News & Alerts – Page 6 – Wingrove-Services

All about Email and Webmail

Email through the hosting

With people working remotely over the past few months I have had a few enquiries about how to do things. Generally when people join I provide a set of guides. In case you have lost yours I have included them all here. Just follow the links below to download your copies.

Note these are only valid for people who are using email provided through the website hosting. Some of you are on Office 365 and Outlook.com; these guides are not for you.

If you are exclusively using Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo for your main communications (you shouldn’t really!), then these guides are not for you either.

Everyone else, this is how to set up various clients.

A recent change is most accounts should now work with mail.yourdomainname.co.uk for the SMTP and IMAP servers. You substitute yourdomainname.co.uk with; your domain name! So for me in this hosting it would be mail.wingrove-services.co.uk for both the SMTP and IMAP servers.

The guides are as follows:

How to set up Outlook (for older versions of Outlook, for new versions (2016 onwards using Office 365 check the next one. Guide link: How to set up Outlook.

How to set up Outlook in Office 365. There is a parameter which you cannot normally access in Outlook in Office 365 which may cause problems. This tells you how to locate it and set it up. Guide Link: How to set up Outlook in Office 365.

How to set up email on an iPhone or iPad. Guide Link: iPad and Smartphone

How to set up email in Thunderbird. If you are not an Outlook user, you can download and install Thunderbird which is a free email client application by the same group that developed the Firefox Browser. Guide Link: Thunderbird Mail Client.

How to set up email on a Mac using MacMail application. Guide link: Mac Mail application.

How to use Webmail. If you access your email through stackmail.com then this guide tells you how the interface works. Guide Link: Webmail user guide

How to set up Out of Office messages. The email server is the centralised location for your email. If you want to set up an Out of Office message, this guide tells you where to go. Guide Link: Out of Office.

Any questions or request for further guidance drop me a line.

← Support via Zoom Speeding up websites →

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.

Plugin Conflict

I recommned that everyone checks their contact form each month to make sure it is still working. It is effectively sending yourself a message. Particularly if things seem quieter than usual.

Why?

Mainly because from time to time something may conflict with what was formerly a stable installation. Each week there are three or four new software releases that will be available for your website. Because of the choice of plugins I use (they are generally used in the 100,000’s and they are well supported). Occassionally something may go wrong, it is usually transient, and fixed quickly due to the number of people using them.

Mailpoet 3 & Contact Form 7

These are two very popular plugins used on thousands of sites. I have come across an issue where both are installed. However it does not seem to affect all websites where both of these plugins are used which is unusual. At the moment the problem seems to occur on new sites only.

It can be identified in the following way. Firstly go to your contact form and send yourself a message. Did you receive it, or did you see an error message? If you received it ok, then nothing more to do here.

If you did not receive the message, go into the plugins page and deactivate MailPoet 3. With MailPoet 3 deactivated go back to your contact us form. Send yourself a message. If you now receive it, it indicates that there is an interaction between MailPoet 3, Contact Form 7 and the sending service. If that is the case please drop me a line and I will sort it out for you. I have a workaround which is already implemented on many sites.

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

Available for small commercial sites now

If you know of anyone that is looking for a website for a small business, I have just started to develop sites for this market. I have taken three more on over the past month. Two of which needed to be rescued from other hosting companies with higher fees.

I can provide a similar service to the one I provide to charities including training. But if someone is looking for editing and maintenance as well, I can provide that on a PAYG basis, or pre agreed development work.

Just put your friend in touch with me for an informal discussion on where I can help.

Ripping off Charities

I was approached by someone requesting help with their charity’s website. She was the chair of the organisation. As with most of my connections with people it was largely word of mouth and recommendations. They connected through my website.

This was also significant in that I was using the Tawk.to app on my website and cell phone, and while sitting watching TV they popped up and started to ask questions. (Check out Tawk.to on your site).

Anyway it transpired that this organisation had their website rebuilt by a commercial organisation. The fees were high, and it was very difficult to edit the site, and they were seeking more control.

I offered to look at the site to get a feel for what might be involved before making any commitment.

It turns out that the developer had charged them £750 for a FOUR page website. Plus there was nothing notable about the design, it was based on a template that cost around $28. There was more…. The developer had a minimum charge of £105 whether it was a 5 minute job or a 3hr one. (They charged £35 per hour). In correspondence it was clear that the developer was offering to update the website as it was running on old plugins and an older version of WordPress. They would not click on the update button for free, they would charge the client for that service.

I requested access to the website to find that all of the editors had “AUTHOR” rights and were very limited on what they could do. This would mean they had to go through the developer to get anything done. And of course pay a fee.

This is one of the reasons I work with Charities. I thought it was absolutely appalling that a developer could charge £750 (for an at best £100 website) and the website could be locked down in this way, with the client having practically no control and having to do everything through a developer whose charges started at £105. This is the worse example I have come across in the past 9 years of doing this.

Solution

This charity is my most recent addition to my client list. As I did not have full access to their website I rebuilt it externally, using a new template in my hosting. I increased the pages to incorporate GDPR, Terms and Conditions, Accessibility and a few other things. The site is now around 12 pages and has a more robust structure and is more mobile friendly than the former site.

All of the editors now have Administrator level access and can see all of the site and change it all. They also have multiple 10GB mail accounts available, training built into the webiste, and I will run a Zoom session with them shortly to show them how to develop the site further. The cost? £0 for the development work and £60 per annum for the hosting. I cannot do that for everyone that approaches me, but this was an awful case of a small charity being ripped off by a commercial and allegedly professional developer. I have spent a lot of my time in the commercial world, some of it in very high margin businesses, but even based on my experience, this was an excessive case of profiteering.

You should always be in control

My philosophy is very simple. I give you the same level of access rights as I have. Which also means you can break the site if you do not know what you are doing. All of my clients are free to take their websites somewhere else and have access to the hosting control panel and domain name. I provide free training to ensure that you can edit your site and not incur any editing expenses if you wish to do that. Which ultimately means you can spend more of your budget on the services you provide to your clients.

← Coronavirus image for posts Available for small commercial sites now →

Coronavirus image for posts

For those of you with Divi based websites, your posts are best displayed with an image to conform to the newspaper layout you see on your news page. But where do you get an image from?

I originally thought this image was made from dried flowers inserted into a ball, but reading the small print it is actually a 3D generated image of a measles virus.

To use it, place your cursor on top of the image and right click and save the image to your local computer.

The image source is from https://unsplash.com and was created by CDC

Generic virus image

Here are some others so you can create your own. All of the links below go to the Unsplash.com website where there are thousands of free images covering all sorts of subjects.

https://unsplash.com/photos/bkc-m0iZ4Sk

https://unsplash.com/photos/w9KEokhajKw

https://unsplash.com/photos/rnr8D3FNUNY

← Coronavirus Resources page Ripping off Charities →

Coronavirus Resources page

Helping parents to keep their children occupied.

The following is not my work, it is compiled from several sources (Currently Home-Start Watford and North Somerset) and contains a set of useful links to external 3rd party websites that may be of interest to children.

To use it click on the button at the bottom of this page, and you can download an MS Word document with some notes in it with links to 3rd party websites. You can use this as the basis of a page on your website that you can promote for parents.

I provide this without any warranty, or statement as to whether it is fit for purpose. You need to review it and use what works for your organisation. You also MUST check the links to the websites and take responsibility that the content on those sites is appropriate for your audience. Hopefully you will find it useful.

As I am introduced to more sites that may be useful I will add them to this document. If you know of any please let me know. Then we can help each other in these difficult times.

You should be able to copy the text and paste it into a web page and it will all work. However, do test it first before you publish it.

If you are stuck and not sure what to do, drop me a line or give me a call.

Click Here for Word Document (save it locally and then review)

← Covid-19 coronavirus support messages Coronavirus image for posts →

Covid-19 coronavirus support messages

I have received quite a few messages requesting support for adding in messages relating to offices are now closed, or other guidance relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. I have carried out all of those free of charge.

If you do not have a message on your website about it, maybe because you have forgotten how, let me know and I will help get something on the site.

My only request to you however is please provide me with the message you want visitors to read. While I can certainly be creative, the message really needs to come from you, not me. It also helps me to just concentrate on the mechanics of getting a message on to the site.

The best way to tackle this is to create a post or short article with your detailed statement in. You may edit this later as circumstances change. I add a bouncing box on to your home page in a prominent location which advises people that you have an important message. I connect the box on the home page to your post, or I can add both of them in.

If you do it that way, you are not placing a huge notice on your home page, just a small one with the detail in the site.

Contact me for more help or guidance.

Keeping parents sane!

I will also extend this to include a single page or post with help for parents (or your clients) with tips on how to keep the children busy as well. But I need you to do the legwork and present me with the text and links to the appropriate sites. My role is pasting the content into your site, not being creative editing it. If you wish to do that, I will also create a page on my website as a resource that others can copy, as everyone is facing the same set of problems.

← Online Training Coronavirus Resources page →

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.

← Did Nominet contact you? Covid-19 coronavirus support messages →