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 →

Complex Forms are now Available

Mainly for Home-Starts

I switched over to Contact Form 7 several years ago and am now familiar with several plugins which extend the functionality, particularly in the area of complex forms.

I now have available:

Professional and Self Referral Forms (£130 for both)
Volunteer online diary (£80)
Volunteer Application Form (£80)

The first professional referral form took 1 week to create from scratch. I start with an off the shelf copy of one of the forms, and take feedback to modify the form for your organisation.

The form has two major components; what you can see online, and a formatted email which is returned to the organisation with all of the data in it. It is also possible to include the data as a CSV string of characters which you could import into a spreadsheet or database. The email is human readable and annotated to clearly list the data submitted by the user.

You can see some examples on this site and have a play: https://wingrove-media.uk

Contact me for more details. I can also point you to live examples which are currently in use by various organisations.

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 →

Page Redirect crashing some websites

On most websites I use a plugin which redirects a user to a Thank You page after they complete a form. This is a trivial function, and not one you might think could bring a website down. I have had six cases over the past week where sites have stopped working due to an upgrade of this plugin. It appears that the authors have substantially rewritten it, and there is probably a bug in there somewhere causing the problem. Can you all check your websites and let me know if you have a message about a critical error has occurred.

That is the symptom. It is easy for me to fix and will take a few moments to do so, but right now I have not been through all of the websites. You can help me to help you.

Normally this type of incident is very rare, and it is clear that not all sites are affected either, so it is probably a combination of things. Around a year ago WordPress made some changes to error monitoring, where a site may have continued to work in the past with some issues, they seem to stop working now.

You may occasionally see a 500 error on your website, these are transient and indicate that the server cannot respond. They will clear themselves. You should never see CRITICAL ERROR. If you see that flag it to me immediately and I will sort it out for you.

← Another Phishing Scam - You may be targeted Home-Start Resources Page →

Beware of the peaks!

For much of the past month I have been working my way around sites and making sure the sites are updating correctly. In some cases they have not been doing this without additional input. I have not got to the bottom of why, some of it is related to the Divi template. I spent a very tortuous 2 days seeking support to find out why. It would have been more productive watching paint dry.

However I digress, I looked at around 70 of the sites I am hosting. I had to make changes to them to get the last version of WordPress to manage the updates. After I have done this the sites should in theory look after themselves.

In the dashboard of most sites is a Google Analytics summary of the last 30 days of activity on your site. I noted the image below which has a strange peak in it on one of the sites.

This is not normal

Then I found another one

And another one

And another one

Unravelling the thread

I found five in around 70 sites, so it was not everywhere. But what is it? I chose one site and decided to check Google Analytics to see what it recorded. The peak in most cases occurred over a 5 minute period when allegedly around 350+ people from around the world decided to visit your website at 9am in the morning. And I do mean from around the world, not just in the UK. Any country in the image below that is a shade of blue, means people (allegedly) came from that country.

The image on the left shows the top 31 countries and how many computers in each country. Click on the image to see a larger version. Not listed here, but I did check, looking at Russia countrywide, the visits did not come from one computer, but came from many across Russia.

What is going on?

Given the attack which is still going on some 4 weeks after I was notified on another site, I am very conscious of how long that took to sort out. I checked in with the hosting company to ask about these and what they thought they were. I did not get a straight answer, other than any attack will be handled by special measures in the hosting and the site will continue to work despite this.

It is unlikely that these sites were affected in any way, the visits in this case were no different to UK based visitors. The only difference is they came from everywhere in a very short period of time, apparently altogether or in quick succession.

Speculation

A few years ago I witnessed an attack on one of my sites while with another hosting company. I documented it at the time in this site. The site in this case had a protection mechanism built in that if there were too many visitors arriving at once, or trying to log in, they delayed any further activity from that IP address. As soon as one was blocked another one started. When that was blocked another one started, and they skipped all around the world in a few minutes.

The site was not taken down, but this is basically known as a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack. The expectation being that if enough computers hit your site it will consume the server resources and your site will grind to a halt.

Click on the image to see a larger version

BOT Network

It is highly likely that I was witnessing a Bot network which is a set of compromised servers from around the world controlled by one central resource and they were testing it. When I last came across this I had all of the IP addresses of the computers, and could do a geo location search and also identify the owners of the computers (if they were a server for example). In many cases they were corporate servers owned by respectable companies that probably had no idea that there were additional processes running off of their computers.

The system might be targeted at some point on a corporate server and financial demands made to turn it off.

Things for you to think about

If you see a massive peak in your statistics that you cannot account for, let me know ASAP. I will look into it. If you have one of these it means your statistics for that period are no longer valid. So do not use them in any promotional documentation.

You may have seen in the past messages like “We checked your website and it was not getting many visitors pay us ££££ and we will increase the number of visitors to your site” Well this is one way of doing it. It will not however generate any more business because the visitors are not real.

I can selectively turn off countries from accessing your website and take some other measures with the hosting company if you see anything like this.

However it should not really impact your website, or your existing visitors. If you are not sure about something; drop me a line.

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 →

Evening Tutorials

Would you benefit from more training on your website?
Would you like to get some more of the cool features to work on your site?
Do you need a refresher on common problems?
Would you like to participate in a forum?

Just thinking outside the box here. I know from working with some of you, you have picked up the concepts behind editing your websites and have done really well. If you would like to become advanced users and learn how to do more,. why not consider signing up for a once a month (free) or ad hoc online Zoom Tutorial? I could run this as a forum and have multiple attendees.

Let me know if you are interested in going that extra mile. Use the contact us page to send me a message.

← From website referral form to CRM Need a bespoke CRM system? - Call Graeme Neale →

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 →

Website Health

WordPress has recently introduced a health widget in the dashboard. It indicates the health of your website. I have been getting questions on it. It looks like this.

I have not done anything yet on this site (my site) so let’s take a look. First thing is not to wholly believe what it says. But we should check it out. I have clicked on the Site Health Screen link. It takes me to here.

The first thing to note is at the top. It is now running some tests. Which infers it did not really know what the state of the website is.

We have 0 critical problems, if you ever find you have one or more in this space alert me immediately. A critical problem could bring your website down.

The two recommended improvements show that I have one or more themes that are not in use, I should remove them.

It also says I have one or more plugins loaded which I am not using, I should remove them. Both of these are security precautions. In our case, not that important.

The last one relates to a function in the hosting which I have never seen anywhere, and is not supported by this hosting. It too is non critical. However it is worth checking by opening the box.

In the meantime while we have been thinking about this page the Site Health has changed to:

… GOOD. Well I did not do anything to the site. Unfortunately the way this has been implemented is a little alarmist. I don’t mind WordPress mandarins building a stronger and more robust platform, but this feature is not a great implementation as it turns out.

Check for yourselves

When you next login, give it a try and see what the page says. If you see something there after you have loaded it and are concerned, let me know and I will check it out for you.

← Website unavailable and other messages WordPress Site Health Check →

Website unavailable and other messages

Over the past six months there have been around 4 or 5 cases where websites have stopped working. This can invoke panic if you have never seen it before. There will be a white screen and some short message on it which will not mean a lot to you.

Firstly do not panic

Your website is still there, but cannot run. WordPress introduced some measures around six months ago which ran some diagnostic and other tests and reported on the health of the website. It is since this change some sites have failed, probably because one of the trapping mechanisms trying to identify problems has kicked in.

Generally what has happened is the website may have been upgrading itself, the upgrade has caused a temporary conflict, and this or some related event has caused it to crash. What you see is the white screen. It can sometimes be falsely triggered by security plugins.

How bad is it?

The first thing to check is whether you can still log in to the site. Try to login as an administrator. If you can get into the site, there may be a warning message there. If the problem is down to a plugin (it normally is) try turning some of them off and see if the website returns. If the site does return, delete the broken plugin, and try reinstalling it.

If you cannot login and have access to the hosting

Normally the way I have to handle these problems is to log into the control panel, use a file manager to locate the plugin directory for the website. I then work my way down the list renaming the directories by adding some text at the end of the directory name. For example if the directory was called wordfence, I will rename it wordfence-off. When I do this, the plugin can no longer load. If it was the one causing the problem, then the site will return.

I would then delete the plugin and reinstall the latest version, that normally fixes it.

Can’t fix it?

If you cannot resolve the problem, send me a message, better still call me on the phone, and I will take a look as a priority. But you may find you can resolve this yourself.

Why?

I use a very limited set of proven plugins across the websites I build. They are all well maintained, and if a problem exists, and I can identify it (usually takes around 30 mins), so far removing and reinstalling them has resolved the problem. You may however have added in your own selection of plugins. Not all plugins are equal. Yours may be causing the problem.

If you are stuck, and have refreshed your browser, or tried a different browser and get the same result alert me immediately and I will try to get it resolved for you quickly provided I am near a computer.

If the worst happens

We always have a weekly backup we can rely on for website recovery if we run into a problem that cannot be resolved.

← Speeding up websites Website Health →