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in Web Hosting on Aug 25, 2010
We’ve also updated the one-click installs of Zen Cart and Drupal so you can take advantage of the latest releases. The software can be found in the ‘CGI scripts’ area of your hosting control panel, and our one-click install means you can enjoy great ecommerce and content management systems within seconds.
One-click WordPress 3.0.1 and BuddyPress 1.2.5.2 now available
Our web hosting customers can now take advantage of a one-click install of leading blogging software WordPress 3.0.1 and the social communication script BuddyPress 1.2.5.2. Simply log into your hosting panel and scroll down to ‘CGI scripts’ for a fresh install in just a few seconds.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Aug 05, 2010
Adding more and more plugins can bloat out your WordPress installation, so try to use straight coding where possible. You can customise your WordPress blog and add new features without worrying about plugins, widgets and themes using these simple code snippets.
Display Random Links
If you have a lot of links to other websites and not very much space, you can show random links in your WordPress sidebar rather than displaying all of them at once. To do this, open up your sidebar.php file (either in the WordPress theme editor or via FTP). Then define your existing list to show random links by using ‘rand’ in the tag, e.g.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Hosting on Jul 16, 2010
We’re pleased to announce that we’re now offering one-click installs of WordPress’s forum software, bbPress. Message boards are a great way to promote visitor interaction and can be a useful tool to discover what your visitors are interested in, who they are, and what else they want to see from your site.
bbPress is open source and focused on speed and security, meaning you don’t have to worry about slow loading pages or the risk of being hacked. The streamlined software is also lightweight and efficient for better use of space and bandwidth. bbPress is easy to install thanks to our one-click install solution, and the user-friendly control panel also means less work for admins and moderators once you’re up and running.
bbPress enjoys many similar customisation elements to WordPress so you can develop and install themes and plugins (e.g. for ratings, video and private forums) to customise your forums. Furthermore, bbPress can be integrated with WordPress so it has access to your blog’s functionality and users signing up to your message boards can also be users on your blog. This is especially useful for multi-author blogs, blogs with regular commenters and those looking to build up integrated site communities from an existing WordPress blog.
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in Your Business on May 27, 2010
In this article I will point out a new way of marketing your business website by using a blog. Why should you care about blogging, that’s just something web designers or egotistical teenagers do to look cool in class. If Microsoft believes that business blogging is important then who are we to ignore it?.
Non Compete culture
Companies worldwide, and from my own personal experience especially in the UK, are very scared of giving away the smallest hint of what they actually do for their clients. Their perspective is often that any information they make available could be valuable to their competitors; they could get an edge over them if they knew their prices.
The Less Customers Know, The More We Can Charge
UK companies have a tendency to hide their prices and instead give an awkward quotation form for their services, even though they may supply competitive prices and a reliable service. If you picked up the phone they can probably give you a quote straight away.
Be Personable
There is an attitude that the less the client knows the more we can charge and to a great extent this is true. But these companies are missing a new wave of marketing, one that is transforming companies images and actually making business approachable and personal, even Microsoft, the brand tarnished with the evil corporation badge for so many years, has seen the error of its ways and is using blogging to become more personable.
Blog Marketing Gains Trust
The blog marketing scheme works by creating something that is mostly lost on online trading; trust. That website could be run by anyone with a few services to throw your way, you cannot actually judge what the company staff are actually like and there’s no way you can truly estimate the level of integrity the company has and how specialized they actually are.
These are all trust issues affecting paying customers choices every time they look at your website.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on May 09, 2010
A couple of weeks ago we looked in to Google’s announcement that they are using a page’s load time to rank a sample of sites (1%) and what it meant for your website.
One of the most resource hungry ways of creating a website is WordPress. With its multiple CSS, JavaScript and PHP files and a heavy reliance on calls to databases a WordPress site can easily become bloated and slow. Web masters who use WordPress need to look at how they can decrease their website‘s page load speeds. Here is how.
How do I find out how fast my website is the first place?
To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools.
To check out your site on spec you can also install Google’s page speed plug-in for FireFox here http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html. This site within Firebug (also required) and gives a page a score out of 100 along with what you need to improve.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Apr 28, 2010
Modern cars are incredibly difficult to break in to and steal, so much so that thieves often find it easier to break in to a house and steal the car keys to make off with it. Hackers targeting your website are faced with a similar problem when it comes to getting access to your website.
Few hackers target the web host directly, with all the money large web hosts such as ourselves spend on security and monitoring it is simply too difficult to gain access. Instead they go directly after the webmaster by downloading a virus on to their PC and getting the FTP log in details so often stored as an unprotected flat text file within software such as Filezilla.
What do they do with the information?
Once they have direct access to your website’s files they are any number of actions they can take:
- Insert links in to your site & create link farms
- Capture your member’s information
- Links to malware
- Spread viruses
- Destroy your site
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Apr 13, 2010
There are a select group of WordPress plug-ins & widgets I go about installing as soon as I have set up WordPress, sometimes even before I have activated my theme of choice. In no particular order, below are the plug-ins & widgets I install within the first 24 hours without fail and think you should too…
Contact Form 7
Have your site’s visitors send secure messages to your email inbox with out exposing your email address.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Mar 06, 2010
If you want to jazz up your WordPress and Joomla installations then add a new (and free!) theme to your website, we have picked out some of our favourite ones below.
Free WordPress Themes & Templates
Easily change the look and feel of your WordPress installation by incorporating a new theme.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Promoting Your Site on Feb 19, 2010
Blogs are a great way to increase traffic to your site but only if they are given the same amount of attention as the rest of your marketing.
The power of a successful blog is well documented and the promise of more traffic and brand engagement draws in countless webmasters every year. At Heart Internet we first started our blog in 2007 instantly making the same mistake many other businesses have made when it comes to blogging; we didn’t know why we wanted one, we just knew they were the fashionable thing so we needed one! The posts were irregular and were often just product updates or press releases. At the turn of 2009 the blog’s existence was called in to question and it was agreed we needed to make wholesale changes or remove it altogether. Since then we have seen a 400% increase in traffic to the blog and a marked increase in reader engagement thanks to a fundamental shift towards providing our readers with useful content to help them make the most of their website, encouraging comments and a conscious effort to market our blog as resource.
Content is king
What you say, how much you say and how you say it should all be constructed with your target audience in mind. The two big questions to ask are “Why should anyone read the blog?” and “Why would they want to come back and read it again?” Corporate press releases or staff hires are fine in moderation, but not if that is all the blog is about, people simply won’t read it. To gain traction with a reader a blog post has to be informative, interesting, amusing, original or shocking. Committing yourself to this long term takes a lot of time and effort. If you approach the blog something to be done when you get a spare minute, it will fail.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Feb 19, 2010
Despite this I can happily build a website that looks pretty good and has working (and secure) scripts. Below is a list of resources for you to take advantage of if you need an element for your website but creating it yourself is beyond your skill set.
Have an attractive looking website without HTML/ CSS or Illustrator
I can hold a paint brush but that doesn’t mean I can paint and just because you know how to use the software that doesn’t mean you can design a beautiful website. To get yourself started or even to use it as it is “out of the box” here are some great websites to download readymade designs. Some are free, others require payment.
Edit images without Photoshop
Admittedly you’ll never be able to hit the dizzy heights of those that can use the likes of Photoshop but you don’t need to for most sites. Being able to rotate, re-size and crop an image is enough for the majority of editing requirements and you can do it all online with these programs:
