Mark – Page 39 – Wingrove-Services

Adding Video

Sometimes a site can be made more interesting or effective by adding video to the site. It may be a promotional video about a service, or a fundraising video to raise awareness of the services that are provided from an organisation and where your money goes.

While some of my client base do use professionally developed videos from small specialists, it is also possible to create your own if you take a little care. Most people have video cameras, and many cameras these days have the ability to record video. If you have a DSLR then some of these can produce very high quality video in HD and above. Continue reading Adding Video

Publishing News based on a time and date

Sometimes it is desirable to publish something in the future but prepare it now. The commercial world, government and many other organisations who have marketing departments, control the release of news in this way. It has a greater impact if it all comes out together.

It is possible to prepare a news item or post ahead of time and then set it up so that it only becomes visible on a certain date and at a certain time. Continue reading Publishing News based on a time and date

Highlighting a quote on your site

Sometimes there is a need to highlight a message or piece of information on your site, these may be quotes extracted from the text or something that you want to visually stand out. There is a double quote icon on your editing screen. If you start a new paragraph and then apply the (double quote) icon to that text it will look similar to this.

Do all crabs thing humans walk sideways?

The style applied will depend on what master template is used on your website, so it will not look precisely like this unless you are using the WordPress TwentyFifteen template. Continue reading Highlighting a quote on your site

Automating Backups

If I am hosting your website you will be aware that part of that service is backing up your site and should it ever happen, restoring it in the event of a failure at the hosting, or your site being hacked. I use Duplicator to handle this task, but each is handled manually, and when I drop by your site (minimum 4 times a year, or on request), I check the installation to ensure it is updated and everything looks ok.

There are many back up solutions, one of the benefits of using Duplicator is the site can be moved elsewhere fairly painlessly. Other backups can be quite fiddly to manage. I tend to go for the simplest solution so that you can use it too.

Exploring new options

On the 31st of January I am starting a program which will look at the feasibility of using automated backups of sites which can be done as frequently as every 4 hours or as long as once a month. The system is predictably more complex, and of course in every backup situation, you also need the assurance that you can recover it in the event that you need to restore something.

Unlike other plugins I have used this one I have to pay for to get the additional functionality, however if I buy a developers licence for it, then I can use it on all websites, which makes the functionality available to you. Continue reading Automating Backups

Google Maps Anguish

For most of the sites I have built I use Google Maps to indicate where the organisations are located. This method was very simple to do and immensely valuable to users and web developers, it was a free service and Google had a simple method for handling it. It was also very popular.

Then it all changed

I suppose if you are offering a free service for a long time and get absolutely no benefit from it, it is inevitable that someone will wake up and start charging for the service.

If you do a search on “embedding google maps” you will find lots of references to methods that were simple, but no longer available. You will also find lots of complaints about Google maps getting very complicated. An often quoted response is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Continue reading Google Maps Anguish

Someone is trying to log in!

I thought I would share the following as it gives you an insight into what is happening on most WordPress sites around the world; just that you are not normally aware of it. On your sites I use something called Sucuri Website auditing. It does a number of things, including logging activity on the site.

I have set up some sites to collect passwords from failed logins. The list below shows (probably remotely controlled) computers trying to login using the username “admin”. Continue reading Someone is trying to log in!

Webmail and how to configure it

For most of my client base with a few exceptions you have the ability to set up to 10 email accounts per website. (More are available on request if you need them).

I set these up for you when the website is built and provide you details on how to access them. Because each account is unique to the domain name (your website name), then you have your own private hosting area where you can carry out several email related functions:

Create a new email account
Delete an old email account
Change the password for an email account
Change the storage size for an email account
Set up one or more forwarders that will send an incoming email to another email address

Continue reading Webmail and how to configure it

Security and Email

19th of January 2015

Articles are now available on security and email on the site.

Note that some of the security items are password protected.

New items on email configuration available

(18/01/2014)

I have added how to add email accounts to your hosting package, and how to set up and configure WebMail and Outlook to work with your email package. The main article is here. It is also available through the main menu.

Note that this will not apply to everyone, as some accounts continue to use legacy email or those accounts provided by their service provider such as BT.

Understanding your sidebar

Most aspects of your website can be edited using the page or the post editors. This is how you can delete, edit or create new content for your site.

There is one area where it is not so obvious how you can modify the contents.

If your site has a sidebar then this is managed from the Appearance Menu. View this article on Widgets to understand how your sidebar is managed, and how you can change the contents presented in your sidebar.

Take care here, HTML and other code can be presented in the sidebar, so it is not like editing a page or post in the Visual editor.