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Spiderbyte Newsletter Jan 2020

Welcome to 2020

Well 2020 is here and we are looking forward to a bumper year, we hope you are also feeling excited about the year ahead.

We have had Alex working with us over the school holidays and he is showing great skills on the websites and other projects he has helped us with.

In this issue, we will be talking about:

  • Special on Domain Names
  • Our SEO courses for the year and how you can get them at the old price!
  • A New hosting plan to drive your website
  • Invoice Payments via Credit Card
  • New Clients and redesigns

Domain Name Special

We are starting to see the newer .nz version of domains names popping up around the internet. It has taken a while, but as we suspected when the domains were first released, eventually most people will move to the .nz version of the domain names.

We advise people to take both the .co.nz and .nz versions of domains if they are available. This way you protect your brand from someone else registering the alternative.

To kick off the year, we are going to offer registrations of new domains at special price of $25 incl gst (saves you around $20) till the end of February. Renewals will remain at our normal price of $39.95+gst.

Contact us if you would like to take advantage of this offer.

2020’s SEO Workshops

We are locking in the dates now for our SEO workshops this year.

These workshops are great as we have a small group come in and we go over basic SEO techniques, but the best thing is that you get to work on your site during the session.

So you get some real outcomes by the time you leave the workshop.

The dates we have set are as follows:

  • Wednesday, February 19th
  • Wednesday, April 15th
  • Thursday, Jun 18th
  • Tuesday, August 18th
  • Thursday, October 15th

The cost for this years workshops will be $160+gst, but for those who register and pay before the end of January, we are offering the old price of $99+gst

New Hosting Plan

Based on feedback and some ideas of our own we have a new option for hosting your site

Premium Partnership Hosting

This new hosting plan is designed for those organisations who want to work closely with us on their website to continuously get the most out of it. We get people asking for a more proactive relationship with us, where we are working alongside clients to drive their website and it’s effectiveness.

This hosting package is priced at $119/month + gst and provides for an hours worth of work on the website plus reporting and suggested improvements. Additional hours beyond the hosting agreement can be either factored into the monthly fee or dealt with separately.

Invoice Payments via Credit/Debit Card

Credit and Debit Card payments are now possible on our invoices. When you receive your invoices you will see a green Pay Now button on the top of your online invoice.

This uses the payment system Stripe to process a card payment online.

Once paid using this method your invoice is automatically marked as paid.

Fresh Works

Some of the sites we have worked on over the last couple of months

Fishing Trips – a new visual redesign
Stay Kerikeri – Boutique Accommodation in Kerikeri with their new striking design
Ngawha Park – A new innovation and enterprise park with a website to provide progress information on the project
Far North Rentals – A redesign to bring a more modern feel and more obvious ways of booking your rental car.

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Do I have to keeping changing my website content to maintain web rankings

 

In this video we talk about the frequency of updates to your site.

Transcript:

So something we often get asked is: how often do I need to update my content for the website.

People have been told that they need to update their content on a regular basis to keep the rankings up in the search rankings and what we have found is that it’s really dependent on your website.

If you’ve got a website that’s something like the New Zealand Herald, it’s a daily news site Google is going to expect that it’s going to have content coming through every day, but if you’re the Encyclopedia Britannica it’s completely the opposite, it’s a historical record and so you’re not expecting that content to change all that often.

So if you are an accommodation provider you might only need to update your content every 6 months, maybe every 3 months when you’ve got something good to put on there.

Maybe you’ve done some new decor or you’ve changed some of the duvet covers then you can get in there take some photos update the content and maybe write a blog post telling people what you’ve done.

And if you use the changes in your normal business as a catalyst for what you doing on the website then it means that you can have regular content even if it’s not daily or weekly but regular enough that means that the search engines are going to keep up with you.

 

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Deepweb’s new video series

To answer questions that pop up regularly in our hands on SEO workshops and also from other clients in our discussions with them, we have decided to put together a video series on YouTube.

Each question is given it’s own short video to provide an answer and examples.

If you have a question you want answered, leave a comment here or on the video

If you want to be notified of new videos, Subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon for notifications.

You can find the YouTube Channel here.

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Spiderbyte May 2019

Spiderbyte May 2019

In this issue: SEO Workshop / SEO Review Special / WordPress Meetup Group

Well summer is mostly over and we are now into the new financial year. Things are moving along here at Deepweb where we are working on a number of projects large and small.

We have been involved in the start up of a WordPress Users Group in the north, for those developers, designers and users of WordPress to facilitate discussions about the use of WordPress on the web. You can find out more about this group here on the Meetup Website. We are thankful for the support of Bizspace in Kerikeri for hosting our events.

SEO Workshop:

On the 14th of May, we are running our SEO workshop, this gives you the opportunity to learn how the search engines work and what you can do on your site to influence where you appear in the rankings
Date: 14th May
Time: 9:30am to 1:30pm
Morning Tea provided (and yummy coffee)
Cost $99+gst

Half Price SEO Review Special:

If you can’t get to the workshop, or if you want to leave it to us, we are having a special on SEO reviews and updates.

We can look at your site and update the SEO to look to improve it’s performance on the search engine.

It’s a 2 hour review, normally costing $320+gst, but you can get this done for $160+gst

Get in touch if you want a review done or call us on 09 4016656

Tips and Tricks

A great tool for managing tasks on the web is Todoist. We use it to keep track of things and it is a great free or paid tool. You can categorise your tasks and put due dates to keep everything on track.

There is an app as well that synchronises between it and your computer, meaning you can add items to your list when you are out and about and see them at your desk when you get back to the office.

Thoroughly recommended

Get in Touch

If you want to chat about anything web related, drop us a line at webmaster@deepweb.co.nz or give us a call on 09 4016656

Have a great May
Joanne and Steven

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WordPress Meetups in Northland

With WordPress powering approximately a third of the worlds websites, it touches a lot of peoples lives including developers, designers, business owners and end users.

We have seen the New Zealand WordPress community when we have attended WordCamps, the large unconferences that happen each year in NZ to discuss all thibgs WordPress (and some no WordPress specific topics)

The closest local community (Meetup) to Kerikeri was in Auckland and try as we might, it was too difficult to get to one of these events.

After support and encouragement from the organisers of the Auckland event, we decided to start one in the North.

WordPress Meetups are open events, open to all who are interested in WordPress: people who code for it, people who design for it and people who use it daily to run their business.

We had an initial get together earlier this month and have been wonderfully supported by Judy at BizSpace (https://www.bizspace.nz/) who is providing us the venue.

Next month is all about Security, and we will talk about the best way to secure your website and some of the plugins you can use to achieve this, we’ll also talk about other security aspects like passwords to help protect your site.

If you are interested in coming along, we have a Meetup Group here: https://www.meetup.com/Northland-WordPress-Meetup/ Sign up and you will get notifications about when the next Meetup will be.

It will be great to see you there.

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Hands on SEO Workshop

Learn Stuff! Have Fun! Make a Difference!

Tuesday 14th of May, 2019 – 9:30am to 1:30pm

Get your chance to help your site improve in search rankings by understanding how they work and how you can make changes to your website to do this.

It is a 4 hour workshop that covers a whole range of topics relating to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) including:

  • The Important Meta tags
  • The myth about keywords
  • Writing Content
  • Doing Your Research

Bring your laptop (or we can provide one) so we can work on your site during the session so you get started straight away

Cost is $99+gst per person

We provide coffee and yummy food 🙂

Book your space, we are limited to 6 spaces so you get the most out of the session

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Tomcat Not Starting

We are doing some work with a Java based application (Alfresco) that we have deployed using a Windows installer.

Recently, we had an issue where the starting of the services (Tomcat and Postgres) both failed, they would say “Starting” for about 5 seconds and then stop.

The log in the Application Log showed

Starting Tomcat Server…
Exit code: 1
Stdout:

Stderr:
Unknown error starting tomcat

No logs were written to the application log files to find out what the problem was.

We tried reinstalling the services to see if there was an issue with the service itself, but that did not fix the problem either.

Many of the posts online mention upgraded versions of Java (7 to 8 typically) but again, not in this instance.

Digging further into the Windows Error Log, we found that the service was throwing an error like:

The service terminated with the following service-specific error: Incorrect function.

Again it seemed like a version or missing component issue

What appears to have happened, and coincidentally a Windows update happened at the same time, was that the Java Virtual Machine details and the Classpath details had been cleared.

By adding these back in, we were able to get the services back up and running

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Best SSL Plugin for WordPress

As the internet moves toward a more secure web and Chrome and Firefox start to increasingly make insecure websites more and more obvious, it makes it more and more  important to make sure your website is on the right side of the SSL line.

We have turned to Really Simple SSL

It is really simple and it takes care of the redirects and also the mixed content issues (when you have content that is both SSL and non SSL)

What does it do?

  • It handles most issues that WordPress has with SSL, like when you’re behind a reverse proxy/loadbalancer, or when no headers are passed which WordPress can use to detect SSL.
  • All incoming requests redirected to https. It defaults with an internal redirect, but can be done as a .htaccess redirect.
  • Both site url & home url are changed to https.
  • Insecure content is fixed by replacing all non ssl http:// urls with https://, except links to other domains. It’s done on the fly, so no database changes are made (except for the siteurl and homeurl).

With AutoSSL now on most hosts, it makes sense to do this final step to make you site secure

 

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Where have my Outlook Settings Gone?

Do you need to change a port number in Outlook for your email? Looking for some other mail account settings that you were sure were there before?

Join plenty of others who seem to be having the same issue.

If you are running the latest version of Outlook (Office 365 subscription users like me are upgrade to the latest version automatically) then a change to the way Microsoft displays account settings has hidden the more advanced settings with no clear way to get to them.

In the past you would go into your Account Settings and look for the “More Settings” button, this would give you a popup window with port numbers, SSL choices and the ability to save emails on the server.

Now you get the following:

New Outlook Settings Screen

As you can see it provides a very limited set of options.

So if you see the above screen, don’t worry, the real settings are a few keystrokes away.

Where are they Hidden?

To get to the settings, press Ctrl+Alt+S to open the Send/Receive Groups settings

Ckick on Edit to take you to pleace where you can choose the account you want to edit eg:

Highlight the email account on the left and click on the Account Properties button at the top right and low and behold, our friendly settings screen of olde appears:

Now you can make you changes as before and save/apply when finished

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WordPress 5.0 – The Big Upgrade

WordPress is due for a major upgrade shortly.

(Currently in Beta form, here is the link to the latest info https://wordpress.org/news/2018/11/wordpress-5-0-beta-4/)

Whenever you see a piece of software tick over to the next major version (in this case 4.9.8 to 5.0) it can be nervous times for website owners and website developers like us.

In this upgrade WordPress’ editor is up for a rejig. This time though it is not a small change, but a significant change with the way most WordPress users generate and edit their content.

Gone is the old “classic” editor and in comes Gutenberg, the new block driven editor.

To be fair WordPress is playing catchup with other Content Management Systems in the market like Squarespace and Wix in the way their users interact with the websites in a more visual and intuitive way.

To bridge the gap a range of Page Builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Composer and SiteOrigin have forged a large section of this space. It will be interesting to see how each of these builder integrate themselves into the Gutenberg editor. So far many of them are releasing their own blocks as Gutenberg blocks so users can continue with the system they are used to using.

The day of release is currently set to November 27 and time will tell how bug free the initial release will be.

Our recommendation is to NOT upgrade to version 5 as soon as it is release. Generally there will be two or three patches (5.0.1, 5.0.2 etc) fixing bugs and sorting out teething problems.

Only after this will we contemplate moving our clients onto version 5.

We are testing the migration at the moment to see what issues will be thrown up and this is something that will need to be done with all clients before they make the leap.

Change is necessary, but in some cases it might be a bit messy. We’ll have to test and find out