When making new Photoshop imagery it is useful to know where to find some free images to use for your creations. In this blog post I will share ten of the best texture websites out there.

Continue “11 Free Texture Websites”

Most CMS platforms for websites have a login page where it requires a login and password. If you own or run a website having secure logins has never been more important! In this post I suggest ways of increasing your password security. [divider style=”1″]

Why is a strong password so important?

You spend a long long time making your website. Its content, its media & making it work as efficiently as possible. Others have different ideas…hackers, although many are good, some provide a real threat to your hard work. A hacker can try a brute force attack to infiltrate your digital kingdom.

What a brute-force attack is

A brute-force attack is where a computer tries every possible key or password until it succeeds at infiltrating your website. Nothing like a bit of determination! A simple brute-force attack usually has a dictionary of all words or commonly used passwords and cycles through passwords until it gains access. It can take time to complete BUT just read the next paragraph to see how many passwords can be tested per second…

How long does it take to hack a password through brute force?

This piece of information is really going to shock you…

Individual desktop computers can test over a hundred million passwords per second using password cracking tools that run on a general purpose CPU and billions of passwords per second using GPU-based password cracking tools.

Wikipedia

Scary thought really isn’t it, best change that password from password123 now don’t you think?

The hack clock is ticking

Eventually, after a while the hacker will gain access to your website this way if they are persistent. It can take a few minutes, a few days, a few months, a few years, or decades ( i think most would give up at this point! ).

Want to know exactly how long it takes to hack your password then simply enter it into this website, you might be quite amazed at how secure your password is https://howsecureismypassword.net/ if it doesnt take long it’s time to make a change! [divider style=”1″]

Tips to creating a good and incredibly strong password

Most brute force hacking uses commonly used “words” and natural choices we make like numbers after each other. A good technique is to use a phrase rather than a couple of words. For Example think of the song “If I could turn back the hands of time”

“If I could turn, turn back the hands of time, then darling you, you would be mine”

No, I am not declaring my love to you but I am loving this technique for building a password! What I want you to do is take the first letter of each word in that single sentence from the song and make a password!

“If I could turn, turn back the hands of time, then darling you, you would be mine”

IICTTBTHOTTDYYWBM

This password would take 8 million years to hack whilst still being easy to remember by remembering the tune…quite a while i think.

Add some numbers

If you add just three memorable numbers 124 on the end it would take 3 trillion years to hack

Add some funky symbols

add a ? and it would take only 27 quintillion years to hack…so not at all long!

Go the extra mile & Deny Access to your CMS dashboard

Warning before performing this action make sure you have a basic understanding of what you are doing 

What if someone does manage to access your website through brute force, what then? Don’t worry if you do the following steps they can’t access the dashboard of your site even if they guess the password correctly! Bonus.

If you are the only person who needs to login to your Admin area and you know your own IP address, you can deny wp-admin access to everyone but yourself via an .htaccess file.

Create a file in a plain text editior called .htaccess and add:

# Block access to wp-admin.
order deny,allow
allow from x.x.x.x 
deny from all

replacing x.x.x.x with your IP address. 
Your Internet Provider can help you to establish your IP address.
Or you can use an online service such as What Is My IP.

You have completed your first step to lock down

Creating a strong password is only your first step to ensuring your website is less at threat to those with malcontent towards you and your business. There is a lot more to be done and I will be blogging about these things in future blog posts so please, sign up to my rss feed for my blog and receive it in your email so you never miss new information.

What is your Twitter Followers profession?

“You there What is your profession?” The soldier replies ” Im a potter…sir”

the king continues integrating “…and you, what is your profession?” “sc-scultper sir”

And he askes once more ..”you?” “BlackSmith”

“Spartans what is your profession?”

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 Building your Spartan Twitter Followers Army

There are several ways to build your Twitter following on Twitter but there are two common ways. Follow people in the industries you are interested in and they will follow you back or alternatively you can pay someone to give followers.

Slow and steady follower gains but a strong small and influential group

The first path of following people and receive follow backs to those in my particular professional industry is the option i chose. Admittedly it takes time to build a large Twitter following this way but like 300 Spartans going to war, having 300 relevant Twitter followers compared to 30,000 you have paid for that have no real interest in you or your business is a waste of money and a weak following regardless of numbers.

Paying for a fake Social Image

I know some people pay for a following so they can look like they have integrity and are a powerful online social force with something important to say but strength doesn’t come in numbers it comes in the quality of the few and I can quite proudly say every follower I have on Twitter is someone in my area of expertise that may retweet what I tweet and get some benefit from my tweets.

How to spot someone who has paid for followers

Usually spotting a Twitter User that has paid for followers is easy. One key factor is having very few tweets for the amount of followers they have gained. A sure sign something fishy is going on.

You are being decieved by the seller if you pay for fake followers

Not only are you being decieved by the seller of the fake followers but they will also abandon you before you know it. I do know somebody who has bought Twitter Followers and they have started loosing quite a few of those followers a couple of months later.

Do you want to deceive your potential clients?

The worst part of buying Twitter Followers is that you are deceiving your potential clients into thinking you have integrity and influence if they follow you on Twitter when really your reach and influence in Twitter is small.

My final note is this, fight your fight the proper way, take your time ( believe me it takes time! ) and build your following by following others in your industry, retweeting, favouring and sharing other peoples content, build strong relationships with followers and you will gain respect as a true Twitter Power then you too can call yourself a Spartan Tweeter.

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 A top tip to build a truly powerful twitter army

You may already know this but there is a great online program called justunfollow.com. You can see who has followed you, unfollowed you, even copy followers of people you follow which is ideal for building a relevant Twitter Following. I use it every day on the free version but for just a small fee you can follow and unfollow as much as you like and build your following much quicker.

Follow me on Twitter 

Last year I started rebranding an IT company that had two sectors, a data centre consultancy & a state of the art Colocation Data Centre. Both had been branded with separate identities due to the fact the consultancy was very well established and a recognized brand and the investor didn’t want to damage the brand recognition. Considering this the rebranding of the company had to be carefully thought out and the Digital Artwork to be displayed on the walls of the data centre was no different. In this post I discuss 5 things that I feel are important to consider whenever you design some digital artwork for a corporation. Continue “5 things to think about when designing good digital artwork”

When I started building up my website with plugins, themes, pictures, JavaScript and various other features I started noticing a slow down in my website speed. I was less than happy that this was happening but I suspected that because my site is driven by databases then the server has to work a little bit harder than usual. Having a CDN has many benefits and speed is one of them, read on…

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My website seems slow do I need a CDN to help me?

The first thing I recommend you do before even considering buying a CDN is test your website using tools.pingdom.com/fpt/.

This website tests the speed of your website from various locations around the world and gives you a breakdown of what is the main issues effecting your website speed, you may find it isn’t your media files after all it may be something else…

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Optimize your hosting provider first

When you put your url into the test box if you notice the first option that appears ( which happens to be your connection to your host ) is one of your slowest features ( anything about 1 second is pretty poor, anything about 3 seconds and you really do need a new provider ) then this will be a hosting server issue.

Shared hosting

If your website is on what is called a “shared server”  (which most websites are if they are not a large corporation with their own IT equipment) then getting a fast connection can be difficult. A shared server means just that, you share your server with other websites and sometimes there can be hundreds sharing the bandwidth to your server and why a connection can be slow. Some hosting providers do give the option of dedicated hosting but it does tend to cost a lot more…if you are a fairly young online business I would stick with shared hosting until finances permit you to make the transfer to dedicated hosting.

Research your hosting providers for your needs

Some hosting providers are better than others for different reasons and Bluehost.com is one particular host that is recommended for WordPress sites, but don’t take my word for it. I recommend that you consider doing some research about hosts, read customer feedback and possibly look into changing your hosting provider.

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My host is great, so what is a CDN?

CDN is an abbreviation for content delivery network. what a CDN does is distribute your large data files (such as your images,videos, audio and JavaScript, etc) and deploy them on a system of servers in multiple data centers across the world.

Why is having a CDN going to help your website? Speed is one reason a CDN can boost your websites performance but there are more reasons, if you are interested in what they are then please…read on!

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So why should I buy a CDN for my website?

Users have a need for speed

Users are very impatient and getting more impatient.

They expect fast & efficient websites so they can reach the information they want at lightning fast speeds. A user just sees a browser window but behind that computer screen of that web request activated from a left mouse click of your right hand is traveling down the internet highway to process a large amount of data of varying types and putting it together like a jigsaw of varying file types to return it back to the screen of the user wherever they may be.

One datacentre in a big wide world

If you are lucky your website data will be stored on servers that are located in a high tech top of the range data centre like the one at MigSolv.com.  Although this is great the problem with this is that if you are in a far off land such as California accessing a website stored in the UK it will take longer than one closer to where the web request is being made.

Geo-location on the CDN

This is where a CDN steps in. A CDN relieves this issue by delivering that data from the closest server, via geo-location ( Geolocation is simply the identification of where the electronic device request is being made from).

Improves your User Experience

Once you have set up your CDN then the website increases in speed & the user will be happier in at least one area of using your site. Since using my CDN I have seen my bounce rate decreases by 20% and the amount of time people staying on the site increasing.

A CDN will likely improve your conversions

As Goran Candrlic mentions in his post about website conversions and speed. For every 1 second of improvement they experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions. There is some great information on that post about speed and conversion so when you get time check it out!

Search Engines have a need for speed too!

If your site is fast the major search engines will fall in love with your content! You will find you start ranking higher for your pages and higher search engine ranks means more traffic and more traffic means more chance for conversions!

You can’t take me down so easily

The fear of hackers, spammers and others with malicious intent is a constant worry for website owners. Having a CDN gives you some extra redundancy should a hacker manage to take your website down because your files are stored in a type of cloud in varying data centres around the world so you content may still be accessible. One little piece of mind if it ever happens to you and you need to reinstall your content to your website.

 A CDN can help you when you get popular

All website owners dream of gaining thousands of visits a day. Becoming web famous would be a dream and would be the best way to increase conversion rates. As you create more great content your traffic increases thus more requests for the data will be needed putting extra strain on your server. A CDN reduces the pressure on the server and will make your website faster even when you have unpredictable spikes in traffic.

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Which CDN is best for a WordPress based site?

Why I am discussing WordPress? WordPress may be the most popular CMS widely used by website owners worldwide today. Its simplicity of use and lack of a need to understand in-depth coding ( although it is good to have at least some basic html knowledge at least ) to make a website work well for your business.

A very good cache plugin that ALL WordPress sites should have installed is W3 Total Cache.

W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN

W3 Total Cache has a feature to add MAXCDN. When a plugin as good as W3 Total Cache recommends a CDN you automatically know this is probably the best option for your site.

Tried and tested another CDN , Cloudflare

I did try Cloud flare first before I started using MaxCDN as my chosen CDN but I didn’t feel I was getting the level of service I was expecting.

It came with features to block well-known threats from certain IP addresses across the world that are recorded but the problem with Cloudflare is that sometimes it blocked some people who are genuine visitors which seriously frustrated them.

You may say this is a small price to pay for a CDN making sure to keep your website as secure as possible but I think as long as you back up your databases and content as regularly as possible using any backup program, then you have nothing to fear from hackers and spammers as a restore of the system should be pretty straightforward as long as you give your hosting account a very strong password.

MAXCDN was and is the best option for me

I use MAXCDN for my website content and I couldn’t be happier! I am writing this from the point of view of a very happy customer. I could write and promote several CDNs with the chance of getting affiliate percentages from all products like several blogs do but that isn’t why I write about certain products, I write about products I believe in and that I have had a great experience with.  I believe in only promoting products that I truly believe in and that I think  others can also reap the benefits of.

Exceptional customer service

I think what stood out for me with MaxCDN was their live chat feature. When I wasn’t sure whether I had set up the CDN correctly I spoke to one of their employees via the Live chat and I was very very impressed! I created another user with admin privileges so they could access the plugin and the employee then set up the CDN perfectly.

Of course giving access to my website to someone I didn’t know did give me a little apprehension but as I back up my site regularly I felt it would be okay to create a new account and delete it once it was completed.

I was blown away by this level of customer service , they could have pointed me into an online tutorial but they exceeded their requirements and helped all they could!

Clearly faster than before

Making my connection for users to my website faster was really important to me, probably the most important and MaxCDN really delivered. I am much happier with my website speed since using MaxCDN and I highly recommend the product.

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So should I get a CDN for my website?

You may have guessed already but I think EVERYBODYS website should have a CDN. Fact.

If you are serious about generating traffic and providing a brilliant experience to your potential clients or readers then you have to own a CDN for optimum website speed experience.

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MaxCDN is the best option for you and I wouldn’t recommend using any other CDN. You have nothing to lose as you have a 1 month trial too, click the banner below to find out more : –

Broken links can really effect the integrity of your website so it is vitally important you find them before your visitors and search engine bots do! Although it may seem like a minor point you would be mistaken because if you just leave them it makes your business look totally unreliable if you can’t even get the basics right. In this post I will tell you how to avoid the embarrassing broken links from effecting your users experience.

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First things first 404 errors

When a website user cannot find a page they are looking for they arrive at what is called an error 404 page. These pages are not often designed well but can make the experience of reaching a broken link that slightly more forgiving if it is at least pretty. Here is one I designed for MigSolv Data Centre Specialists.

Think about the company’s brand, what would represent their identity in an imaginative way?

Redirect ALL 404 error pages to the homepage

As your website grows you may notice more and more link errors appearing, its natural so don’t worry, if you have over 1000 pages and blog posts there are naturally going to be broken links (i.e. if a visitor bookmarks a particular page they liked) but it still doesn’t look great for visitors.

A way to defuse arriving at an error page is to redirect the lost soul back to the homepage so they can navigate to the desired page they were looking for. To do this you will need to follow these instructions.

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and on the left hand side options select Appearance > editor.
2. Navigate to the 404.php file of your live theme.

3. Replace the content with that below

Enter this code

You can download the file and replace it for your 404 file if you have access to your back end, or alternatively open it copy and paste the code into your 404.php section on the appearance editor dashboard.
Download 404 file here

How to check for broken links ?

If you are on a mac how to check for broken links

Integrity is a broken links checker for Mac OS and it is the one that I particularly use. It is straight forward and gives you heaps of broken link information.
Download it here : –
http://integrity.en.softonic.com/mac

If your are on a pc how to check for broken links

Link checker 6 is a broken links checker for PC, i’ve not actually used this one yet but the reviews on it look good.
Download it here : –
http://wummel.github.io/linkchecker/

And if you don’t want to download software

If you don’t want to download a program that is okay this Online broken link checker will help you find and correct all the links that aren’t working correctly.
Follow this link below :
http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

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If you find any other broken link tools or you have your own tips please feel free to comment in the box below.

Google Analytics is a fantastic little tool for analysing how to improve your website through visitor behaviour, locality , referal traffic etc but if your IP address is included in the analysis it may make the results quite inaccurate. In this post I discuss how to exclude IP addresses from the analytics.

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If you are using Google Analytics to give you useful information and you aren’t excluding your IP address you may as well shut down your account with google now. If you are at a loss to what an IP address is or how to find it don’t worry, that is why I wrote this post..I’ll help you as much as I can.

What the heck is an IP address?

Think of an I.P ( internet protocol) address is a unique string of numbers that EVERY single digital device you use or own has if they can connect to the internet. It is like a home address for your computer devices so that it can be identified online. This is why you need to exclude your ip addresses you own to access your website as even when you are working on new content google analytics will see you as a visitor and NOT an owner or designer.

How do I find out my IP address?

To find out your I.P address all you need to do is go to www.google.co.uk and type into the search bar”ip address” and it will come up with your unique IP address. It is that simple 🙂

Ok, got it..so how do you exclude your own IP address from google analytics results?

1 . Firstly you need to login to your account.
2. Click “Admin” in the orange bar on the right hand side.

3. You should receive a screen similar to the above one, just check you have the right website open before you go any further from the drop down boxes.

4. In the third column, the “profile” the fourth item in the list is called “filters” click it!
5. Now click on the filters tab and click the “+ New Filter” button.
You will be given a screen like the one below simply give the filter a name that will help you identifiy it is your computer like “home desktop”.

6.The Filter Type raido button to select is “Predefined filter”.

7. The final step is to choose “Exclude” from the first drop down list then “traffic from the ISP domain” and “that are equal to” then enter your IP address you looked up in Google.  Check whether it’s IPv6 or not (if you don’t know leave it unchecked).

8. Click “Save”

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Complete-oooooooooo!! Your account will no longer include you in the analytic results. Hooray!!

…if you don’t have a Google Analytics account yet, don’t worry it is really straight forward and in a future post I will be blogging how to set up Google Analytics for your cms website.

In widely used CMS WordPress you may notice a drop down list with Paragraph as the first option. When you click this box you will find various formats for your text from Heading 1 to Heading 6. You may be wondering why are there so many headings or you may even be thinking that you only need to use them for emphasising or increasing the size of font but that is not the true purpose of headings. In this post i explain how to use heading tags to full effect.[divider style=”1″]

Continue “On the head son!”

Every url you create is given its unique ID and on the blogging CMS wordpress it is usually in the form of whatever the title of the blog post or page title is. An automatic permalink may not be the ideal url and I explain why below.

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Urls are a part of your seo strategy

The words you use in your url act as a part of Googles ability to index your written blog post and one aspect to index your urls higher than the rest competing for that particular keyword. For instance in this blog post “www.jawilsondesign.com/permalinks” is the url of the post because if someone searches for that word it will be seen by the search engine and return the url to the searcher in a list of other urls that also use this particular keyword.

urls need to be humanised

If I had let the CMS create the permalink for me I would have ended up with “www.jawilsondesign.com/the-importance-of-permalinks”. This is both good and bad for your website. It is bad for users to manually type in the url to their browser address bar but it IS excellent for the long tail keywords ( long tail keywords are words that have less competition from other sites for search rank positioning) of SEO.

urls need to be easy to type for users

You need to ask yourself what is important. Is it making your url easy to type in incase they want to visit your page easily or is it to be found organically on the major search engines? I believe when it comes to blogging the best way to generate urls is to consider what people might type into google as a sentence. I.e. “how important are permalinks” or “the importance of good permalinks” etc. which would give you a long url but great search indexing.

Not every country understands what a “hyphen” is

As my globe trotting boss mentioned to me the problem with long urls like “www.jawilsondesign.com/the-importance-of-good-permalinks” is that not every country understands what a hyphen is. Not only is it very difficult to remember the whole url it would be even more difficult to understand if you are not from a country that regularly uses the hyphen.

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When to use hyphenated urls and when not to

It is in my belief that hyphenated urls are best used when writing blog posts. The well known search engines will love this and help generate natural traffic to your website but when creating the url for your static pages such as services, about etc a short simple url such as www.jawilsondesign.com/about is much better than a url like “www.jawilsondesign.com/about-ja-wilson-design-the-multi-discipline-designer”

Sharing changes things

When sharing your latest blog post it is usually good practice to use url shortening tools such as goo.gl particularly if you share your work on Twitter. This being the case the whole decision of what the url should be doesn’t matter as much when sharing.

In conclusion I recommend that you use long hyphenated permalinks in blog posts to target long tail keywords but keep your main page permalinks short and easy for users to remember so that the pages can be found easily. Should you have any further suggestions please comment below.

If you are a regular visitor to my website you may have noticed that I had my website on maintenance for 2 weeks as I tried to improve the words and layout of the site. Although my intentions where to improve the experience of users I feel as though having any holding page in maintenance mode for longer than half a day is very bad for business.

In this post I explain why Maintenance Mode is bad for business and an alternative to having a holding page.

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Google tells a story about a bad decision

I have been looking at website UI for my current boss on his website lately and I noticed my website had certain things that I wasn’t happy about. I felt things weren’t quite right and I wanted to add a e-commerce feature to my website in the near future and I didn’t feel the UI at the time was right for that kind of experience so when I was looking at my boss’ website I also decided to put my website under development and put my website on maintenance mode for 2 weeks…bad idea, just look at what has happened to my traffic 2 days later to having the new website live…

Its dived from 275 visitors a day to…10

… someone pass me a tissue box!

It was clearly bad for SEO

Looking at my webmaster account I again have gone from making over 2000 impressions with 150 clicks a day to 500 impressions and less than 10 clicks! Its a total disaster in terms of SEO and generating traffic.

Having created a holding page that lasted for 2 weeks so that I could alter the website from the backend of my CMS I thought it wouldn’t effect my traffic too much and those who are really interested in what I write would return once its live again but I realised it effected my google search ranking position and totally wiped out the work I had put into my blog…

…i did it the wrong way.

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The right way to use Maintenance Mode

Unless you want to destroy your websites traffic there are several ways to build a new UI and appearance of your website without having to use a maintenance mode for a long period of time and this is how I recommend anyone makes big alterations to their site, use a program called ServerPress.

ServerPress

Serverpress in a nutshell allows you to create a virtual server for developing your site away from effecting your live site. No need for a maintenance mode ( well not for 2 weeks anyway! ).

Serverpress creates fictional domain names and lets you setup your server settings to replicate that of your website ( you don’t know how much I wish I had used Serverpress 2 weeks ago! ).Each virtual server resides on your computer and can be easily accessed from your desktop web browser via a fictitious, pseudo top-level domain; You build everything on that virtual server with ServerPress just as you would on the live site, only its pretend! Awesome or what!? You create all your new website elements to avoid damaging your online reputation and then once you feel everything is created to your liking export the design

…its at the exciting part..nearly ready to go live!

Setting your evolution a-live!

The problem I found with my maintenance mode setup was that I put my website on a maintenance holding page for 2 weeks..2 weeks! What the hell was I thinking? That was not clever! There is nothing that infuriates Google robots more than a dead end and even worse a maintenance page! This immediately decreased my google ranking for everyone of my pages because the bots couldn’t access the information and why my traffic is struggling to recover since becoming live again two days ago.

Although it is the case that maintenance pages are deadly in terms of SEO & web traffic they do have a use, once you have created all your pages, UI and images then you can use a maintenance page for a maximum of half a day to import your new design and make sure all links and permalinks are working how they should be.
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Live and learn

This has been a learning process for me. I didn’t manage to get my website exactly as I wanted in two weeks, holding down a full time job, life pulling you in different directions and workloads increasing unexpectedly all made the process slower than I wanted. Setting a time limit for how long the new layout will take makes it more like mission impossible than a pleasant process that it should be.

Key Message

When you make huge changes to layouts and the look and feel of your website you should make the changes on a virtual server first then export the design to the live domain…NEVER make big changes on a live site and by god…

DO NOT USE MAINTENANCE MODE FOR WEEKS ON END!!

lesson learned the hard way…