Support via Zoom

Like most of you I have become a Zoom convert and have taken out s subscription. I can provide ad hoc support if you are stuck, free of charge, just drop me a line and I can give you a hand. Training is also available delivered via Zoom if you need a refresher, or never got any training because of the coronavirus pandemic. So no excuses for not knowing how to do something.

Remember no such thing as a silly question. So if something is bugging you, stopping you from updating your site let me know.

Hosting Enhancements

I am on a permanent quest to find out the magical set of values that will help a website perform more quickly. I have noticed at various times that some websites are quite quick, and the same ones can be slow on other occassions.

I had reason to spend some time over the past month and explore why a site was not particularly quick to find that there are some tweaks that can be added. I was a little surprised about this because the hosting company claims that the hosting is optimised for WordPress. Yet it seems we can do further optimisations as well.

I am going to list them in this post for those of you that have access to the control panel you will be able to make these changes yourselves. If you site is running slowly, it can be for many reasons, but if you are concerned drop me a line and I will check your site out and if appropriate make the following changes.

Memory size

I have noted at various times that the memory in use in a large site has been quite small. No idea why other than it appears to be much smaller than the available memory. In our case in this hosting we can reset the default from 128MB to 512MB. It needs to be done in two places. One is in the wp-config.php file as a directive, and the other place is in the PHP settings.

The additional directive in wp-config.php is:

define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘512M’ );

Number of Vars

All websites and applications use Vars or Variables to store things. In the default case this value is set at 2,500. Many new sites including those based on Divi may have more than this. I found that we can increase this figure to 6000. This can be found in PHP settings.

Output Buffering.

This is set to off by default. It should be turned on. This can be found in PHP settings.

PHP version

Many of the plugins and templates require PHP to be at version 7.3 or above. This is worth checking as when I started we were at verson 5.6. This can be found in the control panel.

CDN Turned on

The hosting we use has recently added a feature called a Content Delivery Network which can be turned on. This will offer cached versions of pages available to people wishing to access your site. This can be found in the control panel.

Web Optimisations

There are settings in the site which can be optimised and are low risk by the click of a button in the hosting. This can be found in the control panel. Use the least risk set of options.

CRON

CRON is a timer that launches functions at certain times. It is a scheduler. WordPress uses a crude type of scheduler triggered by a user or bot visiting the website. That one is called wp-cron, It works most of the time, however on some sites there may be queues of tasks waiting to be completed. This is particularly true if the site is not visited that frequently. There is another catch in the hosting which limits the time available for execution. So if there were five tasks waiting to complete, only one of them may be completed. You can get around this problem by configuring a CRON job in the control panel which is more reliable and will execute whether people are visiting the site or not. It is easy to do. You set this to run every minute. This means tasks do not queue up due to lack of visitors. While I do not profess to know a lot of detail here, I suspect that if the queue gets too long the sites slow down because basic housekeeping functons are not being carried out.

The cron job you need to add (once per minute) is below. Replace the domain name with your domain name.

wget -O/dev/null https://yourwebsite.org.uk/wp-cron.php

Online Training

If you need a break from the garden or cooking during these times of social isolation, why not consider a training session online? I normally visit people after they have had a new website launched or a substantial rewrite and provide training. But right now much as I am suffering from cabin fever, I cannot do that. However we could do something online. Contact me if you are interested, especially if you have training outstanding at this time.

How does it work?

Right now, I could not tell you, but I will speculate. I will identify a free application (probably VNC) which will allow screen sharing. I will set up the training in your website, we will both go online at the same time. You will need to install VNC or some other screen sharing application. I will connect to your computer (with your permission). I will provide instructions on where to get the application and what to do to install it, how it works, and most importantly how to remove it completely afterwards. I know a lot of remote IT support specialists use these types of programs, or consoles to remotely access computers. It is also a massive security hole if you leave them there ready for access. So I will tackle this with that in mind. You install it, and you remove it afterwards.

We will also need an audio channel open, so either a landline, skype, whatsapp or other method can be used. I can do this in a variety of ways, so it is really down to you and what works for you on the audio side.

I will talk you through the tutorial, as I can see what you are doing, I can advise you if and when you need guidance. When I run these things onsite, they are normally 2.5hrs. Online, we can split it into two sessions.

Interested?

Firstly, I would like an expression of interest. Because I will need to do some legwork to figure out how to do this if there is enough interest. For those of you who have not been trained, the sessions are free. It is part of the package that I provide. For those of you I have already trained, the cost will be £40 for a refresher unless I have recently upgraded your website. In which case it is free.

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Custom Header and Footer

The Divi Template has had a few additional features added over the past few months. One quite important one is the ability to add a customised header, footer and content area. These are defined centrally. In fact multiple different headers and footers can be defined and applied to specific groups or pages or posts. I have started experimenting in this area on some of the new sites.

Application for Home-Start

I have received a few requests from Home-Starts (I host 34 of them) asking me to add a donate button to pages. I have in the past added this in as a separate block within pages. Now there is an alternative way of doing this.

As of 12/2/20 I have one design available. I am open to modifications to it, however there are certain rules that need to be observed in the way it behaves.

There are actually three headers, one for large screens, one for tablets and one for smart phones. They are all different. The desktop and tablet versions show the Donate (and Get Help) buttons. There is also a sticky menu available when the user scrolls down the screen. This “sticks” the menu to the top of the screen.

Please note these are all scaled to fit the page. Click on the desktop version to see it full size.

The images below are scaled. Please click on them to see them full size.

1). Wide Screen Version

2) Tablet Version

3) Smart Phone Header

I have not installed one of these on a site yet. If you are interested in this please contact me.

Anti Spam Measure for Forms

I have used a variety of Form Managers on sites over the years. The majority of you should have Contact Form 7 on your site. I have used a standard feature in Contact Form 7 which is a hidden field. Computers can see it, but humans cannot see it, so they do not fill it in. If the form is submitted and the hidden field has data in it, it is not accepted becasue it has been added by a computer so the form is rejected.

It certainly helps in most cases, but I am also aware that some of you seem to have websites targetted from time to time. Here is another simple addition to your forms which may help. It is a simple quiz which will prevent submission unless the answer is correct.

There are standard forms of recaptcha used by Google. It relies on a human interpreting what is in a picture, or pictures. It can be particularly tiresome on some websites. I have also noted a difference in operation of Google Recaptcha with different types of browser. It works very well with Chrome, less so with other browsers.

The following is a simple addition to your Contact Form 7. Download the file by clicking at the bottom of this post and copy the text and insert it just above the entry for the Enter button.

Here is an example:

I have inserted another form control between the message area of the form and the Enter button. Here is what it looks like in the Contact Form 7 Layout. Highlighted in yellow below.

It may look complicated, but it isn’t really. There is a short explanation at the start and a series of questions, each with the response expected like this:

“1 plus 2 =|3”

You can build your own questions for example:

“What is the capital of France?|Paris”

Anyone submitting a message can see the question, but not the answer.

Of course none of this should be really necessary. But unfortunately there is a large group of people that must see some success from sending spam messages otherwise it would not be worth effort.

Will this solve the problem?

I honestly do not know. I am pretty sure with some of the anti spam measures which are often defeated, there must be people who are paid to paste messages into forms. In which case none of these methods will work. But if you are currently plagued with spam messages coming in via the website, this may be worth a try.

Do It Yourself

Locate your contact form by logging in and locating Contact in the side bar. Look for the form(s) and open one. Towards the bottom of the form you will see the text:

[submit “Send”]

Place some line breaks between this and the content above it. Then click on the download button to download the example code. Then paste it into the space you have made. Save the form and then go to your contact us page and test it. Make sure it works and you still receive a message through your website before leaving.

Any problems drop me a line or call me. Click on the button below, you should see the text, copy it, and paste it into the form as described.

Download Code Here (text file) opens in a new window

Adding a document to a button

This article is mainly aimed at those people with Elegant Themes Divi based websites. This template has lots of features enabling you to build and maintain interesting interactive websites. With the prevalence of mobile devices representing more than 50% of the accesses to your website, you need to take more care with links. A finger is larger than a mouse cursor. Buttons can often get around this problem, they are easy and natural items to touch and therefore cause something to happen.

Many of you have referral forms on your websites which are used by your clients. These change fairly regularly, so you need to reassign a new document to them, or add new buttons into your website. They are also used on policy pages to facilitate downloading policies. The page comprises an array of buttons in this case.

Buttons are preferred to links

I have touched on buttons in the past, in all of the most recent websites (probably since late 2017) there are library elements built into your website which follow your colour schemes. This saves you from having to format the button when you add it to the website.

The tutorial below tells you how to upload a document to your media library, how to add a button to your website and how to link the document in the library to the button.

Click on the button below to download the tutorial.

Download the tutorial for adding buttons

Processing Form Data

I was asked if it was possible to add a form to a website for an event dinner, collect the responses and place them into a website to reduce the laborious activity of copying feedback in forms by hand. Other examples of where you might want to do this are with a census, or survey. In the past I have helped to set these up and created the associated form, the responses come back as emails. These then need to be processed by hand.

Having given this some thought, there is another way you could do this to simplify the data collection and processing. The problem is getting the responses into a spreadsheet. Once it is in a spreadsheet, then it is relatively easy to write formulae to process it, or extract the data you need.

There are several aspects to this, some may not be that obvious:

1). The form data can present the options, and the form can only respond with a single selected option. So for example we can say you have a menu choice: Rolled Pork, Rolled Brisquet, Vegetable Stack. You can only select one of them. What is selected and returned in the form is the precise choice of words. If it is precise, then it is unique. You can process it in a spreadsheet.

2). While you can have forms that say Enter A,B,C,D, E, F where A is strongly agree, and F is Strongly disagree. What you get back is A, B, C, D, E, or F. But this is not easy to process. Whereas “Strongly Agree” is easy to process. So use the language that humans understand. You can abbreviate it later in a spreadsheet. This is of much greater importance if you are not a computer programmer, or software engineer. Those people can think in terms of variable names, and values. If you are not used to thinking that way, keep it simple.

3). If the website uses Contact Form 7 (one of the most popular contact form plugins and one I have been using for several years now), you can build the response email up very precisely. So much so that you can create the top part of the email in a human readable format, and the bottom part in a computer readable format which you can use in a spreadsheet.

4). Send a copy of the response back to the person that sent it to you. It is good manners really, and in the case of a Dinner Dance, you have a hard copy of what you ordered for dinner.

Processing the Data

You will see examples later in this article, let’s assume that I am collecting feedback on dinner choices. I have created a form which I can collect information from people. In this case I have received the following:

Starter: Smoked Salmon with Celeriac and Prawn Salad

Main Course: Slow-cooked Rolled Brisquet with gravy

Dessert: Summer Pudding

I can format the responses in the email which comes back to the organisation like this for human consumption, and like this for adding to a spreadsheet:

Smoked Salmon with Celeriac and Prawn Salad,Slow-cooked Rolled Brisquet with gravy,Summer Pudding

You will hopefully agree that the first version is easy to interpret, but the second version on a single line you have to look more carefully at to interpret. So we provide both.

CSV

The second version is the data presented in a CSV format or Comma Separated Value format. If you look closely the three values are separated by commas.

I can paste that second CSV formatted row into a spreadsheet row for later formatting.

Wait while collecting form data

If I use a special email box for all of those responses, I can set up the form and forget about it until I need to do some processing. All of the data will go to a special email account. I just work my way down, open up each one and paste the CSV formatted line to a new row in the spreadsheet.

Convert the CSV rows to columns

Next I choose Data in the spreadsheet, highlight the rows of responses and convert the rows of CSV data to columns. After this is done, all of my First Course, Main Course and Desserts are all in aligned columns.

Plus I know that the content in the columns is predictable and finite, I am not going to find Jelly under Dessert because it was not an option to start with.

Add in some formulae

Choose a location at n+1 rows down your sheet where n is the maximum number of responses you were expecting.

If I choose a range for say the Dessert column on the spreadsheet and I carefully look at the available options I will find that there can only be four possibilities. In this case none, Summer Pudding, Chocolate Tart or Lemon Cheesecake. I can now set up a formula which will count the total number of instances of “none”, “Summer Pudding”, “Chocolate Tart”, “Lemon Cheesecake”. In other words I have created an automatic way of counting the instances of a given response in a single column.

Summary

If you have something moderately complex you wish to achieve, it is possible to build CSV based response and paste these into a spreadsheet, convert them to data in columns, and then process the columns. It can make the tedious steps of processing information a lot easier.

I am looking at this right now as an example for someone, so I will come back and provide a downloadable guide here once I have progressed it further. (January 2020).

Update Feb 12th 2020: This system has been implemented and is in use with a client. It is now very very easy to collate all of the responses and run some analysis on a spreadsheet to identify, total income, total number of attendees, total plates of each type for the kitchen, and also identify special dietary needs. If the user had to paste each value from every email it would have taken a considerable longer period of time.

Contact me to discuss further if you want to do something like this.

Questionable Advice?

I have had several requests over the past two months to add “DONATE NOW” buttons onto all pages on a website. One request in particular came via a voluntary advisor which seemed totally flawed to me. However I can appreciate that most of you are dependent on “external voluntary experts” of which I guess, I fall into that category too. So here is my take on it, like all gifts, you can choose to accept it or not. It is just an opinion.

When you look around the web, particularly on charity sites you tend to see the Donate buttons plastered everywhere. The advice given to my client was to add a link under the button which goes directly to a preferred fundraising portal. Say for example Virgin Money Giving. That sort of sounds ok, but I disagree, for several reasons:

1). Let us assume I have arrived on your website, I am not that familiar with it, I have looked around and now I wish to make a donation to help you. So I click on the Donate Now! button. What happens?

It takes me to a completely different website, it may have your logo there, but it has someone elses logo there too, I am not sure if this is a scam or not, so I leave. Did you get your donation? No.

There is a web standard called WCAG2.1 which states that a link that opens in a new window, or takes the person off of the website needs additional text to advise the user before they click. Think of it as a best practice. You cannot do that here. Let us look at another case:

2). I am familiar with your organisation, I have visited several times, and I can read (!). I want to make a donation. If I want to make a donation, which page would I go to? Chances are you have a Fundraising page at the top of your menu. That is where I would go. I did not need a button plastered everywhere.

The Donate Now button is not dissimilar to someone on the street asking you for money; they have not established a compelling case why you should give them money, but they are asking anyway. Chances are most people will ignore it.

It is much smarter to sprinkle Donate Now buttons within the content on your site AFTER you have just made a case for why it might be a good idea to donate. It is more subtle, less “in yer face”. While I have no firm evidence to support this, I suspect it will be more successful than the former method which has the subtely of a sledgehammer.

If you must, do it this way…

If you must put a Donate Now button everywhere, it should really link to the fundraising page, or the page in your website which lists the various methods of raising funds. In this way the user is still on your website. So within the page you can explain that by clicking on a link or icon on this page you will be sent to the fundraising partner page, specifically to your account on that page, and it will open in a new window.

By doing it this way, you conform to best practices in WCAG2.1, and you are holding the hand of the donor and reassuring them as you take them to the appropriate website.

I personally would be more likely to donate that way rather than the sledgehammer approach.

Why the sledgehammer approach…

I am being disingenuous really, I don’t think people really mean to use the sledgehammer approach, but I think there is a reason why they propose to do it this way. Fundamentally the person making the recommendation is making an assumption: they love your charity, everything about what you do, and as such they are already bought into the value you provide. So in their case you do not need to engage into a sales pitch, they are already sold. So the button is all they need. Well that is fine for them.

But your adviser is not your average donor!

However the people you are hoping to donate to your organisation are not bought in yet, so you have to do that as a separate activity. Taking them to the fundraising page first is vitally important. Of even greater importance, sprinkle those donate now buttons within your content, say after a moving testimonial from one of your clients, or a case study. I think you will have much greater traction with your market.

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Do you have a Social Media Editor?

From a marketing angle, you may consider social media to be very important to your organisation, and it is of course. However it is a bit like preaching to the converted if you think about it. It is not likely someone will find you on social media unless they already know about you. So that means the audience you are sharing your social media stories with are already fans and followers. It is a way of keeping in touch.

Many organisations I work with have strong social media presence, but not such a strong presence in the news on the website. Is this a problem? Well yes, I think it might be. Here’s why:

Do you want more people, or the same people?

Ask a marketing professional and they will always want more people exposed to a story or message. Particularly that group that is not currently engaged with the organisation. Within that group might be future; donors, contributors, volunteers, members etc. That is really what is important. Of course you do not ignore those people that have signed up or following you already. We are talking about a superset of people, not just regular engaged fans.

Work smarter not harder

So, let’s be clear here, this takes a little more effort, but over time it will be much less effort, and you will reach far more more people.

Without exception, if I look at the statistics of those sites that have a rich and varied news feed, they also have high numbers of visitors. There are some technical reasons for this in terms of how the website works. But let’s keep this simple.

Here is a new strategy

Get your social media guru to add things to the website first. Do what they were intending to do in a post on your website rather than Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

That in itself gives you an advantage over twitter because you are not restricted on your content. When you have added the item to your website post. Display the post in isolation from the news page. (When you view it on the news page with other posts, you need to click the image, title or read more link to open it). Now copy the URL or web address for the item in your website.

Next go to Twiter, and paste it there. Then go to Facebook and paste it there. Both systems will try to grab something from your website. So you don’t have to rebuild it all in Facebook, Twitter et al.

Now you have met the requirement to keep your fan base in touch with what is going on. However it will also drive up your website visitors as a result. For those people that happen to come across you while surfing the web, they can see it too. They would have missed it before if it is exclusively on social media.

Check your results

Most of you have a Google Analytics panel on your dashboards, you can see and monitor the results of this change if wish. The net result in terms of effort, is you create it in one place only (your website) and do not need to recreate it any where else. Everywhere else including feeds you simply add to, you just paste the URL. When you do this, you will see a big spike on the number of visitors to your website. Many of those will be first time visitors. Some of those will also become fans too.

Alternative Home-Start Menu

Clikc on the image to see a larger version.

I have just completed my 30th Home-Start rebranding project for Home-Start North Somerset. While engaged on this excersise and looking around at some other sites I found a way to remove the normal menu system and substitute it with a customised one. I am still working on this, and it is not as simple as throwing something together because it has to cater for different screen widths.

I have had a few requests for donation buttons, and have generally placed them in a section below the menu at the page level. However if you are interested in this solution I would like to know if it is worth pursuing. Right not it is incomplete, I have developed a desktop version (as per the image above) a tablet version which is smaller and simpler, and just started a smart phone version. I think there is a substantial amount of work to refine it, so I am shelving it for now.

The three new header sections (desktop, tablet and smartphone) are tied to the top of the page and scroll off of the screen. One problem I need to solve is how to keep the menu at the top of the page using this process, or substitute another one when the user scrolls down the site.

Anyway, if you would like to know more, drop me a line please. If I have enough interest I will provide this for free to all of those people I have upgraded over the past 8 months.

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