Mark – Page 36 – Wingrove-Services

Who owns your domain name?

I am not trying to be alarmist here, be assured that despite reading this below; if I set up your domain name for your organisation then you own it. However problems can occur, so I have several examples I have given below to illustrate them, and what happened as a result.

The following article largely applies to .co.uk and .org.uk domain names. I have had direct experience in these cases, ICANN controls other domain names like .com. They will have similar processes in place.

It is possible to look up your domain name using a “whois” service. For .org.uk and .co.uk, these are managed by Nominet. You can go to this page, enter your domain name and see what is recorded about it.

http://www.nominet.org.uk/whois

I generally take out domain names for new clients using one of two accounts. The majority are held with my registrar uk2.net, and I am the registrant. Because I have an account with uk2.net my details are automatically entered against the domain names. However I can edit some of the fields on request.

Why is this important?

The person that holds your domain name, also controls where DNS is located, this is the service that connects a user looking for www.mysite.co.uk to the right web server. It also affects mail as well. So in the wrong hands, you can end up in trouble if you are not careful. Your mail could suddenly turn off along with your website.

Case 1: The registrant passes away

While replacing and moving an existing site I needed access to the domain name. Continue reading Who owns your domain name?

Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo email user?

If you have most of your email transactions going through a hotmail, gmail (google mail) or Yahoo email account then you need to read this!

Many of the organisations I work with use their domain name as the primary email account. Some use their Broadband Service Provider’s domain name, and some others use Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

Whatever you use, have a backup email account. Here is what has happened to one organisation I have been helping this month. As a result of this they have lost their primary email address for at least a month.

Help I am stuck in Ukraine!

I received a message like the one below, I have seen these before, I have removed the email address in this case. Continue reading Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo email user?

Google Analytics

I have around 75 sites running Google Analytics, I can grant full access to you so you can see your statistics. There is also a video tutorial I have created which gives a very brief overview on interpreting the information. The video can be found on this page: Video Tutorials

Interpreting the data

There is a great deal you can do with Google Analytics, and there are some specialists that make a living out of using it, and interpreting it. I would encourage everyone to take a peek at it. It will show you how many hits your site receives per month, and what people are looking at. I would not however take it as gospel. It does need some interpretation, and at best it gives you an indication of how many visitors you had expressed as a range, rather than an absolute value. For example some visitors arrived by accident. They tend to leave from the page they arrived on. These are recorded as “bounces”. What is not clear though is how long they spent on the page, and whether they got what they were looking for.

Doing your bit

There are some organisations I have worked with that have not followed up and checked their sites rankings in Google. There are things that I can do to improve your ranking through the development of the website, and there are things that you can do. Without both of us working together on this, you cannot benefit from being at the top of an organic search. It is important to point out here that the goal is to be at the top of a google search without paying anything to influence your ranking. Continue reading Google Analytics

Home-Start Birthday Badges

I have built around 35 Home-Start sites over the past 3 years, many are on their second generation as I switched from HTML to WordPress 2 years ago.

For most of them, they feature a birthday badge in the sidebar. This is a graphic, and I usually place the next 3 years + worth of birthday badges in the media library so that the respective organisations can update them.

It is important to show how long an organisation has been established on your site, it says you are stable and are likely to stick around. (Regretably that is not always the case in these days of reduced funding).

Follow the link below, and you can download 25 years worth of birthday badges in a zip file. They go from 10 through to 35 years. After you have downloaded them, unzip them and keep the ones you need and discard those you do not need. Continue reading Home-Start Birthday Badges

They know you know!

I recently acquired an Apple Mac Book and have been learning how to use it. They are renowned for their ease of use. I have several email accounts, and these are accessed by multiple windows platforms, Apple mobile devices and the new Mac Book.

For some time now I have received a form of junk mail that comes from the same source (but through different hosting companies), and in multiple flavours. I know this because the structure of the mail is highly predictable. I can receive 10-20 of them in a day, and they tend to come in a burst from apparently different sources. They all feature an unsubscribe link, which, as I have never subscribed to any of them, it is hoping I will click on it. But I don’t.

Why not?

Continue reading They know you know!

Take care removing things from your site!

I dealt with a situation yesterday where someone needed to remove a sponsors logo from the footer of their site because they were no longer receiving sponsorship from the organisation. They were not sure how to do it, so they located the image in the media library and deleted it. It solved the problem of removing the image from the bottom of the site, but created a new one. The code was still there, and a little symbol appeared along with the text “footer-logo” next to it.

I have not generally given information out about the footers. There is a reason for this; it generally seldom changes, and in most cases it is specially written code rather than created through the Widget menu option under Appearance. So it is not easy to edit, and with current security running on most of the sites, you cannot edit it anyway without compromising the security.

So if you need a footer changed let me know and I will change it for you. Continue reading Take care removing things from your site!

Use your domain name for your email

Many of the charities I work with continue to use their broadband service provider email account, rather than an email account associated with the website they have just acquired.

For example if I created a website for www.mycoolcharity.org.uk then email accounts can be created for xxxx@mycoolcharity.org.uk. Then your mail is tied to your domain name.

Many however stick with xxxxx@btconnect.com, or yyyy@talktalk.net because these are the mail accounts they have always used.

Maintaining legacy accounts

Generally I recommend going through a transition period where mail from the old and new accounts run in parallel. You reply from the new email address and over time you will find your “real traffic” will migrate to the new email address as well. The only thing that is left on the old address is junk mail. …. and who wants to keep junk mail! Continue reading Use your domain name for your email

Email issues: When Forwarding does not work

The following is a bit technical, but bear with me. It is useful to understand how some of the mail protection policies work and the impact they may have on your mail in some circumstances.

I have a large number of email accounts, I don’t tend to check them all, but consolidate them by setting up forwarding. So any mail coming into say myname@somedomain.co.uk is forwarded to myname@someotherdomain.co.uk. Then I only need to check one email account at “someotherdomain.co.uk“.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had this working ok within a single hosting company. I made some changes when a second hosting company came on line, and moved one of my accounts to hosting company #2. Then I started to see problems.

I am using a forwarder in one of my hosting accounts. This may be relevant to you if you are using forwarders in your hosting. I generally set up one to handle messages posted to your site. These are generally handled through a mail account called info@yourdomain.org.uk which may then be passed to your normal administrative email account which could be xxxx@btconnect.com or another service provider email. Continue reading Email issues: When Forwarding does not work

More on Spam

Sometimes I see a spam message come into my email box which is really stupid. It is like attaching a warning banner to the message saying “I AM SPAM”.

Here is an example below, can you spot what is wrong with this message?

smapMailExample

Continue reading More on Spam

Using Images on your site

The following is covered in one of my video tutorials. Check video tutorial 7 for more details.

Some people are uploading images to their sites straight off of the camera or iphone. Firstly, well done for adding visual content to your sites. This is absolutely the right thing to do. However be aware of the following limitations and the impact they can have on the hosting and on your users.

An image displayed on your website is limited in size to the space available for it. Generally I advise 610 pixels wide unless it is in a gallery, then it can be larger so 1024 pixels wide might be ok. This means you need to scale down the size of your image before it is displayed on your site.

Why?

The website is set up to display an image in the available space on the page or in the gallery. If the image is 5000 pixels wide, it is reduced to 600 pixels wide in the browsers rendition of your website. So there is no value in sending a 5000 pixel wide image for a space that is only 600 pixels wide. (A pixel is a picture element or small dot that can represent one of 24 million colours, the screen you are looking at has millions of small dots). Continue reading Using Images on your site