News – Wingrove-Services

Refresher Training

Forgotten how to edit your website?

Don’t despair, I have some solutions available for you.

While I provide a lot of help FOC for short enquiries, I do have quite a large number of people I am in contact with now.

For all new websites and since those days of Covid I have been providing online training for Divi site owners. Before Covid, I used to visit most people and do the training face to face. I now have a few sites in Scotland and Northern Ireland so that is not always feasible.

I can provide the following to you:

2hr tutorial on what you need to know about WordPress and how to edit your website and create news.
Editor page built into your website with support PPT on it and links to other resources.
Editing exercise page.
1 hr post editing training support. This is on an as needed basis, so if you need me to check something or have a question, this will be debited by the minute.
A video of the Zoom session.

This is a more elaborate version of what I did when visiting my clients. It is designed to help you to be independent. Cost is £50 only available to direct clients with sites I have built.

No Budget – No Problem

I also have some training resources and tips on this special page: https://wingrove-media.uk/hsuk/ if you scroll to bottom of this page you will find there is a tutorial online and a list of times for the various exercises. This is available free of charge.

Editing Credits

While this service is not part of my normal package, I realise that some people do not need to edit their sites very frequently, or just want to outsource editing the website. I can provide up to 3hrs of editing time on an as needed basis. To take advantage of this you purchase an editing credit. Once that is agreed, you pass content to me and I will place it on your website for you. I keep a record of how long each one takes and share that with you. Contact me for more details. This service is only available if I built your website.

← Complex Forms are now Available Fake 20i.com invoices →

Home-Start Volunteer Diary Form

Over the years I have been asked several times if I can build a Home-Start Volunteer Diary form online. To do a one off is prohibitively expensive, and I have not bothered to look at it in any detail in the past.

I have had a recent request, and based on my experience using Contact Form 7 and the layout manager plugin I have built a demonstrator. You can try this form out for yourself. It will send a message back to your email address with up to 122 different items of data formatted in an email.

You can locate the page here: https://wingrove-media.uk/vol-diary/

If this is of interest to your organisation (most likely a Home-Start) then please send me an email letting me know, and I will keep you in the loop as it develops.

There is already 6.5hrs work in this form and over 870 lines of code. It is outside of mainstream website development and maintenance, but if there is significant interest, I can share the development cost across multiple organisations which would make it more attractive as a development project.

← Home-Start Resources Page Plugin is crashing sites (11th July 2022) →

Home-Start Resources Page

I currently host around 40 Home-Starts with a couple more in the pipeline. I also started working with Matt Hann and Tanya Freedman (HSUK) and look after another 40 sites there on a three month rolling contract. The additional 40 sites are based on one promoted by Rutland Online who are no longer developing sites for HSUK. These sites are also in the same hosting you are in, just in a different account. My role is to maintain them each month.

I have hit quite a few problems in the way these new sites were set up. To help people there is a page you can also use here https://wingrove-media.uk/hsuk/ which lists those websites, but of greater importance, at the bottom of that page are some self help guides. You are free to use these if you wish. Some relate to the way that the hosting works, some relate to specific issues in that design of website. Many are relevant to you as well.

#BehindTheMask

I have just added one which contains a specially built slider to add the existing slides used on the Home-Start home pages to help promote #BehindTheMask. Please do help yourselves and download your copy of the pre-built slider and the instructions. It only takes 5 minutes and I have done the hard work for you. Note that the dimensions of the sliders used on your sites are different to the ones used on the HSUK sites. I have done two sets, just take care to pick up the right one.

I also have a couple of posts prepared which you could also import and publish including the graphics. Contact me for more information.

← Page Redirect crashing some websites Home-Start Volunteer Diary Form →

Another Phishing Scam – You may be targeted

It has just been brought to my attention that there is a phishing scam going on where people who have websites at 20i.com (I have your a reseller account here) are being sent phishing emails. It works like this:

The hacker has done some research based on name servers and then identified the websites that are hosted at a data centre. They then visit the website and scrape an email from it. They then take a screen shot of a legitimate page from the parent hosting company and attach that into the body of a an email.

Fortunately none of you receive any emails from 20i.com directly, so hopefully your suspicions will be raised immediately. However it would be possible for me to automate the accounting side of my reseller package and you would receive emails like this. I have just never bothered to set it up.

In the image below I shown the email which someone had kindly detected and flagged to me. I recognised it immediately as a 20i message. You would never receive one of these unless you had your own account with them.

I have also placed my cursor over the image so you can see where the link goes to. You can see immediately it does not go to 20i.com, it goes to a server in Spain.

This is a classic Phishing Scam. What they are after is maybe payment, or a username and password to log into the system. Either way it is a criminal act.

Ways to detect these types of scams

When you look at the image above, it does look genuine on first glancing at it and not looking closely. It is actually based on a real message that they send out, but I am the only one that might get one, not you.

There is a glaring error on the first line where they have adapted the message. “…. will expire within the next days.” The actual number of days is missing. That is so they can create a reusable block of text for anyone. There are also special characters embedded in it which do not display correctly and if you look at the punctuation it is incorrectly spaced as well.

Bottom line

If you receive a message and it does not look right, it probably is not right. The general give away is not much context and a link, or a lot of credible context, but the link is through an image. You can always find where a link goes to in most mail programs by placing your cursor on top of the link but not clicking. In this case you would be passing information to a hacked server at http://……clinicapodologiabarcelona.es (I suspect a foot clinic in Barcelona).

Invoices relating to your services

You will only ever receive a message directly from me, it will not contain any links for you to login somewhere else. You would never receive a message from the hosting provider I use directly unless you had an account with them.

Please remain vigilant, and drop me a line if you are unsure about anything, I would rather spend time replying than see anyone caught out, there is a lot of this going on right now.

← Phishing Case 3 - What happened? Page Redirect crashing some websites →

Social Media Strategy or just winging it?

During my business career, from around the mid 1990’s there was a phrase that used to be passed around in “Marketing Speak” which was “Work Smarter not Harder”.

This article and the corresponding PowerPoint attached below is really all about this. I have come across examples where there is either a lot of effort going into administering and keeping a social media feed up to date, and nobody is paying attention to the website, or both are working independently.

The discussion looks at the problem from a number of angles, and asks several relevant questions in terms of what you think you are trying to achieve. For example if you have a facebook group, do you realise that this facebook group is similar to a congregation and you are preaching to the converted? Really what you want to be doing is extending the reach of your organisation and growing the interest in your website (and facebook group).

It is not difficult to do, but it does encourage you to stand back, see what is happening and then ask yourself is it yielding dividends for the organisation, or are you just doing what you think everyone else is doing without understanding why.

The Social Media Strategy ppt explores ways of helping you to reach further, and grow your viewers. The website is central to everything and is like the Oracle, it contains all knowledge about your organisation and news. You copy links from your site to social media. That means you do not have duplicated effort, so you can now work more efficiently.

Anyway enough of my marketing, if it encourages you to think out of the box and ask why, it was worth putting together. Drop me a line if you have any questions or seek clarification.

Social Media Strategy

← Captcha Solution for Contact Form 7 Beware of the peaks! →

Dangerous Spam in Circulation

I subscribe to a number of websites that report on vulnerabilities and various scams as they emerge. One in particular caught my eye as we currently have at least one site under constant bombardment (4 per minute for 8 days now) with a spam email that carries a highly suspicious link. In that case no damage has been done other than wasting a lot of my time. The sending VPN node is blocked (the actual sender is hidden from us) and the content of the email has been analysed and if any get through they are sent to a junk email folder. The problem here is detecting it when it happens to minimise disruption.

One such publication is called Hacker News. I get that daily, and there are all sorts of reports of problems in major systems. I want to bring your attention to just one of them.

IcedID

There is a particular email circulating right now which will come most likely through your contact form, will look official and will advise you that are using images on your site which are subject to copyright. Practically speaking, while I know some organisations are not particularly careful where they pick images up from, I have only ever come across one legitimate case.

The email carries an obfuscated link (you cannot tell where it is going to take you to) this is really the first warning sign. Never click on anything that does not look right particularly if it is an unsolicited email. In this case the email states that the link will lead to evidence of copyright infringement and you need to take action now or legal action will be taken against your organisation. This type of email is likely to panic someone into clicking on the link. If you see anything like this relating to your website forward it to me and I will check it.

If you do click on the link it will lead to downloading “IcedID” an information stealing malware. If you do not have strong security on your system with AV and Security software the download may not be detected.

You can read about it here: Hackers Using Website’s Contact Forms to Deliver IcedID Malware (thehackernews.com)

Most junk email is easily identified, there are a few around that can scare people into taking action. Don’t become a victim of that. Send it to me, I will check it out for you.

← Case Study - Extreme Spam! Captcha Solution for Contact Form 7 →

From website referral form to CRM

Mainly for Home-Start organisations, but it can apply to any group with online referral or application forms.

I have built a proof of concept which has a referral form online which is quite complicated.

The user inputs data into the form and then sends it to the recipient.

The recipient has a very easy form to read. The form formatting can be applied to user requirements.

Within the form the data is duplicated as a CSV string of characters (Character Separated Value). You can copy this block of text and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet and then apply Text to Columns command. Now each cell has a data field contents in it. You can manipulate it further from here, or even import it into your CRM system.

To find out more and look at a working example with documentation that you can try online, go to here: http://wingrove-media.uk/generic-application-or-referral-form/

Follow the link above to visit the page with the form on and try it out for yourself.

← For Home-Starts and a couple of questions Evening Tutorials →

For Home-Starts and a couple of questions

On the 1st of February of this year I was hosting 41 Home-Start sites from around the UK with two of these in development. Since then one of them has been published.

It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to let you know where they all are. No two sites are exactly the same, and while I follow the branding guidelines issued by Home-Start, each site has the personal stamp of the local organisation.

If you have a few minutes to spare, it might be a good idea to have a look around and see how other people do things. There is no single magic answer, but some of these sites are showing the same things and have been handled in different ways. As such they may offer different ways of engaging your audience. You may see some features you do not have on your site and wish to explore those further.

Currently the list is located on this temporary website: http://wingrove-media.uk on the home page. It is not really a website, just a play area for me to explore ideas.

Sharing Info

It also occurred to me that each of these sites has a Google Analytics Token assigned to it (once they are launched). There are statistics for each site. Would there be any benefit in collecting data from each site and showing it distributed anonymously. For each participant, I could tell you the reference number for your organisation and see how you are doing compared to your colleagues? This might open a path for continuous improvement.

Let me know if you are interested in exploring this further: mark@wingrove-media.com

← Stackmail From website referral form to CRM →

Effective Use of Social Media with WordPress sites

I thought I would kick of 2021 with a reminder to everyone, or perhaps this is totally new to you; how to use your site effectively with social media.

Many of you already understand this and “get it” but as I work around the 130+ sites I am hosting I see examples where there is little activity on the site, but lots of activity in Social Media. So, social media has basically replaced your website as the means of conveying information and raising interest. The reason why this is not a great approach is you are preaching to the converted.

The problem

Some people find adding things to social media really easy, and adding things to your website takes longer. While this is true, the benefits of adding things to your website in terms of news is of much greater importance than adding it to your social media feed. So it is worth taking the effort to do it. There is no excuse, because if you have forgotten how to edit your website there is a guy in Buckinghamshire who will be glad to run an online Zoom session, and show you how. From around June of 2020 I started to run online editing sessions over zoom and recording them and adding them to your site. I also now add Editor pages into sites with guidance built in. So all the help you need is there, just ask.

Why posting only in Social Media is not a good idea

Many organisations have their own Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts. This is good. But think about your audience. Your audience (people that have signed up to join your feed) are already fans or interested in what you do. They have already bought in to your value proposition. So you are preaching to the converted. But are there any new people coming along. Probably not.

There is so much social media around now, probably in excess of 100 outlets you are unlikely to stumble across a feed which will be of interest to you. It is more likely you will locate a feed through a website with a link to it. That is important, people find social media feeds largely through visiting websites. This is because search engines mainly refer to websites, and people are used to browsing websites. Think about those feeds you have signed up to, how did you get there in the first place?

Think Website First

This is the approach I recommend you take, and how to measure it. Firstly plan, what is it you want to say? How do you want people to respond? Hold those thought at the back of your mind when you create a post for your website.

You have the benefit that you can say a lot in a blog (news page) on your website. So get those messages out crisp and clear. Add an image or two to keep it interesting. You have already exceeded what you can show easily on Facebook and Twitter.

Avoid Text in Images

Some people go to great lengths producing graphically rich content. Which is fine for humans. But the internet infrastructure works on Text. Computers cannot read what is in an image. Also accessibility standards state you should not put text in images because people with visual impairments cannot read them. (Their computers read text, but cannot read images). By all means show an image, but make sure the key points are in text in the post. Then search engines will be able to pick it up.

Assign any relevant categories to your post and publish it.

Turing to Social Media

Now that you have your full message on your website, you can now turn to Social Media. Pull your website up in your browser, navigate to your news page and open the new item so it is full screen. Copy the URL (Web address) for the page.

Now switch to Twitter, Facebook etc and paste that link into the feed. You do not need to write everything again. But you could put a short note there. Usually what happens is social media will pick up some of the text and images from your website.

Check GA in a few days

All of my sites have Google Analytics added to them, so you can go to your GA account (contact me if you need access and have not been there before), and check what has happened on your website. You should anticipate a big spike in visitors, because they have been referred from Facebook, Twitter, et al.

But……

You are still only reaching the converted. So how do you spread the net wider?

This needs a little research, but is definitely worth the investment of time. You could start by looking on a map at the major regions around your location. Then look on Social Media to see if there are interest groups in those areas. For me, there is Your Prestwood and Great Missenden. It is generic, and designed to connect people together. Unfortunately many of these feeds are cluttered with adverts from businesses. However you are different. You are a charity in need of help and promotion. It is likely that the moderators and admins will look sympathetically at your case.

Join some groups locally around your location and when you are looking for volunteers, or looking for donations, or simply wish to promote your work, you create a post on your site, publish it. Take the URL for the post and paste it in these newsfeeds. Now you are preaching to an audience that may not be aware of you. Not everyone will come, but you should get a significant blip in interest.

Spreading the net wider

So, start to think bigger, how can you reach out to a wider audience and bring people into an inner circle of “friends of your organisation”. You will find this approach can yield big dividends in establishing your presence, value and needs.

Don’t forget the search engines

Another advantage with this approach is you have generated back links (links back to your website) which are vitally important in your ranking with Google and other search engines. The more you have, the more important your website is perceived to be. Also the content has been indexed, and may come up in searches. So you have increased the possibility of being found.

Working Smarter not Harder

I think if you adopted this approach, you will see results, and unlike just using your social media groups, you are exposing what you do to a larger audience. That will ultimately bring more people to your site, and that may increase your supporters. In this process you only created the post/ news item in one location. So you did not have to do it multiple times. All you posted in social media was a link back to your news item. The only other thing you needed to do was check on the social feeds in your local communities.

Capture and Retention Strategy

You could all take this a stage further. Many of you have a newsletter function built into your website using MailPoet. If you regularly publish news on your website, then this news can very quickly be built into a newsletter (it takes less than 5 minutes). You send the newsletter out to subscribers to your website. Maybe once a month, or once a quarter. Here you are taking your website out to the subscribers rather than waiting for them to come back. This too will cause a huge peak in website visitors.

Putting this all together, you have these classes or groups of people.

- Group A: Those that have never heard of you (Millions)
- Group B: Those that have heard of you and watch your social media feeds (50-100)
- Group C: Those that visit your website (80-400 per month)
- Group D: Those that are subscribers (50-100+)

Group D are the most loyal and most attentive group. Your goal is to grow this group by measuring the number of subscribers on your website.

Group C will contain regular fans, and passers by. Prominently advertise on your site that you have a free subscription. Convert Group C members to Group D members.

If you are treating Social Media (Group B) as a separate thread to your website, then the chances are those watching Social Media are not looking at your website. By posting links to your site from Social Media, you can change that. If you can drive Social Media watchers to your website, then you can get some of them to sign up to Group D (subscribers). Remember you can measure that.

Group A is where the gold is. In B, C & D those people are already aware of you, you need to reach out to those that are not aware of you to grow your numbers and levels of interest. This is where you should be placing as much effort as you are on your own social media channels. In group A are donors, volunteers, prospective employees, trustees, subject matter experts, the list in endless. They just don’t know about you yet.

Put a Marketing Plan together

A marketing plan can and should be larger than this activity, but just focusing here for a moment. Set your self some goals to get more hits on your website. Most local charities with a few exceptions get around 150 site visitors a month. Give yourself the goal of growing it by 50%.

If you have a subscriber list and newsletter in your website aim to get that to 100 (which should be relatively easy to do).

The point here being that these are things that the average person can do, and better still you can measure whether it is having an impact or not. So you are not working blind. Use the statistics on your site through Google Analytics, and the subscriber list to provide the assurance that you can make a difference, and drive it relentlessly throughout the year.

It is not all theory

Here are three examples of why I believe this can work for you.

1). Prestwood Village Association (https://prestwoodva.org.uk) this organisation is based in my village. I joined them in 2011 and built the original website. It is now on it’s third iteration. We added the newsletter to the website and used Social Media outlets to market the site. Using the same methods I have mentioned above. Prestwood in Buckinghamshire has around 2,500 homes. The website has over 1000 subscribers. That means Prestwood Village Association at any time can reach out to 1000 people in a matter of a few hours.

2). Horsewyse CIC (https://horsewyse.org.uk) is an equine facilitated learning school for children with special needs. They raise additional revenue during school terms by holding day care/ supervision for children for one to five days a week. Coronavirus pandemic excepted; through out the year adverts are placed on the website to say when the next set of dates are coming up. I send out a newsletter to a growing number of subscribers, in the newsletter I ask people to share it with their friends, so more people sign up. That subscriber list has gone from nothing to over 140 people in a couple of years. Here again the messages are taken out directly to people that interested to know what is happening.

3). Home-Start Cotswolds (https://home-start-cotswolds.org.uk) I was working with one of the members of the Home-Start Cotswolds team in January answering some questions. I noted that there was an unusual peak of activity on their site over the Christmas period. Bringing around 60+ people to the site in 2 days. I commented that is looked like the site had some unwelcome attention from hackers probing the site. But happily it was not the case. The website editor had posted news on Facebook which directed people back to the website where they were seeking volunteers. You could track the number of accesses to the volunteering page as well. – Well Done Home-Start Cotswolds, that is the way to go!

Got some ideas, not sure what to do?

Drop me a line. Happy to help get you started.

Suite CRM

Over the past 9 years I have built up quite a large number of contacts and accounts. These have been managed through various platforms such as Excel (multiple spreadsheets) and email. I have a local redundant server with accounts on for each client where I can track the work requests that have come in as well, and I keep working files and backups there. But it has all got rather too large to manage now, especially with regards to customer management and invoicing using spreadsheets. It was creaking at the seams so something needed to be done.

One of the issues has been tracking payments for services. An analysis we carried out in November 2020 showed around £2000+ of unresolved invoices over a 20 month period. Many of these had been overlooked by my clients, some had been paid, but not using the recommended method of a BACs transfer, so were hard to track.

Solving the problem

I looked around for potential solutions and came across a CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) which is based on an Open Source Sugar CRM which is widely respected across industries. The package is called SuiteCRM.

It is possible to load the CRM into a hosting account, and the reason I mention it, is it might have wider appeal than just my application. It is basically a complex website fronting a database. The database is built around accounts, the accounts can have contacts, projects, invoices, notes, attached emails etc. It is really very thorough, and so far quite robust. I have even created my own module to cover hosting details for each client.

If you are managing projects, people, organisations on a spreadsheet and wish to move to the next level it might be worth a look.

How much does it cost?

Like WordPress the software is free. It is supported by a community, and is recommended by the UK Government, and also used by the NHS. If you have come across SalesForce CRM it is similar to this as a system.

If you have someone that is a bit techy in your organisation, and can give you local support, then it might well be a useful addition to the systems you use.

Is it easy to learn?

These days I generally judge technology on how easy it is to pick up, figure out and work around. I don’t want to plough through a 300 page manual, and if you find you have to do that, it can put you off. In my case, I have lightly read up on various things when I have hit a problem. After 3 weeks, I have now loaded in around 130 organisations, over 200 contacts from those organisations, details about websites, and services provided, invoices sent out etc and linked it all together. The really big step is creating a whole custom module for my application. I figured out how to do that and link it into the system.

However I deal with this stuff every day. But I know that in many organisations you have IT people either on your trustees, or staff in your organisation. If anyone is interested in learning more, then let me know.

My plan

Over the rest of this financial year, I am going to start adding in projects, work requests, quotes, email communications into this system and get it to generate invoices by the end of March. If I get this far, I will have a complete workflow from start to finish, including support requests for post release.

Researching SuiteCRM

You can find out more about this package which can be loaded in your hosting area by following these links: Main website is here; https://suitecrm.com/ and documentation you can find here: https://docs.suitecrm.com/

In my case, I grabbed a copy of the software and installed it locally on a Linux Server in my office. But the same package could be added to your hosting account, or better still a new and therefore isolated hosting account.

← Give A Little Love Campaign Scammer and Phishing Example →