17th Jul 2013 | General Information, Web Hosting, Websites
[ss_screenshot width=’300′ site=’https://webhost.cloud-genius.com’]Special Promotion
Money off!
Our servers are faster than ever.
I would have said that our servers are HOT, too… but that would have given the wrong impression.
Our partner’s website hosting servers are going through an ongoing programme of replacement. They are now faster than ever before.
To celebrate, we are offering money off all products until the end of the August bank holiday, 5 August 2013.
Spend over £40 and get 10% off when you enter the code HOTSUMMER at the checkout.
To cash in, go to: webhost.cloud-genius.com
1st Jul 2013 | General Information, Web Hosting, Websites
Yesterday, yes Sunday, a client asked me for a new website. They are selling a property in Krakow and need to do it quickly. How could they do it quickly and easily?
Well, I created for them a beautiful, temporary website: [ss_screenshot width=’300′ site=’https://apartmentkrakow.cloud-genius.com’]
Nice website, but what’s so special about that?
The important aspect of this website is that people find it. This website has special Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on every page. This means that search engines, such as Google, do not just make up a summary of each page, but have been told how to summarise. The website has been deliberately submitted to search engines to ensure the earliest possible indexing. There are also full analytics and it has been submitted to Google AdWords.
The website has been laid out to help the visitor. On every page is the ‘call to action’ (‘to buy this property, go here’).
There are email addresses on the pages. They have been encrypted so that humans can click to email, but spam-generating engines cannot read them.
The pages are optimised so that to the search engine the important content comes first, but to the human every thing is in the order that suits them.
The news of the sale has to be got out there quickly – all the pages have links to social media. Any new articles are automatically publicised.
Finally, most website viewing is on mobile devices. This website automatically generates a version for mobile devices. (It is a ‘responsive’ website.)
So, it looks beautiful, it is totally functional AND it was only commissioned yesterday. The beauty of this website is more than skin-deep. Do you want the same, five-star treatment?
[Yes, they could have had their own domain, but chose not to :-)]
6th May 2013 | General Information, Web Hosting, Websites
Why do you use WordPress? Isn’t that a blogging platform?
I have been coding websites now for well over a decade (ouch, best part of two). In that time I have seen many fashions in website coding and design. Repeatedly I have seen one thing kill websites. You might guess that it is flaky servers or lack of security (they don’t help). However the thing that REALLY kills a website is when it cannot be maintained.
I have seen simply beautiful websites grow, flower and die a horrible death. As the number of pages grows and the interlinking becomes more complex the person maintaining it has given up. Guilt, overwork, abandonment!
It is possible in tools like Dreamweaver to use page templates to alleviate this, but only a little.
Step up to the plate Content Management Systems (CMS). Once the framework is set up, you just add content. You add another page, all the links are updated. You add another menu item, the site is all kept in step. You want a calendar of your articles… it does it all for you. You concentrate on your company/charity/creative mission. The computer does the donkey work. Hurrah!
There are lots of CMS about. Some cost tens of thousands of pounds. (Up until a few years ago, most of them did.) Now there are a few free ones. Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress are up among the stars of the bunch. These three all run on Linux, MySQL and PHP – but you don’t need to know that. They just work. Arguably, Joomla! and Drupal are aimed at huge sites and really need techies fed to them every so often. Simplest of the bunch is WordPress. If you can operate a word processor, you can operate WordPress. Some people say that all the WordPress sites look the same… well, out of the box they do. Get a good website developer to plug in some magic. Other people say ‘Ahhhh WordPress, that is just for blogging.’ That is where it came from. It did not stay there!
So I use WordPress because it is easy for my clients to keep the site up to date. Do you remember why sites die? Yes, lack of updating. Make it easy and it is less likely to die. Keep it updated and it will flourish. Your ranking will rise in Google. (Particularly if you let me install a nice search engine optimisation plug-in.) Link it to Twitter and Facebook and all your followers will know when there has been an update. Pretty soon you will be winning the Chelsey Flower Show of websites. (And your clients/customers will know about your business/charity/creativity.)
So, what are you waiting for? What was once difficult is now easy!
Here is another opinion about WordPress – WordPress – a web developer’s tutorial
28th Jan 2013 | General Information, Salesforce, Web Hosting, Websites
The good news is that we have survived the move!
The even better news is that, with the business based in the cloud, there were no servers to move. Even our removal company, who seemed intent on damaging as much as possible, could not compromise our data – it is all safe on servers in data centres.
As far as the business is concerned, it is business as usual. Until the landline internet is connected, we are working off the local 3G signal. The 3G in this area gives us a similar speed to that expected off the wired internet. Thanks to Virgin Mobile, we have unlimited internet at a very reasonable price.
If only all the office furniture were based in the cloud! Much of that is in need of unpacking. For you, our loyal customers, it is business as usual. Even our 0800 number is automatically forwarded to our new line. (Thanks to Telecoms World for that.)
I suppose that you do not really need to know where we are located, as we can work from anywhere. For the curious, we are in a village near Ammanford in the county of Dyfed, just off the end of the M4. The full address is on the Contact Us page.
23rd Oct 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
In this article I will look at how you can prevent your email addresses being harvested from your website. It continues on from Defeating the Spammers pt1
The ‘traditional’ method was to put up a graphic instead of an email address. This may have prevented spammers from harvesting emails, but it also reduced the ease of use of the site. With a link the legitimate surfer could just click to open an email. With an image of the email address the surfer would have to type the email address into his/her email app. (If you linked the image to a mail address you would be back in situation where the harvester could gain your email address.)
Fortunately there is a WordPress plugin that addresses this exact problem.
CryptX
This will find anything on your WordPress post or page that looks like an email address and create an encrypted link. It can convert it to one of several different formats: john@cloud-genius.com can become:
- John[at]cloud-genius[dot]com – which is human readable, but cannot be clicked on.
- Can be replaced with a link that goes elsewhere.
- Can be replaced with an image of the email address
Or, my favourite
- Be replaced with a link that a robot cannot follow, but a human can. The text on the page is obfuscated so that a bot cannot read it.
If you need a page to not receive the Cryptx treatment, there is a tick box on the page editing screen that allows you to turn it off.
In total, it is easy to use Cryptx does it all for you. (Warning techie bit: you do not even have to put ‘mailto:’ links on your page.)
26th Sep 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
One of the most disheartening things about having a new website is spam. It can attack in several ways:
1) The email addresses on the site are ‘harvested’ by spammers. All those email recipients then receive ever-increasing levels of unwanted emails.
2) The lovely form designed to receive information from interested customers starts to receive lots of spurious messages that appear to be meaningless drivel.
3) Comments are received on the blog that are completely meaningless, irrelevant and full of strange links.
Fortunately there are ways to defeat all of these problems, or at least get them down to manageable proportions.
This week I am going to look at getting rid of email link spam:
One of the reasons it happens is that email addresses are worth money. If a spammer can send out emails to lots of people and 1% of people buy something as a result then the more emails the spammer sends the more money he or she makes. A spammer sending 10 million emails will make 10 times as much as a spammer sending 1 million emails (all other things being equal). But, you say, these emails are not selling anything, how does the spammer make money? The links and pictures in the emails are there to test whether the email address is ‘live’ before selling it on!
The best way to stop this process from happening is to have the email addresses on your website unreadable by the harvesting program. Many people do this by putting up a picture of the email address rather than a real link. This causes inconvenience to your real visitors as they can no longer click on the link to send you an email, they have to type it themselves (and will inevitably make mistakes). This results in you receiving fewer legitimate emails and, if you are selling something, making fewer sales.
How about setting up links that are unreadable to the harvesting programs but are fully readable by humans and work properly as links?
Try this one: john@cloud-genius.com
If you hover your mouse over it you will notice (normally in the bottom left of your browser) that it produces gibberish. This is what a harvesting program (‘bot’) would see. It will look something like: javascript:DeCryptX(‘kpioAdmpve.hfojvt/dpn’). Click on it [the one that looks like an email address, not the javascript!] and it will open up an email to send to me.
Clever? In the next article I will explain how you can set this up.
Defeating the Spammers pt2
