Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Websites, it's a Love Hate Thing.


When it comes to websites there are many things that come to mind for most people. Either you love them or hate them and websites go to great extremes to get your vote of - Like but what happened to Love and Hate are they not what we humans decide on a daily basis?

Learning Curves
Either you love them or hate them, I don't really recall someone saying I love the learning curve of getting my website designed the way I want it done. I do however recall hearing others including myself how much I hate hard coding a website back in the beginning cause it was soooooo boring!

Domains and Hosting
Oh, here's a real eye twitching combination as if you forget to renew your domain name you hate that someone took it from you using some bot program and now want to sell it to you or the highest bidder! In regards to hosting, it seems many are always trying to find the best service and price and not so many are loyal to their supplier as everyone loves a good deal.

Website Templates
They look so easy on the demo and even the video showing you how to edit the design with ease. But, just like driving a car it looks so easy until you get behind the wheel and for everyone's sake I hope someone is sitting next to you holding the wheel and teaching you when you go, go, go cause it not chances are you'll stop, stop, stop. So just because someone says it's easy, it's best to have a helping hand when it comes to web design as there are more rules to follow other than color codes and easy checkout.

Drag and Drop or HTML
How about both as there is an actual "plugin" if you will that I totally love, yes click that like button and let's get going on the idea of total ease of web design. Of course that's not the only thing you should be concerned with regarding the ease of website designs using drag-n-drop website templates as you also have to be careful in regards to the legal part and not to copy someone's website content, photos. Love it or Hate it the law is everywhere when it comes to web designs.

I Love It!
The one thing I love most about hosting, providing domain names and even the webdesigns we provide our clients is the fact that we're helping them save money and time as if you do it yourself - sure, you can get someone online quick but is it correct? Will people love it? From my past experience since the birth of the internet most will hate it and for many reasons.

Why Hate It?
You might have a beautiful design and it's perfect colors, cool logo but if your content is not enough to keep the reader or searcher loving it for more than 5 seconds they are out of here and you can forget about them clicking like and if you gave them the choice they would mostly click Hate for many reasons but mostly it's loading too slow, some things that should click do not, too much animation, huge photos not optimized for the web and don't even get me started on online stores.. those are another topic all together cause they combine websites with retail and that takes pure balance to keep them surfers returning back for more.

Like or Hate?
Interesting, you don't see any Hate buttons only +1, Like, Share and one has to wonder why is that? I think most logically is possibly your competitors going around clicking Hate all day. So if my blog post today had a Hate It or Love It which would you click? Would you share it and tell others how much you whatever it?

I'm not scared... cause I'm just being me and sharing my thoughts so I really do not care what others think as that's not why I wrote this. Why did I go to Fotolia and purchase an image, edit it to my liking and post this blog post? Well, if you checked out the links I embedded into this post you'd understand.

Happy Holidays and hope it's full of Love with a dash of hate as you know you don't like something someone cooked and it's sitting on the table with one of your in-law's looking at you to see how much you will put on your plate with pure anticipation of the first bite you take of their humble pie :)

Ho Ho Ho!
Snerdey

Monday, December 15, 2014

Protect Your Wordpress Website from Hackers!


If you own and operate a Wordpress website on your own servers you need to of course keep it updated as there are many updates each year as they are constantly updating core of the site to help prevent attacks as well as keeping it new and fresh as the internet websites evolve.

As a website owner or webmaster taking care of your clients websites you need to do a couple of things that will help stop hackers cold in their tracks. Plugins are a simple way but not best solution for everyone but they certainly helped me. I had one website being attacked everyday, weekly and if I did not back it up it would be a total loss as you can't rely on the hosting provider to have your backups and if they did most would be dated beyond the site current content.

Struggling with this for months I have tried many thing and a few weeks ago I added one plugin, upgraded it and walla - instant stop as when I upgraded the plugin I was able to block all countries except USA and that stopped them mean hackers cold. Then to my surprise I get an email that someone logged in as the 1st plugin called Wordfence sends you emails on all kinds of things as you select to be notified as I do.

Wordfence is really good and there's a nice cache system that speeds up the site by 30 - 50 times and that's not percentages. Best of all it's FREE but if you upgrade it adds many other features but the one I love the most is it will send you an SMS to your phone providing you with a code to enter with your password.

The other plugin I added yesterday and I added it cause I kept getting notices of the hackers trying to log-in and I thought there must be a cool little plugin that hides the wp-admin and of course I tried a few but found the Lockdown WP Admin to be simple and quick. The notices stopped as they can't find the login page now.

These two are the only plugins I use for the WP sites now except if the wordpress website theme has additional plugins such as contact form etc.. most importantly is to keep your plugins updated. Wordfence will send you a notice each time a plugin or just about anything needs updated or out of sync to help prevent hacks.

Good luck with your websites and if you've ever been stressed by a hacker.. these two plugins should bring peace of mind.

Regards,
Snerdey