Reviews have become a huge part of the online buying process. Whilst they can be subject to misuse and abuse, reviews are also one of the important things we consider when selecting a supplier or making a purchase. And Google takes notice too – reviews are one of the many elements in the ranking algorithm that determine how high your website will rank in the search results. For local businesses,…
Read in full
Website performance (or speed) is becoming increasingly important. Optimising a website for performance is normally a relatively technical task – although having said that, there are plugins out there that make the job a lot easier – Autoptimize for example. But if you’re in a hurry or don’t fancy diving deep into WordPress performance optimisation, there’s an alternative: Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimisation (APO). Launched in October 2020, and featuring pretty…
Read in full
I came across an interesting post recently by David Risley, of Blog Marketing Academy. It was about blog categories. Hear me out here. I realise the subject of blog categories is not one that many people get excited about. After all, blog categories are just a kind of filing system right? A way of putting your blog posts into a virtual filing cabinet so that there is some semblance of…
Read in full
For those that haven’t yet come across it, Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that let’s you easily add forms to your website. The form on my contact page is created using Gravity Forms. It’s pretty useful in it’s own right – just as a contact form. But I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the more exciting things that you can do with the help of…
Read in fullThis post is Step 2 of my series of blog posts, ‘Running a successful website in the real world’. Click here for more information. The purpose of this post is to gain some idea of what your website is achieving for you at the moment, and working out what success looks like – it simply means that you’ve then got some measure of how the time you are investing in…
Read in fullI recently read an article on Copyblogger that resonated rather. Count up the number of times you’ve been told that social media is really important for your business. You must be on Facebook, you must be on Twitter, etc etc. It’s all pretty overwhelming for a new business owner. But for some, it’s a quick and easy alternative to an expensive website. It’s a good way of marketing direct to…
Read in fullI recently blogged about anti-spam solutions, and mentioned that I was testing the Anti-spam plugin on my website, in place of Akismet. Just a very quick update – so far, so good! I’ve not received any spam comments through, and aside from the possibility of any false positives (genuine comments getting blocked – my test comment came through fine), it looks like this might be a viable alternative. Next step:…
Read in fullThe answer to this question will determine what you in turn, will need to do for it. As there is no such thing as a free lunch; likewise there is no such a thing as a free business-generating website. The amount of value you anticipate getting out of your website will help you decide how much time and/or money to put into it. This post is Step 1 of my…
Read in fullSpam comments almost invariably go hand in hand with a blog. I could talk for ages about how sad it is that individuals and groups of individuals are using their time in such a way. But we’re here to get a job done, and so this blog post is about solving the problem: Preventing spam comments even reaching you For any spam comments that do get through – how to…
Read in fullReady to talk? Call +44 (0)1235 811 088 or email for a no-obligation discussion about your new website.