Website & Marketing Blog

New Website for Luxury Wedding Stationery Business – Studio Blush

We were really pleased when Studio Blush owner Rhona Jarvis approached us to ask us to design her new website.

Studio Blush specialise in top quality designer wedding stationery and other luxury paper goods.

Our brief was to create an upmarket online shop with pale, pastel colours to showcase Studio Blush’s beautiful range of bespoke and In House wedding collections along with their new range of other stationery products.

In terms of colours, we decided to use blush shades to emphasis the brand identity.

In terms of software we choose WordPress and WooCommerce to enable our client to be able to update the website easily herself at any time.

What Can We Learn from WordPress 4.5 Problems & the 123 reg Fiasco?

This past week hasn’t been a great one for many website owners. First we had the WordPress 4.5 update (called Coleman) which many people installed as soon as they saw the message asking them to do so. It just demonstrates the enormous trust that so many website owners have for WordPress that they went ahead with the upgrade without any concern. But unfortunately, as many quickly discovered, this particular update can cause havoc with your theme and plugins leading to strange behaviour, error messages and a general feeling that your website has gone mad.

I don’t know why WordPress pushed out an update knowing fully well that it would wreak havoc with some plugins and themes. I know theme and plugin developers are rushing to update their products to overcome the problems but that can take some time. In the meantime the support forums are full of unhappy WordPress website owners who are struggling to make repairs. So what can we learn from this fiasco?

1. Don’t update WordPress the moment that little box pops up asking you to do so.

My advice is to wait a week or so then check Google or the support forums for possible problems. Just searching for ‘WordPress 4.5 problems’ will put you off updating for a long time!
But if that wasn’t enough for many website owners things were about to get a whole lot worse. If you had used 123 reg for your web hosting then your site could have been one of those that 123 reg accidentally deleted over the weekend. Its hard to believe that a large, well known hosting company could do such a thing but it’s completely true. Fortunately none of our clients were affected as we do not recommend 123 reg for hosting. This is for many reasons not least the myriad of technical issues we have encountered with them which can take weeks to resolve.

What if you have already updated and your site is acting weird? Or what if your website has disappeared thanks to 123 reg? Well this brings me to the most important lesson and it’s a good reminder for us all.

2. You Need Three Website Backups

1. You need to make sure you keep at least two, preferably three backups of your entire website.
2. These backups need to be stored in different locations. So it isn’t enough to use your web hosting company’s back up service as this means the backups are stored in the same place as your website. If there was a problem with the server (say for example an idiot at 123reg deleted everything on it) then your back up goes too. I think we can all agree that the world is full of idiots so something similar could happen again. So some suggestions:-

Store one copy of your webspace (more about this in a moment)
Keep one copy of your website stored on a portable storage device (e.g. memory stick, portable hard drive, etc). Be aware that your site may actually take up a lot of space (this one is about 125mb) .
Cyber security specialists recommend three back ups of everything as devices can fail. So a third copy stored in a different building (to avoid damage by fire etc) would be an excellent idea.
Make sure you also keep copies of your hosting account stored safely

This method of backing up everything three times and storing the backups in different locations is worthwhile for your work and personal documents and photos too by the way.

How To Back Up Your Website

If you are using WordPress then there are plugins which will back up your site for you and either allow you to download a copy (recommended) or save a copy to your webspace. We suggest doing both.

This is back up plugin that we tend to use but it’s just personal preference and there are plenty of other good WordPress Back Up plugins available.

WPBackItUp Backup & Restore

If your website is built using different software check first to see if the software has a back up option. If not you can simply download a copy of all your files using FTP. If you don’t have the FTP details ask your website designer. FTP allows you to see and edit all the files which run your website. You can use free software like Filezilla which enables you to enter your private webspace login details (called FTP login details) and access your webspace. Ideally you need to store a couple of back ups in different locations just in case.

For one of our clients last week the back up approach worked really well. This client has a WordPress online shop running many plugins including WooCommerce. She updated to WordPress 4.5 and suddenly her perfect site started to perform strangely. Product images disappeared, variable products could not be added to basket and there were lots of other strange behaviour. The fastest and easiest way was to replace the site with a backup copy which was taken the day before. Simple! It took about 20 mins max.

If your backups are not available then the alternative is to switch on error logging (via wp-config) and work out what is causing the problem and rectify it yourself. But that is for experienced web developers only! Otherwise ask at the WP Support Forums for advice.

Free Help For Start Up Businesses in Wales

If you are thinking of setting up your business in Wales then there is still free help available via Business Wales. It is funded by the Welsh Government.

The help is predominantly available via their website which has plenty of help ranging from Live Chat support to online guides and videos. You can also ring to speak to an Advisor.

Part of the website is called BOSS (Business Online Support Service) which features online videos designed to help new and established businesses with a variety of issues including Starting A Business, Business Planning, Business Finance, Marketing and Ideas and Innovation.

If you need one-to-one marketing assistance or help with writing your business plan then please give us a call on 07964 594065 o

Google Warning to Bloggers & Marketing Industry

Recently Google has issued an important warning to encourage more transparency. This warning is directed at bloggers who receive freebies and marketing companies who send out freebies to bloggers to generate reviews. This is a huge industry and one that works well for bloggers and the marketing industry. We get asked regularly by bloggers who want to know how to receive free products to review or feature on their social media accounts.

It has been a popular marketing technique for some years. The only disadvantage has been the risk that readers may not realise that a review has been written because the blogger has received the product as a freebie. Inevitably some bloggers will be more positive about the product as they didn’t have to buy it and also if they started to slate products they know the marketing companies will stop sending them freebies. We’ve been concerned that the plethora of positive reviews across the internet for specific products is starting to create untrust with internet-savvy customers who realise that many reviews are not impartial.

But the truth is that marketing and SEO companies (ourselves included) love this method as it generates free coverage of products and it helps to create quality links back to company websites. We all know that paid-for links are a big no-no these days but as genuine links can help a website to achieve higher rankings with Google. So up until now this was regarded as a perfectly acceptable SEO technique.

But Google have focused their attention on this technique and they’ve issued some important instructions to bloggers regarding reviews about freebie products. This will have a massive impact for marketing and SEO companies who will be frustrated that these changes make life even harder for them. And for those of us who have been in the industry for a long time we are left wondering if our clients will be penalised for blog links which were created years ago for their products.

Here are Google’s instructions and our explanations:-

Use NoFollow Links

When you link to the product, company or their social media accounts be sure to use NoFollow links. If you are unfamiliar with Nofollow links, it just means that Google won’t count the link when they crawl your site. In the world of search engine optimisation links are really important and the more links the better so long as they have not been bought. Now Google seems to be saying that links created as a result of a freebie are the pretty much the same as those that have been paid for. We all know that websites which use paid links have been penalised in the past by Google so the technique of asking for freebie links is now deemed risky too. To avoid the risk of the blog and the product company websites being penalised (i.e. drop down the search results or in some cases disappear from the results) you need to set each and every link to NoFollow. Or alternatively don’t create any links, just ask people to Google the product.

How to Add NoFollow

Create a link as usual. Then look at the code version of your link. (In WordPress click the Text view). Your link would normally look like this

<a href=”https://casemarketing.co.uk”>Rachel Case Marketing</a>

Add the following rel=”nofollow” taking care not to delete any brackets or inverted commas.

<a href=”https://casemarketing.co.uk” rel=”nofollow”>Rachel Case Marketing</a>

2. Tell Them It Was A Freebie

Google wanst you to add a statement to your post or webpage to explain that you received the product as a freebie. They suggest that you put the statement at the top as users may not read the entire post. This seems reasonable and its a policy that is already being used across social media using hashtags like #spon for sponsored, #paid for paid or #samp for sample

3. Create Unique Content

This is interesting. They ask that bloggers aim to offer their visitors ‘a compelling reason’ to come back. They also suggest trying to become the ‘go-to source of information’ in your niche or aim to provide ‘exclusive content that only you can create due to your unique expertise or resources’. It sounds like Google are concerned that are there are too many similar blogs out there and a lot of bloggers seem to be copying each other. This may be a warning from Google that they intend to favour unique and compelling blogs even more in the future.

What do you think about this latest SEO change? Will it affect you too?