Keep safe online:

A recent Guardian article highlights increasing security vulnerabilities in Oracle’s Java which is routinely installed in your web browser. Java is the source of 50% of malware and virus attacks, and rising, making it an unacceptable security risk and you should disable Java plugins immediately.

The reason Java has become so vulnerable is that Oracle are unable to address Java security vulnerbilities quickly enough, and have insufficient motivation to put more resources into this task.

How To Keep Safe Online: Disable Java

Java plugins are not needed by most people, so you are unlikely to miss the functionality. Java is responsible for about 50% of all malware/virus attacks and the situation is set to worsen because Oracle are able or sufficiently motivated to deal with the issue—Java was inherited when they bought Sun Microsystems and is not essential to their business.

If you use more than one web browser you’ll need to disable Java plugins in each one. See “How To Disable Java Plugins” below.

Will Updating My Java Protect Me?

Updating Java won’t protect you at all. This is because there of a large backlog of known vulnerabilities which have not been fixed (so called “zero-day” threats). This is why Java is now very attractive to hackers and cyber criminals, and makes it likely that you will encounter Java based attack while you browse the web.

Will My Virus Scanner Protect Me?

Anti-virus software will can’t offer adequate protection, because these too are unable to keep up with the increasing number of new threats that have resulted from Java’s popularity with hackers. This means that you are quite likely to encounter a new kind of malware before it can be blocked by your anti-virus software.

So you should not use Java plugins in a browser unless absolutely essential.

What Happens If I Disable Java Plugins?

It is quite safe to disable the Java plugin in your browser. If any website you visit relies on it, which is not many, you will see a message in the browser asking you to install the Java plugin. If you really want, you could then re-enable the plugin, but first you should consider if you can do without it, or disable it again as soon as possible for obvious reasons.

What About Java On My Computer?

Some applications install Java on your computer without you realising because they use the “runtime” version of Java or “Java RTE”. This is very much less of a security issue than Java in a web browser, but if you can do without these applications you will and uninstall Java from your computer you certainly be improving your security (as well as disabling it in your browser—see “How To Disable Java Plugins” below).

To uninstall Java on Windows: open “Add and Remove Programs” in the “Control Panel” or search for “uninstall applications” in Windows Help. Then click on each of the “Java …” entries to uninstall (you may find several).

Java on your computer is much less of a risk than the browser plugin, so if there is something you use on your desktop which relies on this, you might choose to only disable the Java plugin in each of your web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera etc.).

How To Disable Java Plugins

Here’s how to disable the Java plugin in the three most popular browsers:

How To Disable Java In Internet Explorer

Start Internet Explorer web browser. Press Alt-T (hold down Alt and press T) to open the tools menu. Click on “Manage Add-ons” to open the add-ons list. Locate any items with “Java” in the name, select each and click “Disable”. Make sure every “Java” item now shows as “Disabled” in the “Status” column. Then click “Close”.

How To Disable Java In Google Chrome

Start Google Chrome and type “chrome://plugins” in the address bar. Look for any “Java” plugins and click “Disable” for each you find.

How To Disable Java In Mozilla Firefox

Open the Add-ons page by pressing Ctrl-Shift-A or using the Tools > Add-ons menu. Click “Plugins” in the lower left of the add-ons page. Locat each Java plugin in the list and click “Disable”.

How To Keep Safe Online: Disable Java

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

Initial impressions good:
- faster shut-down (almost instant)
- faster boot
- faster login
- faster all round.. and not just a little. It is a LOT faster at everything. I haven’t yet had a chance to sit back and sigh impatiently. On Windows XP I was generally hyperventilating! 

I also have an encrypted disk… woo hoo. If my laptop ever gets lost or stolen my data should be safe. So wiping Windows XP and moving my ThinkPad to Bodhi Linux is looking good.

I installed Bodhi Linux as this has a non-PAE 32-bit distribution (needed for my IBM ThinkPad T41 which has an old CPU). I think I’d go for Bodhi on other systems too as I like the Enlightenment desktop (very easy to get used to from Windows) and it starts with a fairly bare bones setup so I can just add my own apps).

I wouldn’t recommend the home partition encryption for the novice user. I had to do quite a bit of research to get through it, and found my own way in the end! Note: the “encrypt home partition” checkbox in the Bodhi Linux installer doesn’t do anything. So I used “ecryptfs tools”. Note that the “adduser” command has an option to encrypt when you set up a new user, but I’m not sure if this works.

It is early days yet. I’m still installing applications and setting up synchronisation of files from my main machine (Windows 7) which promises to be error prone (Windows – Linux file sync). In the spirit of my new secure home partition I’ll be using SpiderOak of course (which is free): see SpiderOak encrypted backup and file sharing

Leaping from Windows XP ThinkPad to Bodhi Linux

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

SpiderOak are late to the party, but their solution is best of breed in my opinion, and early landgrabbers like DropBox and Syncplicity (amongst others) should be quaking in their boots. By the way, all these services offer useful amounts of free storage, so if you aren’t worried about privacy for some files it is worth getting accounts on all of them. They will also give you extra free when you refer friends. This makes a new service like SpiderOak particularly worthwhile—get in quick and get your friends on-board and you could end up with quite a few free gigabytes!

Why Should DropBox And Syncplicity Fear SpiderOak?

Because they have compromised on privacy and security, so no matter how slick, for me their services suck!

But Syncplicity encrypt your data don’t they, and unlike some they encrypt it on your PC before uploading?

Indeed they do, but how secure is their encryption? Can you find full details on their website, and if not why not? Also, you may be surprised to learn that your files and folders are stored with their original names on the Syncplicity servers. 

This is bad for two reasons. Firstly it is a privacy violation—their employees have routine access to your folder structure and filenames (I know because they told me). Secondly, anyone with access to this information is in a much better position to break the encryption—so an employee, hacker or government agency will find it much easier to access your data without your knowledge or consent.

Other cloud file sharing services have even more blatant weaknesses such as: not encrypting your data at all, using weak encryption, or holding copies of decryption keys that mean they can access your data without your consent.

All those weaknesses ensure that your data is vulerable to hackers, service employees, or government agencies on request (no warrant needed). The situation is a mess and I don’t like it. My data is not actually that precious, but I still value my privacy and security of my data, which makes SpiderOak a must have even for me. But if your business depends on security of data (and most do), then this is essential and you are at risk using a less secure service.

Encrypted Online Backup—Main Features

• backup: real time (no backup schedules to maintain, no missed backups when your PC is off)
• backup: file versioning (keeps old versions so overwriting or deleting won’t lose your data)
• backup: space efficient (compression and de-duplication)
• security: super secure encryption (of file content, folder and filenames)
• privacy: decryption possible only by you
• synchronisation: real time on Windows, Mac, Linux & Mobile (Android, iOS, Nokia, Blackberry, Windows Phone)
• sharing: share files publicly or in password protected “filing rooms”

SpiderOak give a lot of detail on the service, including their privacy and security (unlike other services), and there’s a comprehensive FAQ, so head there if you want more details.

SpiderOak will increase your “free for life” storage by 1G for every friend you refer, so its worth signing up while its still new and not many people are using it. So get your 2G free storage by signing up now, and me 1G more for getting you in early on the deal!

Sign up now and get 2G “free for life”—encrypted online backup from SpiderOak.

How To Get More Free Online Storage

If you use the sign-up links on this page I get some additional storage for free. You can do the same, boosting your free storage on any service. If you sign-up with SpiderOak now you’ll be one of the first and able to add to your free storage more easily.

Free Encrypted Online Backup, File Sharing & Synchronisation

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

I just had a look over the traffic for the lifetime of this website and the picture it paints is dramatic. The chart is a powerful illustration of the answer to the question, “Why convert a website to WordPress?”

The rest of this post explains the reasons which underly this, and should help you decide whether to consider converting your website to WordPress. In my experience, for most small businesses the answer is a clear yes. I do a lot of such work, and it need not be expensive compared to starting from scratch. If you’re interested after reading, let’s talk.

In this article I’m going to explain why you might want to consider WordPress, even if you have just spent a lot of money getting a beautiful website built using something else. If you are satisfied with the amount of business your website is generating, that’s fantastic. But if not, read on.

No amount of expensive and beautiful designed and branded will attract visitors. And even a beautiful website can be terrible at converting visitors into customers. Worse still, a website created in static HTML, Adobe Flash or even another CMS such as Joomla or Drupal all have major shortcomings that can leave your website an eerie empty store-front. I’ll now explain how converting a website to WordPress can help transform it into a shop busy with potential customers.

The image shows numbers of visitors to theWebalyst.com since launch in January 2009, a shift to steady growth after conversion to WordPress, and a very dramatic rise once I started blogging.

The growth during the WordPress only phase looks small, but it was significant and would be adequate for some businesses. It only looks so small because of the far more rapid growth once I started blogging. To understand why, count how many times I use the word “easy” in the next paragraph.

After I’d converted to WordPress all sorts of things were easy. The rapid growth happened because starting a blog was easy, and a blog made it so easy for me to add pages that people found interesting. The logic is simple: it was easy, so I did it.

The ease that WordPress delivers is the key reason for converting your website to it, as I’ll explain below.

There are many other ways to create a website that looks and works as it should, but all are inferior to WordPress on this key point, and also several other important respects! WordPress reduces the friction involved in every area. That is why it works better. That is why most people need to consider switching from HTML to WordPress, or converting their Flash Websites to WordPress, and even moving from other CMS’s such as Joomla and Drupal to WordPress.

I’ll explain later some reasons why capable and powerful CMS’s such as Joomla and Drupal can still put your business at a disadvantage compared to WordPress.

Converting An HTML Website To WordPress

theWebalyst.com started out as a static website and for several months it got only a handful of visitors each day. After I converted to WordPress it was easy for me to develop it by adding pages about my products and services, and to organise the information clearly. During this period the growth in visitor numbers began, and continued at a steady and significant rate. It looks small on the graph, but it was significant and made the conversion worthwhile.

After a few months I decided to enable the blog feature of WordPress and began my initially amateurish blogging career. In spite of my inexperience, soon afterwards the website experienced a rapid increase in website visitors.

Converting A Flash Website To WordPress

I was recently asked to look at a small business website that is not doing well. It was professionally designed, looks great and has quite a few pages of relevant content, but it is not generating business.

I did a short review and found that it was implemented in Flash which, for me, I take as a warning sign. This is because the only good reason to use Flash these days, would be if some essential feature needed it, and this was clearly not the case. On the other hand, there are lots of reasons for not using Flash if you can possibly avoid it.

Looking at the website for only a few minutes confirmed my expectations—it was done by someone who had failed to match their implementation with the needs of a small business website, and they had overlooked the basic essentials for almost any small business website. There were glaring faults with presentation, usability, navigation, SEO and analytics.

The fact that it was created in Flash was bad for several reasons. One being that it makes it difficult and expensive to change or add features. The client was able to edit the website, but most changes necessitated going back to the designer and paying them more money. This is an unnecessary expense that works for the designer but not for the client. Using Flash also made it difficult to incorporate a blog, so it lacks something that I encourage everyone to have at the ready, even if they aren’t planning on using it.

Why Convert A Website To WordPress?

Converting to WordPress was a great move for me. You can see that from the graph of my website visitors. It worked because WordPress makes things easy, and either free or cheap: setting it up, contact form, maps, newsletter, SEO, updating, blogging. Everything was easy so I did it.

Make anything difficult, even inconvenient, often means that it doesn’t get done. This is called “friction” and it matters. Using WordPress for your website is like adding oil to the engine of your online business.

WordPress is the most popular website content management system (CMS) on the planet for a reason—64% of the top 1 million CMS websites are WordPress websites. The second most popular CMS has only 11% of the top 1 million websites. (Source: Builtwith).

In my experience WordPress is by far the best platform for most small businesses, so it will probably work for you. This is not because of one feature or another, whether you want a blog or not etc. It is the whole package that makes WordPress such a great choice for so many businesses. It is the philosophy, community, low cost of set-up, low cost of ownership, the range of features, the free support, and the fact that there are so many great WordPress developers and designers.

If you have a static HTML website, or Flash website, or a different CMS that doesn’t make things easy, it probably isn’t attracting visitors, or turning visitors into customers, and that is probably because it doesn’t make it easy enough for you to do what you need to do.

I’ll Never Need A Blog So I Don’t Need WordPress

This is sooo wrong! The logic should be the exact opposite: I don’t need a blog so I better use WordPress!

Why? Because if one day you change your mind, and many do when they realise how valuable and fun it can be to write a blog. You don’t have to write often, or particularly well. So if one day you change your mind, you decide you’d like to give it a try and you are running WordPress, no problem! You can have a blog in a few mouse clicks. But if you aren’t running WordPress you’re far less likely to give it a try. You could miss a potential business-saving feature, because it will be time consuming and costly to add it later. What a mistake that would be.

The blogging capability of WordPress is an invaluable cost saving feature, even if you have no plans to use it. Because one day you might want to try it, and the ease of turning on a blog when you feel like it—on an impulse—is one of those little enablers that can helps anyone turn an ordinary website into one that grows and grows its audience. This is one example of the low “friction” of WordPress when you want to update or enhance your website.

I Already Have A CMS—Should I Still Consider WordPress?

Even if your website is built using another capable, well supported and powerful CMS such as Joomla or Drupal, I still recommend that you consider converting to WordPress.

This is because compared to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are over complicated. I was shocked recently when I went back to do some work on a Joomla website for a client. If you think the WordPress dashboard looks a bit complicated, take a look at Joomla!

There are of course some simpler CMS available. But these lack the user base, the community, and the staying power of WordPress. They also tend to cost money, whereas WordPress, WordPress updates and support are all available free of charge.

All these factors have a direct impact on cost, create risks and make it more difficult to keep your website up to date as things develop. I don’t know of a CMS  that can match WordPress on either the essentials needed by a very small business, or the ease and cost effectiveness of scaling from small, to medium, and eventually a large high traffic website.

I don’t recommend WordPress in every case, but for most businesses I’m asked to advise I do conclude that moving to WordPress is the right thing to do. I don’t do this lightly though, because its a painful message to deliver to someone when they’ve already spent a lot with a designer and thought they were getting a great business website. I’m always willing to explain why, and certainly don’t advise it unless I’m convinced it is right for business in question.

Is WordPress Right For My Business?

The only way to answer this is to consult someone who knows the web and what it takes to make a small business website successful. This is what I’ve done for theWebalyst.com, and what I do every day for my clients, including freelancers, therapists, practitioners, charities, clubs and all kinds of other small businesses and organisations.

If this is making you wonder about WordPress, get in touch. I can look at your website and how it is performing in your market, and advise on whether WordPress or some other changes are your best option.

How To Choose A Website Designer

The reason why so many small business websites don’t generate business, is because they were built by the wrong person. It is a mistake to choose your designer solely on the basis of the quality and look of the designs in their portfolio, or indeed on price. But this is all that most people have to go on.

There are two ways to choose the right website designer. A good one is by recommendation, though this is not guarantee and you need to take care when using this method. The other is to do so on your own.

To help you I’ve written a separate guide which explains how to choose a website designer, by recommendation, or on your own. It explains what you need to consider and why.

See: How To Choose A Website Designer

A word of caution: beware choosing based on design quality alone. Its a trap because…

Great Designers Often Create Rubbish Business Websites

A great web designer knows about design, and can create a website that looks good on the surface, but if the website doesn’t generate business your time and money will have been wasted. To avoid the pitfalls read how to choose a web designer.

What Does It Cost To Convert To WordPress?

Converting an existing website to WordPress is a lot cheaper than starting from scratch because I can use the branding, design and graphics from your existing website. Usually I will also recommend other improvements at the same time, but these often reduce the cost rather than increase it, because complexity is not only expensive but often creates a bad user experience.

Designs based on static HTML and Flash are frequently created by designers who aren’t skilled in other areas such as user experience (UX), usability, conversion, analytics and so on. Because they tend to be older, or built by people who have not kept up with developments, static websites are often built using design and usability principles that are now out of date.

Today a business website needs the ability to evolve and keep up with  the rapid pace of change on the web.

For example, by adding social media support when it becomes important to your marketing. Or staying effective on new devices such as mobile phones and tablet computers. In this case there’s a new approach called responsive design that ensures the same website will look great and work properly on a wide variety of screen sizes, without having to abandon what you have already or create many different versions of your website.

WordPress makes it easy and cheap to keep things updated, and to extend and improve your website with additional functionality as and when you need it. This keeps your website competitive and effective at a much reduced cost compared to a static HTML website, a Flash website, or an alternative CMS.

This is why WordPress worked for me, and why it works for so many of the clients I work with. For many I don’t just create a website, I also provide ongoing assistance with online marketing. Maybe I can help you too, with:

Making My Website Work Better

If you have an existing website that isn’t working, and would like me to help you make it successful get in touch.

New Small Business Websites

If you like the sound of me and want a new website, get in touch or take a look at my WordPress Website “Launch” Package

Why Convert A Website To WordPress?

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

The reason that so many small business websites don’t generate business, is because they were built by the wrong person. This post explains how to choose a website designer because is vital you find someone who knows how to create a business website, and not just a plain designer.

There are two ways to select a suitable person or company, and in this post I’ll explain both.

Firstly I explain how to find the right web designer through recommendation. If you can’t be absolutely sure about a recommendation, you’ll need help making the choice on your own. After that I explain how to choose a web designer on your own.

How To Choose A Web Designer By Recommendation

Few business owners are experts in websites and how to make them work for business. This makes it very difficult to assess different designers. It therefore makes sense to ask around for recommendations from people you trust. However, you still need to be sure a recommendation is right for you and your business.

Recommendations Must Be Based On Relevant Experience

Firstly, who to ask. For a recommendation to be meaningful it must come from someone with relevant experience. This means that they should be someone like yourself—in business—and ideally a similar business. Their recommendation will only be worthwhile if what they have achieved is similar to what you need. For example, do you just need a nice looking website, or one that will generate business in a particular kind of market. If the latter, you should only take recommendations from someone with a similar and sufficiently successful website.

You probably don’t want to end up with a designer who created a nice looking website that isn’t generating business! So how to ensure that a recommendation is right for you?

Ask About The Working Relationship

Ask them about the designer and the design process, cost, how it worked and so on. But don’t stop there.

Ask About Ongoing Marketing

You must also ask what happened after the website was finished. Ask how many visitors the website started with and how long it took to start generating business. Do they in fact know how much business is coming from the website! If a business is busy, people don’t tend to be so concerned with where the business is coming from. Perhaps they’re actually getting business from other sources and not much from the website.

If it is the website, how did they achieve this? How do they measure results, how did things change over time, what was done to produce the growth?

Make Sure Their Experience Is Relevant To You

Make sure the website it delivering on their aims in a way that would work for you. Let’s face it, if they are selling DVDs, and you are offering talking-therapy, the same web designer might not be right for both kinds of business.

What To Do If You Are Still Not Sure

Clearly a recommendation might give false reassurance. So if you are not sure you are will need to be careful. Too often in this situation, people make a choice based on a combination of price and superficial factors such as whether the web designer’s portfolio of websites looks good.

By all means take the designer’s portfolio into account. A professional looking website will help after all, but be aware that good designers can create rubbish websites from the point of view of attracting visitors or generating business.

Skilled Designers Often Create Rubbish Business Websites

A web designer knows about design, and might create a website that looks amazing on the surface, but if the website doesn’t generate business your time and money will have been wasted. This is because there are many other factors that contribute to success.

How To Choose A Website Designer On Your Own

Unfortunately there are a lot of designers who went into website work, but have not moved on since the days when creating a few pages was all that was needed to generate business. Those days are gone, so there is now much more to making a website successful. There is too much competition, and far too many ways to go wrong, for design skill alone to deliver even a passable small business website.

Think Web Marketeer First, And Web Designer Second

How To Choose A Web Designer

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

What a lovely graph! The image shows how my website traffic grew over the last 30 days. If you measure the first and last peaks you’ll see it is up over 30% in one month (the dips are weekends).

If you want to know how to increase website traffic, read on!

The graph is important because it shows the increase is not just a temporary spike (e.g. due to being featured on a popular blog). I’m sure you know what that looks like—straight up, and then a fairly rapid decline. No, this is steady growth because you can see it rising week by week over the period.

Of course I don’t get 30% growth every month, but this upward trend has been a feature of theWebalyst.com since I launched it a couple of years ago. Over any significant period (3 months, 6 months or a year) there has been overall growth in website traffic. So how do I do this?

How To Increase Website Traffic

I have never used paid search or advertising of any kind with theWebalyst.com, so my traffic has always comes from unpaid services and referrals from other websites. I have used paid search in other contexts, for clients and for one of my other businesses, so I’m not averse to it, but for theWebalyst.com it isn’t appropriate.

Most of my visitors arrive from Google—i.e. organic search. The stuff we all get for free.

Good SEO & Search Marketing

What this means is that I’m doing good SEO (search engine optimisation) and good search marketing. These days of course this includes good social marketing (I use facebook, twitter, Linkdin, Google+ and others), as well as other online services.

Since I started theWebalyst.com, traffic has grown steadily, and almost entirely due to me providing content that people want, and paying attention to good ethical SEO. I don’t use any tricks or risky techniques. Many websites are tempted to do this, or employ people to do SEO on a pay by results basis. 

It’s another topic, but I’ve written about why you should never pay by results for SEO or online marketing.

The Secrets of My Success:

1) Good Search Marketing. The reason Google is sending me more traffic comes down to two things: I’m providing good quality content, and I’ve made sure Google knows and trusts my website.

The Secret Of A Good Blog

WordPress is the blog king, but it is not just about blogs: my website provides information about me, my services and so on, and if that is all you need, WordPress is still a great choice (which is one reason why more websites are built with WordPress than any other CMS).  

I use my blog to generate interest and attract more visitors. Mostly I blog when I feel I have something I want to say that I believe my customers will find valuable. I find that works best for me personally and ensures good quality.

So when I feel I have something to say that my customers will find interesting I write it. Usually there and then. I do have a file of notes for things to blog about, but I have never used it. Not once, even though it is brimming with good ideas and half written posts! I just don’t find that way works for me.

Some Blogging Tips

When writing I do a few basic things to make it an interesting and valuable read. I apply good SEO techniques as I write, and when I publish I promote it in the ways I believe will give it useful exposure.

I don’t over-concern myself with SEO, or rules. Sometimes I just hit publish, but generally I try to do most of the following:

• choose a great title, then work a keyword into it that I think will be good for this article
• have at least a featured image (the one at the top left of most of my posts)
• include the keyword in the first sentence, and a level 2 heading
• include an image within the body of the post
• write a meta description that includes the keyword
• select suitabable categories and tags for the post
• ensure the post URL (permalink) includes the post title and keyword
• read and refine before publishing

Don’t Make Blogging Checklists Into A Rule

Having just given you a checklist beware that it doesn’t become a rule. It is more important that you put out your ideas than create the perfect post each time. Over time writing and SEO gets easier, and with practice you’ll start to do them without thinking. So by all means have a checklist in mind, but don’t let it stop you publishing.

Blogging Is Personal, Not A Formula

I hope these pointers will help you improve and create steady growth of traffic to your website. Not necessarily doing exactly the same thing, because the same methods won’t necessarily apply to you or your business.

Can I Show You: How To Grow Website Traffic?

I help small businesses increase website traffic and grow online. I do this for myself, and for others. I adapt or create new techniques to get the results you want.

The approach I use for theWebalyst.com can work well for most kinds of business, but the magic of good online marketing happens when I get to know your business, and adapt the marketing techniques for your market, your unique offer, and for you personally.

To do this I take the time to get to know you, to understand your market and your customers, and work closely with you to build sustainable website traffic, making use of search engines, social networks and other marketing platforms that work best for you.

How I Make This Affordable For Small Businesses Like Yours

To get to know your business I will need to work for you with some regularity. Obviously that means you’ll be paying me to work for you over a period of time, which could be expensive. However, I have developed ways of working that make me affordable even for a small one-person business.

theWebalyst.com visitors 13 Oct—12 Nov 2012

To make this work for you, you will need to be sure that the money you spend with me is paying for itself through the extra income it is generating. Since online marketing takes time this won’t be apparent immediately, so we can do things gradually at a level that you can afford. You’ll need to consider the value of sustained growth in website visitors. What would it mean if your traffic grew by 30% in a month? For example, imagine if the graph here were for your website, how much would it be worth to have 30% growth over a single month?

Once you reach a certain point, a good way to work can be to agree a regular monthly budget, and for me to just get on with things. But usually it works best to start with something small. This takes longer to deliver results, but helps makes things affordable. It also provides a way for you to get to know me, feel confident about my suggestions, and for us to develop a good working relationship.

Getting Started

To start with I can suggest some small steps to get things going. For example, I could do a short review to examine your website or business situation and make some recommendations. From there you might decide to have me do some work on your website to attract visitors or improve your response rate. Taking one step at a time.

If you like what I’m doing, at some point you might prefer to just give me a monthly budget and have me get on with building your online presence, attracting customers to your website and generating business. For this I have developed affordable “all-in-one” marketing services. This option frees up time for you to spend on other areas, including delivering your services to your customers.

See also:

WordPress Websites for Small Business

All-in-One Marketing Services for Small Business

If you’d like to know how to increase your website traffic, get in touch and let’s see how I could help you.

How To Increase Website Traffic 30% In A Month

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

.COM Is The Hardest Word To Reserve

.COM is the most popular top level domain, because it is usually the best. You have alternatives of course, such as (.biz .info .eu .co.uk), but these may not suit your business or situation. If you want a good overall online brand, you’ll almost certainly want a .COM domain, even if you also have localised versions such as “.co.uk” or “.eu” as well.

“Brain” Drain Domain

I just had this exact problem and was spending a lot of time trying to come up with domains that work, but which were not already registered. If you’ve ever tried this you’ll know that virtually every useful single word, or non-hyphenated word combination has already been taken, especially if you want to register a .COM domain.

I won’t go into why, but I wanted a .COM domain that featured a particular word (I’ll use “brain” as an example), and was not hyphenated as in “brain-food” or “brain-work”. I haven’t checked, but I absolutely guarantee that “brainfood” and “brainwork”, or any other useful comination such as those will already be taken.

Tip 1: How To Choose A Domain Name On The Tube

So I was trying to come up with good ideas for unregistered .COM domains by adding something to the end of “brain”, without a hyphen, and without it being a real word. This was fairly easy at first, but I was soon running out of ideas. Until that is, I was on my way out for the evening perusing the adverts as I sat on the London tube (our underground/metro).

The ads provided the inspiration I needed – I started searching the ads for word endings I could try combining with “brain”.

In no time I’d come up with things like “brainable”, “brainelligent”, “braintain” and before my journey ended I had nearly twenty new ideas. By spotting a word like “utopia” and using it to come up with “brainopia” etc.

This is both easy and fun, and I came up with a lot of possibilities very quickly. Of course you don’t have to be travelling on the tube (or metro)! Any old adverts will do, and in case you hadn’t noticed, there is no shortage of them as you go about your day

If you have similar tips, please share them in a comment below.

Tip2: How To Choose A Domain Name Using Wordoid

Tip 1 is good, but there’s also an automatic way of doing the same thing, and which is guaranteed to only generate domains that have not been registered yet.

Most online tools for generating domain names are useless because they offer domains with hypens and all sorts of horrible tricks that rarely work will as a brand, but there are some really good ones too.

One online domain generator which I love is Wordoid. This does what I just described, but automatically, and tells you if the domain is free as “.COM” or “.NET” at the same time.

Using Wordoid you can page through and note down the ones you like, and come up with a great list of interesting possibilities very quickly!

Here’s the link: Wordoid domain name generator and checker

How To Choose A Domain Name On The Tube!

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

As everyone quickly learns, it takes more than just creating a website to get visitors, and more than getting website visitors to generate business. This is already hard, and it is getting harder, and before long it may well dry up altogether. So even if your online marketing is currently working, you need to take note of the changes that are already happening and think about the future of your online marketing.

Where Did My Website Traffic Go? Not To Competitors

Relying on Google for traffic and customers is getting less and less viable for lots of reasons. An obvious one, but not the most challenging, is competition. You are probably already aware that more and more businesses just like yours have a website, and the quality of those websites gets better all the time. So already, you know that just to stand still, you need to keep your website updated, relevant and efficient at turning visits into relationships. But there’s a far bigger monster coming to spoil the party: Google itself. Google is a hungry beast coming to eat into your profits.

How Google Is Eating Your Website Traffic

Google constantly changes the online marketing landscape, so you need to be aware of how this will affect you. I’m not talking about how Google changes the ranking of websites—which can push your website up or down the search listings—I’m talking about changes to the very nature of Google search and how customers find products and services like yours. Google is gradually stepping in to offer its own alternatives that reduce the prominence of your listing, unless you pay Google money to increase your visibility.

You may be aware of Google paid search already, and how paid listings have over time taken more and more traffic from less prominent “organic” (unpaid) website listings. But that is just the start. Even the most healthy website businesses are being forced to purchase more and more traffic from Google, because GGoogle Moving Search Options Above Resultsoogle is developing its own services and giving them prominence.

Google Counselling? Google Massage?

This doesn’t mean that Google is setting up a business in competition with you! No, it means that Google is providing links which are ever more prominent than the unpaid “organic” search results that used to bring lots of visitors to your website. As Google develops and gives increasing prominence to its paid services, the free links are falling in prominence compared to links which generate more revenue for Google. So it is not just Google paid advertising, it is also Google Local business listings, Google’s restaurant reviews, and Google … well you name it.

This means that every business will, in time, have to either purchase traffic from Google (through one of these services), or generate traffic from other sources, or rely less on using the website to generate business.

This article from the New York Times provides some examples that illustrate Google’s strategy and how it is already affecting smaller website businesses: Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

And here’s a post which illustrates the latest change to Google’s results page, further demoting organic (unpaid) search results in favour of Google’s own services and paid content: Google Moving Search Options Above Results

An Effective Online Marketing Strategy

If you rely heavily on free traffic from Google, you should be planning ahead and considering the impact on your business if that traffic were to dry up. The article shows that businesses can lose 25% or 50% of their website traffic overnight. How would you cope with that? Could you afford to buy that traffic back with paid search? Are there ways that you can protect yourself, for example by starting to generate business from other sources, online and offline?

Have you been considering these questions? I’m interested to know what you think and if you are planning or already acting to deal with this trend.

Please let me know in a comment. Perhaps you’ve already been affected. If so, I’d like to hear what happened to you and how it affected your business.

It is becoming increasingly risky to rely on Google for free website traffic, so its time to consider the alternatives for your business.

Where Did My Website Traffic Go: To Google!

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

Thesis 2.0 Documentation is growing by the day. Since Thesis 2.0 was released (October 1st, 2012) there has been a rush to provide documetation, which I’ve been collecting together here, and adding to almost daily. This is mainly for my use, but I’m publishing it so others can find things more easily.

HELP! If you know of something that isn’t here provide a link in a comment and I’ll add it to the post in due course.

Particular credit is due to:

Rick Anderson of BYOBwebsite.com for producing a useful set of webinar videos which I’m slowly working through (forgive my notes about these at the end of the post, but note that the times I’ve recorded might prove helpful in locating what you want in a particular video).

Matthew Horne over at DIY WP Blog for his regular output of posts showing how to use Thesis 2.0. These are now building into a great set of “how to” tutorials, plus some useful reference documents (e.g. about Thesis 2.0 variables).

Chris Pearson of DIY Themes for bearing with my queries over on Twitter, as well as folks who are helping each other out on the DIY Themes forums. I’m new to Thesis, and still evaluating it, but one thing is clear: it has an enthusiastic, loyal, knowledgable and helpful user community. I am though disappointed with Chris’ habit of blaming users (“pressure to release”, “you hate us” etc.) when crtitisised, rather than to apologise for launching incomplete (without documentation, bonuses), and making promises he doesn’t keep etc. Maybe the clue was in the name “DIY”

Official Thesis 2 Documentation

Here at last, still a work in progress: Official Thesis 2 Theme User’s Guide
A comprehensive set of tutorial videos: Official Thesis 2 Video Tutorials

Free Thesis 2 Theme Skins To Download

BYOB Webstie: Twelve versions of Thesis Classic with various layouts (free)
BYOB Website: Twelve mobile responsive versions of Thesis Classic (free)
BYOB Website: Maintenance Mode Skin (Free)

SkinMyThesis.com: Nude 960—Free Full Width Responsive Thesis Skin (free) << Updated (now responsive)

Free Thesis 2 Boxes To Download

DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Box—Logo Box (free)
DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Box—Ultimate Tag or Category Cloud Box (free)
DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Box—Disqus Comment Box (free)
DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Box—Windy Content Navigation Box (free)
DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Box—Related Posts Box (free) << NEW
DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Box—Review Meta Box (free) << NEW

SkinMyThesis.com: Free Thesis 2 Box—Social Media Buttons Box (free)
SkinMyThesis.com: Free Thesis 2 Box—iOS Faveicon Uploader (free)

Commercial Thesis 2 Boxes

DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Custom Excerpt Box ($5 as of 4th November 2012)
DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Auto Featured Image Box ($5.99 as of 16th November 2012)

DIY WP Blog: Getting Started Series

http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-getting-started-and-what-to-know-part-1/
http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-getting-started-part-2-html-editor/
http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-getting-started-part-3-css-editor-overview/
http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-part-4-css-editor-options-reference-list/
http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-part-5-css-editor-links-package-options/
http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-part-6-css-editor-menu-package-options/
http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-part-7-css-editor-comment-package-options/

DIY WP Blog: How To’s

Create Two Column Layout (default Classic has 3)
Thesis Logo Box – Creating A “Thesis Box” (HTML Component)
Popular Post Box – How to make a Popular Post Box (HTML Component)

DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Guide

Whats New in Thesis 2.0.1
Thesis 2.0 Guide – All About Columns Galore
Thesis 2.0 Post Formatting Guide – Customizing The Excerpt

Getting Started Video Series:

A series of webinars by Rick Anderson of BYOBwebsite.com. Videos marked with an asterisk I’ve made notes about at the end of this post, including some times that might help you locate a particular section of the video.

Video 1—Introduction to the new system
Video 2—The new Thesis interface
Video 3—Parts of a Thesis 2.0 site
Video 4—Shows changes
Video 5—Fat 4 column footer*
Video 6—Header logo image & navigation* <NEXT
Video 7—Small header image in other page
Video 8—Style backgrounds
Video 9—Feature Box
Video 10—Questions & Answers

Other Thesis 2.0 Resource Lists

DIY Themes Forum: Thesis-2-Resources

Note – Updating from Thesis 2.0 to Thesis 2.0.1 (2.0.2 etc.)

Your current Thesis version is shown under WordPress > Thesis, at the bottom of the “More” menu (see top right of the Thesis control panel). Currently it will show “Thesis 2.0″ or “Thesis 2.0.1″

Updating from 2.0 to 2.0.1: DIY recommend using the auto-update within WordPress. If this doesn’t show an update available, you can force a refresh by going to Dashboard > Updates and clicking “Check Again”. If it never shows an update, maybe you have a localhost installation, see next.

Updating a localhost Thesis installation: DIY don’t support auto-update for localhost installs, so you have to do this manually as follows:

1. Download the latest Thesis from http://diythemes.com/thesis/downloads/
2. Backup your /wp-content/themes/thesis/skins (to keep any edits you made to the supplied skins and any custom skins you made)
3. Replace /wp-content/themes/thesis with the new version
4. copy back anything you want to retain from step 2.

I just did this and it seems fine.

Getting Started Videos Notes:

Video 5—Fat 4 column footer

01:40-01:60 under the HTML tab, making column containers, [color= #ff0000]Rick refers to HTML classes “c1″, “c2″ (for column 1, 2 etc.) as things Thesis looks for. I need to find a reference for speci[/color][color= #ff0000]al Thesis classes etc. See: http://diywpblog.com/thesis-2-0-part-4-css-editor-options-reference-list)[/color]
- create boxes for footer container, each footer widget column, and a widget area for each column
- create CSS columns package to style the four columns
Notes:
- appears you have to apply this to every page template to get the same footer on each type of page!
- same applies to other customisations such as overall page columns
- in template editor one can clone pages and copy one page to another, which provides a way to manage this, but there is no “base” (equivalent to index.php) from which other templates inherit default settings.
-> I asked @pearsonified about this and he said:.
Depends on the situation. I copy templates whenever I create a new one, so I barely have to do anything. If you wanted to come in after the fact and change your footer, you have 2 other options: [1] modify the footer on each template, or [2] use a hook.Also, consider this: It’s rare that a theme or Skin would have more than 4–6 templates. So no matter what angle you decide to attack this problem from, it’s easy to get the results you want. On diythemes.com, I use a hook to place my copyright notice in footers across the site (on different Thesis versions, too!). Hooks offer you a programmatic way to insert whatever you want (especially if you can’t get what you want from the interface).

Video 6—Header logo image & navigation* <NEXT

HTML tab
- create container for header columns
- create container for column 1 (for logo)
- create container for column 2 (for nav & text)
- add columns to header columns container
07:50
- create package (CSS) for header columns container
- CSS set for each column width
09:00
- add reference to CSS, save & compile, save template, refresh preview (blank header now)
09:45 – adding the image
- create a container for the image (a Text Box, to insert HTML)
- add to the
10:40
- go to WordPress media library and get the image URL, insert into post, cut
- paste into the image container Text Box
- save templare, refresh, hey presto header image
12:00
- add nav menu box to header column 2 container
- create another text box for the header text, and insert the text as HTML
- save template and refresh (its not there!)
- put the header text box in the second column, save template & refresh
- hey presto, but column widths not right yet, forgot padding in default header container
15:17 – get rid of padding (CSS tab, edting Single Element Styles)
15:17 Rick editing CSS for Single Element Styles shows padding set using variables $single and $half.[color= #ff0000] Need list of Thesis variables and how to use them.[/color]
15:50 Styling the nav menu
- CSS tab, edit Menu Style package and see results
17:40
- CSS tab, create style Package for two menu conditions (link & hover?)
- Create Package (type Single Element Style) called “Menu Link”
18:40
- get URL for image and set as background in “Menu Link” style
- tweak the settings for CSS package “Horizontal Dropdown Menu (WP)” to improve the menu layout (making space so the background image is visible on each menu item)
24:39 – a lot of too-ing and fro-ing to get the styles right (quite clunky). Much easier to be editing live CSS and hitting refresh. [color= #ff0000]Hopefully Thesis will streamline this at some point?[/color]
27:46 …still tweaking!
29:00 finishing off the hover.
- more tweaking
30:50 Stylng the header text area
- New CSS package, type “Post formatting”
PAUSED 31:32

DIY WP Blog: Thesis 2.0 Box—Related Posts Box (free) << NEW

Thesis 2.0 Documentation, Tutorials & Articles

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business

Just last week I got six requests to “please take a look at my website and see what you can do.”

What Can You Do For My Website & SEO?

Today I shared my thoughts for improving website performance with one of those potential new clients.

He felt my recommendations were “more of the same,” and was very unhappy that having gone through four different web/SEO folks in the last year, his traffic and Google results were still getting worse. I’m not surprised! He’s spent a lot of money with those people, yet his website enquiries have continued to decline.

My recommendations were still valid though, and I stood by them. I explained that they weren’t in fact more of the same because whatever those folks had done, there was still a lot of room for improvement. Some quite basic things were wrong, which was why I could offer several specific recommendations in a short review, which I did free of charge.

But to him it sounded like the same message he’d heard before, and there was no guarantee that if he went ahead with me the results would be any different.

Why Do Things Keep Getting Worse?

In this case it wasn’t just increasing competition. In spite of the work already done on his website there were basic errors and plenty of opportunities to improve things. But I was honest with him, web marketing is very volatile, increasingly competitive, and there would be no guarantee from me that I can achieve what he wants.

I can’t guarantee results from short term changes, and I think it is a mistake to work on that basis (for client or myself – as explained shortly).

This can all get a disheartening and this was evident in his frustration with what others had failed to achieve. I have to question their competence though, because my brief review of his website suggested that while they may have done some valuable work, there were several important things that had been done poorly or missed altogether.

I’m writing this up because I think this is an increasingly common story. People spend money with an expectation of results, but the quality of website designer & SEO out there is so unreliable and difficult for them to judge. So it is too easy to end up being short changed (putting it politely). Some are just not good at web marketing and SEO, others are out to make a quick buck.

It is hard to find the right person for this kind of work when there are so many people who can tell a good story, but don’t really know what they are doing. I have to add though, that it is a challenging business for those doing the work too—things are incredibly competitive, the area is very complex, and new developments come along frequently which mean it can be hard to keep up.

On the other hand, there are certain basics that any website designer or SEO should know are important, and it is quite rare (less than 10% of the time) that I review a website and find all these in place.

The Most Important Thing You Can Do

The most important advice I have for anyone looking for help improving your website results is in two parts:

1) Don’t pay by results. If you do, you are asking for a short term fix, followed later by a Google penalty and sullied website reputation. (For more on this see SEO For Newbies.)

2) Instead, find someone who sees you and your business as the start of a long term relationship. Start small with them and don’t expect miracles. Over time build a trusted relationship with them, and of course keep an eye on the results. So that if you still aren’t getting what you believe is good value, you can decide when to move on before you have spent too much on someone who isn’t up to the job. Hopefully though you’ll find “the one” and you’ll get where you want to go in the longer term.

Its the same way with your website’s relationship with Google, and every other kind of relationship if you think about it. If you just jump in at the deep end you may well drown. Better to learn in the shallows, steadily build trust and confidence, and in time you’ll get where you want to be.

What Can You Do For My Website & SEO?

theWebalyst.com Blog

Web Marketing and WordPress Websites for Small Business