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Category: home page news

Post comments spam hack on WordPress

Post comments can be a gateway for spam. All posts have a comments option for feedback, when we set up posts for all clients we turn off this comments box to stop spammers adding content. We are now having to change the ‘settings/discussion’ settings to stop hackers adding comments to your posts. So keep an eye on the Dashboard ‘comments’ section and if you see something like this example contact us and we can do a quick fix without charge Why does this happen? Historically WordPress is a blogging platform that morphed into web design. The page post system used to blog is a unique and very powerful way of...

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WordPress website training update

Here at Oast House Media we’ve seen an increase in WordPress web design training requests since the Covid 19 pandemic started. Mostly existing clients either requesting a refresh, or taking advantage of the free training session we offer with every new web design. With restrictions in place we use peer to peer on-line training which has proved to be very popular. The client stays in the office and we take over their screen and walk them around the WordPress Dashboard. It takes on average just 30 minutes for a refresh, up to an hour for new clients. A typical training session will include: Dashboard overview Page and post edting Adding...

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monthly clients newsletter

Newsletters and Google SEO (Newsletters explained)

With new web design clients joining us every month and the increased interest in websites and Google search engine optimisation, it’s very important to get some feedback from everyone using Oast House Media. Our newsletter (see July 2020) goes out every other month via the Mail Chimp e-mail system which also gives us an insight as to who looks at the content and which articles are of interest. For example, the graphic shows us that the Manston article was more popular than the training post, no surprise there, the same item was covered by the BBC the previous day and as SEO copy writers we were using the news spike...

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Training goes peer to peer

It would appear that peer to peer is very appealing! As we continue to design and launch new websites through the lock-down period, training the client on how to update their new websites had to go on-line. In the past we’ve either go to the clients offices or they come to OHM. Restriction forced the change and it worked brilliantly. We miss the cup of tea and chat but peer to peer is the way to go and OHM will be on-line instructors in the future. How does it work? Using dedicated software, the client downloads a designated peer to peer program, launches then issues the ID and password, OHM...

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priority electrical shop

The Priority is Sales

We’ve recently completed a new brochure style website design for Gillingham based electrical wholesaler Priority Electrical (see news post). But with Covid 19 restricting shop footfall, owner Simon Fowler requested a bolt on e-commerce shop. Having already completed the design, adding the Woo-Commerce WordPress shop plug-in and integrating into the PayPal payment system was straight forward, but Priority Electrical already had an extensive digital database for stock control, could it be synchronised with the on-line shop? With a few tweaks yes. Woo-Commerce have some clever plug-in partners that can convert CSV (spreadsheet) lists to on-line product data saving hundreds of man hours. Work in progress as of date of this...

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tan bueno Mediterranean restaurant in sandwich

New restaurant in Sandwich website design

A referral from one of our design clients converted to a website design for a new restaurant in Sandwich. The design will help launch this new venture on the old Hop and Huffkin site with the promise of Mediterranean cuisine see website: tan-bueno.co.uk

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Web design enquiries increase as Covid 19 focuses business owners

There is no doubt that as predicted in our late March 20 news blog “Covid 19, an opportunity not to be missed?” the enforced lock-down has re-focused business owners and their web presence. Just this week we’ve had several new web design enquiries and 2 e-commerce shop requests for quotes. As we convert these to actual live accounts we will add to our new clients new posts There’s also the massive increase in web activity as isolated families/businesses look to find what they want on-line, many of these folk are first time users. At the moment, relying on the old ‘word of mouth’ referral simply will not cut it any...

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sightcall opticians web design training

WordPress refresher training on-line

Last month we completed another WordPress training session but this time it was for an existing client who’d already had WordPress training. With Covid19 keeping everyone in lock-down we understand that many clients would like to take advantage of the spare time and update their WordPress websites. For the lock-down period, Oast House Media are offering FREE on-line WordPress training*. First up was Joe Kidd from Kent based mobile opticians Sightcall. Joe’s in South East London and self isolating with his family, however as WordPress is a cloud based application he could log-into his Dashboard from home and we accessed Joe’s device using remote access software and walked him through...

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Covid 19, an opportunity not to be missed?

Firstly, can we wish you well for the coming weeks. Covid 19 is biting deep into businesses as we see many of our clients forced to close their operations after BoJo’s statement last night (23-3-20). I think we can all see that long term it’s for the good but what are the advantages of a business lock down? The good news, your website will carry on working for you 24/7, enquiries may dry up for a while but Google will carry on checking your pages and re-caching content. Experts predict a big trend towards on-line sales as more people are forced to use websites to purchase items. The fall out...

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junk mail and spam from e-forms

High volume email clients use Office 365

Over the past couple of years we’ve been spending more time working with high volume email users. By definition, these are normally companies with more than 3 email accounts (per web name) and/or using the imap mail delivery system. Our mail servers are limited to a storage capacity of 500mb or less, this is more than enough for pop3 users (usually office desktop devices) but we are seeing an increasing usage from iPhone device users, that’s because the iPhone/imap email process doesn’t delete a message from the server after it has been viewed. This so called ‘stacking’ is removing valuable server space from other web services. As from 1st January...

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