Malware, email & plugin patience

Sometimes, and probably more often that you would like, things don’t go smoothly. Your site is down, you aren’t receiving email or a commonly used tool does not work in WordPress. Recently, three such incidences were diagnosed and corrected. A...

Watch out for malware phishing attempts

I almost got snagged today by some pretty clever malware appealing to my sense of duty. See the email I received today. The email looks right. There were no spelling errors. But there were several clues I will describe that you can watch out for. CLUE #1: No one...

Go Daddy a Disappointment

You can put up with a company who provides domain services to thousands of customers but don’t ever buy hosting wth them. Unfortunately, Go Daddy, a trusted domain provider, is taking advantage of people calling to renew their domain by up selling hosting not...

Case Study: When a client’s site gets hacked

The last correspondence a web designer wants to get is an email from a client telling you their site has been hacked. They know immediately because the hosting company freezes their website and notifies them. This letter gets forwarded to you by the client and you now...

The Twelve Days of a Website Consultancy

Being a website consultant is not all fun and games. Much of the time the work can be tedious. Which is why you want me to do it! Here are some of the things I do on a daily basis to help website owners get the best out of their internet presence. These scenarios are...

Amazing SEO Tool in Maintenance Plan

Perugi Design uses a powerful new tool that reports website data on everthing from latest backups to SEO standings. On the SEO report page for Perugi Design, it gave me a flow chart of how my website has performed over the past month. (See image below on left). You...

Five ways to protect your website from malware

In the last few years it was published in the news that the Department of Defense’s computers were attacked by Malware. Yet we website owners, operators, and designers often feel overconfident about our own security. Maybe we feel we are insignificant. What...

Backup before waking up to your website in French!

“A colleague just called and told me her website had been hacked.  It was now all in French and only the home page was visible.  She has no back up and warned me to find out if I have one.  Do I? I just took some screen shots of the pages – but does BlueHost –...

5 Reasons ManageWP is my best tool for website maintenance

The best piece of software I’ve invested in lately is ManageWP. It provides web developers a convenient tool to check on their websites in one dashboard, make updates, scan for malware, (including the new formidable Shellshock) and back up and migrate websites...

It’s Time to Update WordPress

Now that you are adding posts to your website on a regular basis, it’s important to take notice of your plugins. On the side bar on the dashboard you will see the word Plugins and possibly a little black dot with a number inside. This tells you you have...