Red Kite Creative

wp minder

Weekly Links Roundup – Website Maintenance, WordPress Admins, Email Marketing, Why WordPress?

by

The top website and online marketing links of the week.

When you own a WordPress website, are you aware that updates and maintenance are all on you? If you don’t do it, you’re increasing the risk to your site from hacking, malware, and loss of functionality due to old plugins, themes, or server software. Websites under your control require attention – they’re not set-it-and-forget-it, no matter what you may have been told. Maintenance has to be done either by you/your staff or another provider. It’s just a part of having a business website – like doing routine maintenance is part of owning a car or a house. If you don’t want to do this work yourself, try our services at WP Minder.

If you ever need to change the superadmin of your WordPress site (that’s the email account listed on the Settings > General page where notifications go by default), it can sometimes be problematic. In my case my client was never receiving the requests to confirm the changes in Gmail. Not to worry – it’s also easy to change this email address in the database using phpMyAdmin. Learn two ways to change the admin email.

If you’re thinking about starting a newsletter for your business, you’ll soon discover there are quite a few strong options for email marketing solutions. Here’s a review of top email marketing services – my current favorite is Mailchimp for its intuitive user interface, nice template selection and good support; you can start with them for free. But there other good choices here – see what fits your needs best.

I ran across a post that reinforces my strong opinion that WordPress is a great fit for many small businesses. Check out 11 reasons to use WordPress for your first website.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Social Media, Responsive Websites, Website Maintenance

by

The top website and marketing links of the week.

Is your business late to jump on the social media bandwagon? Are you unsure if or how social media can help your business? This post is for you – learn 3 ways that social media can help drive business growth.

I’m in the process of convincing clients with older sites that yes, it really does matter that their 2009 site is unusable in phones. Here’s a post covering 8 stats about responsive websites that you may not have considered. If you have a mobile-unfriendly site, please put a redesign in the budget as soon as possible. You’re hurting your business by giving your users a poor experience, as well as being penalized by Google in search results. It matters.

Finally – website maintenance. They all need it, especially if you’re using a platform like WordPress. If you’re ignoring it, it’s a matter of time until a disaster occurs (minor or major). How will you recover? Learn about the risks, and contact me if you need help maintaining your WordPress site. I have a service that does just that for small business owners: WP Minder.

 

Announcing our new service: WP Minder

by

I love WordPress, and I’m glad it’s been so good for so many of my clients. I like supporting my WordPress clients because they tend to be the ones who are the most keen on really using their sites to benefit their customers and grow their businesses.

WP Minder logoWP Minder came out of a desire to help those clients in a proactive way – by taking the many technical demands of owning and running a WordPress site off their plate, so to speak, so they can concentrate on running their businesses and creating great content. Most small business owners I know don’t want to be their own tech support and don’t have an IT staff to manage it either.

WordPress maintenance is very important, and too often it’s ignored – until something bad happens.

With WP Minder all those technical things and more are handled for you. That includes daily and weekly backups so that if your site gets hacked, it can be recovered quickly and easily. It includes keeping WordPress and plugins up to date. It includes security audits to improve site safety.

Benefits available with WP Minder:

  • 24/7 security monitoring and malware cleanup;
  • Access to a library of over 30 professional WordPress video tutorials;
  • Database cleanup;
  • Personal site checks to make sure everything is running smoothly;
  • Plugin and theme installs;
  • Premium plugin and theme updates;
  • Site migration;
  • Included or discounted support hours;
  • Performance testing and recommendations.

If you own a WordPress site, I encourage you to check out the plans. They’re designed specifically for small businesses and provide the most protection and support at an affordable price. It’s so much less stressful and usually much less expensive to protect a site than it is to try to salvage it after a hack or a server failure – and servers do fail, make no mistake.

Thanks for checking out WP Minder!