Red Kite Creative

Debbie Campbell

Displaying Only the Best Reviews on Your Website? You May Want to Rethink That…

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If you’re like many (most?) small business owners, it’s a point of pride to show those 5-star Google reviews on your website. There are a number of WordPress plugins that will enable you to do this easily. But whether or not this is a good idea requires some thought…

Did you hear about the case the FTC (US Federal Trade Commission) brought against an online fashion shop called Fashion Nova in January 2022? It was the first case of its kind, alleging that the retailer was deceiving customers by only showing positive reviews on their site.

Fashion Nova settled the case for $4.2 million.

The FTC says it has sent warning letters to 10 companies that offer some type of review management/filtering services, so it is definitely cracking down on potential manipulation of online reviews.

What does this mean for you? It’s probably best practice to show all of your reviews on your site instead of filtering out the negative ones, if you’re going to display them at all.

And a negative review isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it gives you the ability to respond publicly to a problem and perhaps fix the situation for the customer. Sometimes this results in an edited and improved review. And at the very least, 56% of consumers say seeing a response from a business owner made them feel more positive about that business.

However, the plugins I’m familiar with that make it possible to filter out the negative reviews don’t seem to offer a way to show the business owner’s responses. That’s a big problem that I’m doing some research on now, if I find one that does show responses I’ll mention it in a future post.

Here are the guidelines from the FTC about displaying online reviews – see the section under Review Publication in particular.

Does Your Website Need a Privacy Policy?

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If you have a form on your site, the answer is ‘yes.’

If you collect any type of personally identifiable information (PII) like names, email addresses, phone numbers, or payment information, you need to have a privacy policy on your site. If not, you potentially risk penalties and legal challenges down the road. And if you have an old privacy policy, it most likely has not kept pace with legal changes.

Privacy law is changing fast – more U.S. states are moving to create their own privacy legislation, and if you have European customers, you may already be familiar with the GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) that requires protection and disclosure of customer data.

The Colorado Privacy Act

Did you know that Colorado (where we’re based) has a brand new privacy law that was officially enacted on July 8, 2021? It’s the third state (after CA and VA) to enact privacy legislation. If you conduct business in our state or target residents of CO with your products and services, this new law may apply to your business if you have more than 25,000 customers. More information on the Colorado Privacy Act here.

How to Get a Privacy Policy

Check out our sister site WP Minder’s latest post on why websites need privacy policies and get in touch if you have questions or are interested in getting a policy added to your own site.

Three Ways to Share Confidential Info (More) Safely

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I often need to get sensitive information from clients: domain registrar login, FTP credentials, hosting account login, etc. Sending this kind of info by email is not a good idea, it’s too insecure (although it’s hard to keep clients from doing it anyway sometimes).

What should you do instead? A phone call to share long passwords is not that helpful. But there are some online tools that are built to ‘self-destruct’ once they’re read or after a specific short timeframe. Here are three.

QuickForget.com

This is my go-to tool for sending secrets online. You can attach files, and set it to delete the message after a set number of views or a certain number of hours. The sender types or pastes their sensitive info, selects options and saves, then sends the recipient the link. Very easy to use.

OneTimeSecret.com

This one allows you to set a time limit as short as 5 minutes (virtually a self-destruct on reading) and a password (or generate a random one).

privnote.com

Similar to the first two, privnote also has some other features. By default it asks for confirmation by the recipient before showing and destroying the note (which you can disable). You can also send yourself, the sender, a note when the private message has been destroyed. And you can set the message to self-destruct immediately after reading.

Any of these tools is a much safer option than using email to send confidential info.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues and comment below if you have questions.

Weekly Links Roundup – Product Descriptions, Button Design, Accessibility, Low-cost Marketing Ideas

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Selling online? Check out this detailed post on how to write a good product description. A persuasive product description might be the very last chance you have to convince a potential customer to buy – just like high-quality photos are critical for ecommerce sites, so are well-written product descriptions.

Here’s an interesting post about button design that I found when working on a new theme this week. Have you ever thought about the differences between rounded vs. sharp-angled buttons – especially if you use a plugin for creating lots of different types of buttons? There’s more to it than you might think – the shape of a button can send a subtle message to your user. Learn how to have more control over your messaging.

While there are some plugins and overlays that claim to make websites ADA-accessible, think twice before relying on them. Lawsuits are being filed against some sites using these quick-fix tools. Learn why there is no silver bullet for making a website accessible.

Looking for low-cost marketing ideas for your business? Here are 14 small business marketing ideas you can execute online today.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Passivity Toward Clients

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Back around Christmas I got a Samsung Galaxy Active 2 watch to replace my old Garmin Vivofit. The watch is really nice, it has completely replaced my Garmin devices including a 230 running watch – so much better than that.

But it has one really strange problem that I encountered the first time I used my ski machine.

The watch connects to Samsung Health on a phone. I like this better than Garmin’s Connect dashboard.

In the watch when you work out, you can choose from a lot of different workouts from walking to running to lifting to hiking to swimming… many others. There’s an ‘Other Workout’ that I use for gardening and yard work.

However – in Samsung Health (phone app) there are hundreds of activities to choose from. Only a tiny number are actually available in the watch.

There’s no way to add one workout type, the way you add an app or widget to the watch. There’s no way to create a custom workout in the watch.

This seems to me really odd, that such a great watch with so many health features has this severe limitation. Cross country skiing would work great for my ski machine. It’s in the app, but not available on the watch.

When I contacted their support and asked about this, they cheerfully told me to put in a feature request. Here is the thread in the Samsung user community regarding the missing workouts on the watch. It was started just over a year ago and has 8 pages of users wondering why a seemingly basic feature is missing on this high-end, rather expensive health-focused watch. Samsung support marked the issue ‘solved’ on the same day it was posted, but it has never been ‘solved’ or addressed since by Samsung.

That’s passivity toward customers. A lack of concern over a key issue that affects a lot of their watch users who have a genuine need for a basic feature.

This week I got a new password manager that has features I need for handling particular business data. It’s a lot better than my previous one, and offers an important feature that lets me customize templates to hold my data in a really organized way. That’s great!

However, as you might imagine, business data might change from time to time. Although you can delete these custom templates, you can never edit them.

So if for example you eventually need to remove a few fields or add a few fields to your custom template, you can’t. Period. You have to first:

  • Create a new custom template.
  • Manually copy all the info for all the custom notes you’ve created into the new custom template – if you have 500 notes, you have to do this 500 times.
  • Then delete the old custom template.

Just like with the Galaxy watch, this edit feature has been requested by users. Not just for 1 year. It’s been a feature request since 2016.

There are a number of threads in their forum asking for this feature. A few of the larger ones have 50+ users involved. So far, I have not seen a single response in any of these forum threads by the password manager support team.

This is, again, an example of a company being passive towards users asking for what should be a basic feature.

In addition, the documentation I’ve read on the company website regarding this and other features is from 2016. Not updating docs is also a sign of passivity.

When I contacted them, they told me:

“We do appreciate your comment and added feedback, and this could be forwarded to our dev team as a feature request. Rest assured I will pass this along to our dev team so they can review, though, I cannot guarantee that this will be added.”

I’m not hopeful that it will ever happen. But at least I know upfront that I’m dealing with a company that really has demonstrated very little concern or interest in its users at least regarding this particular problem. I know that I may be on my own or out of luck if I do have an issue.

I never want my clients to feel this way about Red Kite. I try really hard to always put myself in the client’s position when they contact me about an issue or question, and to do everything I can to give them the best answers possible. Active listening is always better than passive head-nodding.

And I’m thankful that the vast majority of companies that I deal with as a business owner are not passive. They are very interested in solving problems for their customers as quickly as possible – they’re responsive, they actually listen, and they try to come up with the best answers they can. That’s how it should be.

Tips for Extracting a Site from WordPress Multisite

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A few weeks ago, I had a waking nightmare.

It started early one Tuesday afternoon and went well into the evening, and it was brought on by my casual agreement to help a client migrate one of three sites out of a WordPress Multisite installation to a standalone install. It started off so innocently…

(FYI, if you’re not familiar with Multisite, it’s a tool for setting up a network of WordPress sites all managed from the same admin dashboard. Learn all about Multisite.)

We originally set this  Multisite installation up about 7-8 years ago as it seemed like the perfect solution to manage several sites from one dashboard. My client has disliked it ever since the newness wore off a few months after launch. And as her developer, I haven’t had a happy experience with it either. It seems really clunky and my client always found it difficult to use.

Breaking it up into separate sites seemed like too much bother, but this week she was finally ready, and based on the posts I saw about extracting sites from Multisite when researching the task, it didn’t seem like a big deal to me.

Nope. I was totally wrong about that. It was an enormously big deal.

I am no expert with Multisite by any means and this is not a complete guide to extracting a site from Multisite. But in hopes that I can help another developer get through this process without as much frustration (on the edge of tears a few times), I want to share some tips for this process that would have saved me a lot of time had I known them up front.

Tips for Multisite Extraction

1. When moving a site, normally I’d copy it with All In One WP Migration, which makes it super-easy to migrate a site from one host to another. But when using Multisite you can’t do that (there are some commercial plugins that will handle backups and sometimes migrations for Multisite installs, but they are much more complex than regular sites). So…

Start with a fresh install of WordPress, preferably on a test server you know well.

2. Copy the theme from the live site by downloading it via FTP and then uploading to the test site. Make sure it looks okay when you activate it.

3. Before attempting to move any content, you’re going to want to get all the plugins moved into your test site. You can manually install them one at a time, or you can copy the /wp-content/plugins/ folder from the live site to the test site.

4. For any plugins that need special settings, like WooCommerce, get those set up before migrating in the content from the live site. I didn’t do this the first time and wound up having to import content several times to get everything to come in correctly.

5. Once all plugins are set up and the theme is working fine, it’s time to get the content in. Using the WordPress Importer in Tools, export all the content from the live site. When you import into the test site, let it create the users it needs and be sure to check the tickbox to “Download and import file attachments.” See this guide for transferring content from one WordPress site to another.

6. Once the content is imported, check the entire site very carefully. If you find missing images, don’t panic.

This was one of the most frustrating parts of this entire process for me, as the images kept importing with missing data here or odd sizes there. And once they were finally all imported correctly, many were still showing broken links.

You’ll need to replace the URLs for the missing links in the database. I used phpMyAdmin for this.

Normally it’s super-simple to do a search and replace for these links, but what I didn’t notice at first is that Multisite puts a few extra directories in the URL. So what you’ll be doing is replacing something like this:

mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/my-image-name.png

with this:

sometestsitedomain.com/wp-content/2019/05/my-image-name.png

Note those extra folders in bold; you have to remove those in every link where they appear.

7. Once you have all the images looking good, check the site again, comparing it side-by-side to the live site. Even after multiple content imports we were still missing 3 widgets, two text widgets and a newsletter signup widget. While they were easy enough to recreate by referring to the live site (or a cached site like the Wayback Machine), we might have missed one or more without a comparison.

8. If everything now looks good, it’s very strongly advised to take a backup of the hosting account where the live Multisite is if like me you are replacing the Multisite with the new single install (you may or may not be doing this).

If you’re just moving the newly-created single install to another host, that’s easy (and as a developer you don’t need instructions for that). But if you’re replacing the Multisite, you need a backup. Just in case.

If the client’s host tells you that their built-in backup system ‘works fine with Multisite’ or ‘backs up the entire account including Multisite,’ I’d make sure I had an external backup too. Don’t count on what your host says.

Unfortunately there aren’t many backup solutions that work with Multisite (another reason to stay away from it), and the ones that do are almost all commercial plugins. But it’s important so it has to be done. Buy a plugin and make a backup – and if your host claims to support it, make one there, too. You can’t have too many backups.

9. The last step is migrating the test site to the client’s host server. That’s the easiest part. Breathe a sigh of relief.

Alternatives to Multisite

If I were to advise a client with multiple sites now how best to manage them, I’d recommend getting something like MainWP and avoiding Multisite completely. But if you already have a Multisite situation on your hands, hopefully these tips will make extraction less of a banging-head-on-desk ordeal.