The Change Creative
Having an email address that isn’t @hotmail or @gmail whether for business or applying for jobs is really quite important for several reasons. In this blog post I plan to explain the issues surrounding not having a branded email address.
Choosing the right hosting provider for your website is HUGELY important and probably the most important part of your website. Like a house, if you don’t put in the right foundations in at the start then your house is going to start getting problems and it just won’t be a good construction. Hosting is the same, choose a hosting provider that is below par and your website will see the effect. In this blog post I discuss why I had no choice but to leave my hosting provider.
You have probably heard it over and over again “is your business online yet?” or “create your own online presence”, but where do you start? Do you hire a web designer or do you try to save your money and design it yourself? One area to consider if going for the web designer option is the website hosting you choose.
In this post I am going to share what you should consider when first developing a new website and what to do as your website contenet grows and hopefully, your audience and profits increase, I have wrote the post in a fashion from the very start of a websites life to the large succesful website. To begin, lets discuss what website hosting is …
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″]
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.
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…
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.
Scary thought really isn’t it, best change that password from password123 now don’t you think?
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″]
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.
If you add just three memorable numbers 124 on the end it would take 3 trillion years to hack
add a ? and it would take only 27 quintillion years to hack…so not at all long!
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.
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.
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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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?
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
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
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
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/
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.
When you bookmark a page on a website it is added to a selection of other favourite websites in your bookmark window. Some have icons and others don’t. Why is this? They have a favicon in their root directory.
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A favicon is just that a “fav” icon so when a visitor bookmarks your website it has a recognizable branded icon next to the website link. This may seem like a pretty pointless part of your website but you would be wrong.
If your company logo has been designed well then it will pretty easy to simply it into a favicon. Just look at the special features of the log, in the above example the O in Solv is considered to be the prominent feature of the corporate identity, MigSolv copyright 2013) so it taken into photoshop and seperated from the rest of the logo.
A favicon helps your user to identify your website quickly & easily and if your company doesn’t have one it looks like one of two things. A) You don’t finish your website which might also represent your company’s image that you don’t finish things & B) You don’t understand technology trends properly.
The size of the favicon is usually 32px x 32px.
You have two options, either use the logo you have now, go to edit > …image size and change the pixel size to 32 x 32.
Once you are happy with your icon make sure to save it as a filename.ico. This isn’t a drop down file type so you will have to manually enter the .ico at the end of the file name.
Lastly upload your completed favicon to your websites root folder and web browsers should then pick up that you have one. Your mission is complete! Good job soldier.
If you are not an owner of photoshop ( or GIMP ) or just not confident enough in the program then you can use this free favicon generator which does the job for you.
If you would like a professional designed favicon for your website please feel free to contact me using the contact button and I will give you a very reasonable quote. Happy creating folk! 🙂
