.
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Web Hosting — Not All Hosting Is Equal
Every website needs web hosting. But not all hosting is equal. When next considering which hosting company to use it's worth remembering most hosting companies claim 99.9% uptime, but very few provide any statistical data which shows this.
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Converting Your Visitors To Customers
Whether your website is purely informational and your goal is to build a readership with your site visitors or you are looking to sell services or products online, conversion is all about getting people to take action there and then.
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Choosing a Web Hosting Provider
One of the most important aspects of the internet is being found. You'll hear lots about optimising your site for the search engines and making sure you have great content but you'll rarely hear about the importance of reliable web hosting.
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Images For Your Website
Frederick R. Barnard published an article regarding the effectiveness of graphics in advertising called "One look is worth a thousand words", in Printer's Ink, December 1921. Barnard added "so said a famous Japanese philosopher, and he was right" A picture is worth a thousand words...
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A Handy Content Tool
Finding it hard to write new content? Can't come up with ideas? Do you think of an idea but then forget it when you need it? If you find it difficult to think of ideas for content and have problems writing the content then a "swipe file" may be the answer.
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New Mobile Site? Test It
The use of mobiles to access the web is continuing to grow. More people now access the web on a mobile device than a desktop or laptop. The continuing rise in mobile web surfers means making a mobile version of your site should be a priority.
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Find Old Web Pages
Sometimes after changing or deleting a web page you might want to view the page again at a later date e.g. you may want to access information that was on the page or you may simply want to see how a page's content or design has changed over time.
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Why Professional Web Design Is Important
In the old days, anyone could design and code a website. Over the years web design has changed dramatically. As the internet has evolved, web design has evolved in tandem and now when it comes to building a site you need a professional web designer.
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10 Tips To Speed Up Your Website
Website developers are always looking for ways to improve website search engine optimisation. One of the ways to do this is to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. There are a number of things you can do to improve your site speed.
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EU Privacy Directive — Does It Apply To You?
The EU law which applies to how your website uses cookies (e.g. if you are using Google analytics) and similar technologies for storing information on a user's equipment such as their computer or mobile device changed on 26 May 2011.
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