Red Kite Creative
…and we’d like to give you a present.
The first five people to get in touch today and mention our birthday will get 14% off their next WordPress design & development project.
Have you been thinking about a new business website, or giving your older site a makeover? Now’s the time!
Contact us to get started and get your discount today only.
And a big, warm “thank you” to all our clients and friends who helped us get this far.
The top website and marketing links of the week.
I always encourage clients to display testimonials on their site, if their industry allows them. Testimonials are a great way to influence prospective customers toward purchasing your products or services. And reviews let your customers speak – even if they are not always positive, how you handle negative reviews is important, too. Letting prospects see how you take care of problems is at least as important as the glowing testimonials! Learn more about why you should add testimonials and reviews to your site.
…And along that vein here’s a great guide to adding product reviews to your WordPress site. This is a comprehensive overview with a good selection of recommended plugins, and why you might want to use one of them even if you’re running an ecommerce site with WooCommerce which already has built-in reviews.
If you were in a tizzy trying to get your site into compliance with GDPR last week, you were far from alone. Read this opinion post on GDPR from the New York Times – it might make you feel better.
Finally… if you collect traffic data for your website, did you know that Google Analytics is not the only option? That’s what I said. Learn about Kissmetrics, Matomo (formerly Piwik) and AFS Analytics. All except Kissmetrics offer a free plan as well as commercial pricing.
The FCC votes on removing Net Neutrality protections in mid-December. Do you rely on the Internet for your livelihood? Your entertainment? This is how things will change if this vote goes through.
Please, if you are concerned at all by this, learn how to contact your representatives and ask them to stand up for a fair and open Internet.
Learn more about Net Neutrality.
The top website and marketing links of the week.
Does your website delight your users? Or does it leave them with a less-than-satisfied feeling? Read this article about UX (user experience) and find out how poorly designed websites are a lot like having a cranky receptionist with a bad attitude.
Did you know that Google gets around 30 billion search queries every month? That’s staggering! And I’m sure you’ve heard the recent talk about potential biases in the major search and online news providers. Here’s an interesting recent post about how much trust people put into Google search results.
And finally… Do you use stock photos on your website? If you do, you’re certainly not alone. But did you know there are stock images that can help you show off your products? These are called (I didn’t know this) ‘scene generators.’ They can help you display your clothing, print designs, food and drink offerings, apps, identity and more. I’m actually using one on the home page of this site… View a collection of scene generator examples and see if they can benefit you, too.
Do you have an old laptop? Is it slow as the DMV?
My old (2010-era) Toshiba Satellite had become horribly sloth-like, taking 5-6 minutes to fully boot to the point where I could connect to wifi. I thought of replacing it, but there was really nothing else wrong with it and laptops are expensive. So I did some research and learned that I could do some upgrades.
I bought a new batch of memory, replacing the 2GB chips with 4GB chips. And I bought a 500GB SSD (solid state drive) to replace the old 500GB hard drive. These, I read, were the changes that would give me the most bang for the buck. Cost me $214 total.
For my updates, I didn’t have anything key on this machine so did not need to copy stuff from the old hard drive, and I had the OS disk to reinstall Windows. Replacing the memory and hard drive were quite easy, it took about 15 minutes. I had to adjust the SSD as it wasn’t booting properly the first time, but after re-seating it it was fine.
Now, my 7-year-old laptop boots to the login screen in about 10 seconds (I kid you not) and is ready for a wifi connection in about 1 minute. It’s super-fast all around, and feels like a brand new machine. Especially after I cleaned it up a bit.
For the price this was a great approach. I didn’t need a new laptop – yet.
One of my clients got an email from Google this week with a warning about his insecure website (a site which does not have an SSL certificate so the URL begins with HTTP instead of HTTPS). Chrome is taking things to the next level (a welcome change as far as I’m concerned) with its drive to push all the web to HTTPS.
In October 2017, Chrome will begin showing a “Not Secure” warning whenever a user enters text in a form on an HTTP page, and for all HTTP pages when browsing in incognito mode.
So picture that, those of you who’ve delayed securing your business website… someone comes to your site and wants to contact you with some questions. They go to your contact form, start typing – and they suddenly see Not Secure appear in the address bar, something like this:
Even if they’re not buying something from you, that’s enough to make some users think twice, or it should be.
And if you’re still offering items for purchase on an insecure site, you’re putting your users at great risk (as well as yourself and anyone who works in the backend of your site) and this should help dissuade users from buying from your site.
Please, get an SSL certficate. Even from a host that greatly overcharges you, you can usually get by for $50/year or less, and some of the better hosts now offer free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.
Once you have it installed, it’s a matter of an hour or two of work on many smaller sites to get it correctly switched over to HTTPS (though it can be very time-consuming on larger sites) – it must be done with care to avoid search engine ranking and indexing issues. But it’s an effort that you really must make. Google will only get harder on sites that stay with HTTP, and those site owners are putting all who use their website at risk.
Eventually this is what Google plans to do to HTTP websites in the address bar, and you don’t want your customers to see this, do you?
