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So you’ve decided to go down the theme route for your new WordPress website. The next step is to choose which WordPress theme to use as the base. But where do you start with the myriad of options out there? There are a few things to bear in mind when short-listing WordPress themes. It’s important…
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You know you need a new WordPress Website. But you’re not sure whether to go down the design or theme route? Whether you’re a new business or going for a rebrand, it can be hard to know which is the best approach to take. You want your WordPress website to work hard & meet your…
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Halloween & Bonfire Night are behind us which can only mean one thing… the countdown to Christmas is on. Black Friday (29th November this year) is generally regarded as the start of the Christmas shopping season. But what does that mean for you if you are in the third sector? If you haven’t already, it’s…
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October 21st – 25th 2019 was International Charity Fraud Awareness Week. Each day covered a key theme; understanding charity fraud, fundraising (donation) fraud, cybercrime & cybersecurity, internal (insider) fraud & keeping data safe. In case you missed it, here is a round-up of our tips from our social media updates throughout the week on how…
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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the UK on 25th May 2018. GDPR is a data protection framework provided by the EU and regulates how organisations store, process and protect people’s data. It replaces the earlier Data Protection Act and is enforced here in the UK by the Information Commissioners Office….
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With the recent alleged concern from supporters regarding RNLIs 2% spending overseas, have you considered how you show your supporters where their contributions go? Making your figures visual can really help you stand out whether this is in your Annual Report, on your website or ideally both. That way existing and potential supporters are able…
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Do you run an eCommerce business? Are you fed up of abandoned carts and high bounce rates? The below infographic lists 10 statistics which may be affecting your eCommerce website as well as what to do about them to gain customers and increase sales. We’ve compiled the above statistics which show that it’s more important…
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Search advertising is a method of attracting more customers to your website via specific adverts that will appear in the search results when potential customers search for related terms or on other websites that they are using. More often than not this is in the form of Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) such as Google…
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To mark the end of May’s Mental Health Awareness Month, Rigorous are excited and proud to announce that as of 30th May 2019 10% of all proceeds from all future sales of any of our WordPress support packages will go to The Blurt Foundation to assist the crucial and fantastic work that they do helping…
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Your customer calls you up and asks you if your site’s safe to visit. When you Google yourself, you see those five horrible words under your site’s listing: “This site may be hacked“. What do you do next? Find out what Google knows Google’s decided your site’s hacked, but how do you find out why?…
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Adding more to the bottom line of your wordpress ecommerce shop will often come down to new customer acquisition; getting new people to buy your stuff. Whilst we really shouldn’t forget our existing customers, this post will go into some detail on different techniques you can employ to either get new customers or push more…
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WordPress is a solid, flexible and scalable choice for your WordPress Ecommerce website. You’re probably already using WooCommerce to power your WordPress Ecommerce shop but what can you do to really improve your Ecommerce revenue through your WordPress site? Here’s what you can do to really get your profits up. Speed your WordPress Ecommerce site…
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On 25th May, 2018, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes law across all EU countries (and yes, despite Brexit that does include the UK for the foreseeable future!) If you’re running a WordPress ecommerce website using Woocommerce, you might be wondering what you’ll need to do to make yourself compliant; after all, ecommerce involves…
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Boring but somewhat important note: General Data Protection Regulation compliance (GDPR compliance) and how Gravity Forms GDPR compliance is implemented is a legal topic and it's best to seek qualified legal advice regarding its implementation in your business. Although this article offers technical detail about some aspects of its implementation, it in no way constitutes... Read More Read in 2 minutes
Website design is the exciting bit of having a website. Website support and maintenance is the stuff that happens after your website goes live and it’s very easy to see it as something unimportant you can neglect. I’d like to make the case that website support and maintenance is just as important as the build…
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Having a plugin hacked on your website is a horrible thing to happen. Firstly there is the reputational damage – a hacked plugin can mean your website automatically redirects somewhere unpleasant, is covered with adverts for unsavoury things or simply isn’t there. The plugin hack can also lead to longer term damage if search engines…
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There are lots of web design companies out there offering WordPress website packages. So how do you make sure you have chosen the package that is right for your business? To my way of thinking, the elements of WordPress website packages can be divided into two categories. The first is the essentials: all WordPress website…
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At one level, WordPress is very simple to use, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular. Adding content, changing content & deleting content is very straightforward & can be done by almost anyone, regardless of their technical skills. At this level, WordPress technical support is rarely required. No WordPress technical support needed? Unfortunately,…
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WordPress is one of the world’s most popular website content management systems for good reason. It’s endlessly flexible, easy to work with and meets all the latest web standards. Unfortunately, because it’s one of the world’s most popular website content management systems, it’s also one of the most vulnerable to attack from hackers. So what…
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Keywords are the words and phrases that people trying to find a product or service like yours will type into Google (other search engines are available). You need to make sure that these words are included in the content of your website – check this Web 20 content to get a clue. Not sure what…
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So, you’ve got a WordPress website. You’ve got a couple of clever plugins that, with a little bit of customisation by your web developer, have given your site exactly the functionality it needs at a fraction of the cost of developing something from the ground up. Great! Except you’ve found you’ve got a problem with…
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Kaptinlin’s Striking theme for WordPress is widely thought to one of the most powerful themes you can purchase for your website. It’s billed as the ‘ultimate responsive WordPress theme’ and it seems that plenty of people agree – over 17,000 sites use it and that number keeps growing. It’s easy to see why Striking is…
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You’re told that WordPress website monitoring is important. But why is it important to monitor your WordPress website? And what does it mean? What WordPress website monitoring means when you Google it When you Google “WordPress website monitoring”, you quickly see that most people take it to mean monitoring your website’s uptime (that is, the…
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So, you’ve made the biggest decision about your website. You’re going to use WordPress. Now for the next biggest decision: your WordPress site developer. How do you make sure you’ve chosen the WordPress site developer who’s right for you? Here are my five top tips. Ask for a WordPress site developer recommendation First of all,…
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In the early days of WordPress, the joy of it was that you could update your website yourself and didn’t need any technical expertise. These days, the joy of being able to update your own website is still there: in fact, it’s probably the main reason you chose a WordPress site. But there’s also a…
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There are lots of reasons for choosing a WordPress website. For many companies it’s the ability WordPress gives you to add and change content without the need to go through a third party. This is undoubtedly a big advantage. However, as you’ve probably discovered, having the ability to update your own website content is not…
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So, you’re managing your WordPress site well. You’re finding it easy to add / amend / restructure content and all is well. But then you hit a brick wall. Something goes wrong or you can’t work out how to do something. Suddenly, you need WordPress help and you need it fast. But is it OK…
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In the last post I talked about how joining the ranks of the WordPress experts was something you should consider doing. On the other hand, I think there’s a stronger argument for deciding that rather than even thinking about becoming a WordPress expert yourself you should simply enlist the help of someone who already is…
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A few years ago, updating a website was a laborious, highly technical affair. Adding a news story or details of a new product was something that needed to be done by the experts in your web department (if you were a big company) or by your freelance web designer (if you were an SME). These... Read MoreRead in 2 minutes
What is a WordPress theme? Before we consider when you might need WordPress theme support, let’s take a step back and answer the question that many of you may be asking. What is a WordPress theme and do I have one? Your WordPress theme is basically the design of your website and the way the... Read More
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You know those update WordPress site notifications you see when you log into WordPress? What do you do when you see them? Take the necessary action and update your WordPress site? Or ignore them because your site is working fine and, as the old saying goes, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’? If you’re…
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So you’ve got a WordPress website. Congratulations – in my opinion you’ve chosen (or had chosen for you) one of the best web content management systems (CMSs) in the world. But I’m not sure it’s enough on its own. Having a great CMS that makes it easy to add and update information is no good…
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One of the best things about WordPress is the support forums. They are where WordPress users all over the world post problems and provide solutions. When WordPress support forums are indispensable If you have any queries, can’t figure something out or have just got a problem with your WordPress site, WordPress support forums are the best place... Read More
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(Header image courtesy of Sally Mahoney) Some years ago, my good friend (and client) Jonathan Pollinger mentioned to me he followed Chris Brogan’s strategy of choosing 3 words instead of making a New Year’s resolution. You can read about Chris’ three words for 2015 on his website but I thought this year I’d try this trick too. Chris’ suggestion…
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Websites are often designed, built and delivered with website maintenance being an afterthought, or not at all. After the amendment period (ours is 30 days, which is about industry average) the website's all yours to do with as you see fit. It's at this point websites usually get left to their own devices; blogs with... Read MoreRead in 1 minute
Thought I’d make a quick comment on this story in TechCrunch. Basically, the take home message is that Facebook’s API is worse than Google’s (it wasn’t clear from the article whether this was one of their APIs or all; I’d assume all), Twitter’s, PayPal’s and a number of others. Personally I think this is an…
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Having let the dusk settle and having taken time to think about it (well, it has been a week!) I feel like I should post about my view of last week’s Digitalks as an organiser. As usual we ran the event upstairs in the D’Fly; a venue which continues to provide a good home for…
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This tripped me up the other day. Looked fine in Internet Explorer 8 and other browsers but Internet Explorer 7 was cutting off the text, as if the element containing it was too small and an overflow: hidden; rule was at play. The fix? Setting the line-height to 100% on the offending as follows: h1 {…
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Google announced their plans to remove support for everything except the latest version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari at the beginning of this month on the Gmail blog (which was also cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog and Google Docs Blog). This is obviously an interesting development for all those users of Google products (especially those on, as of August 1st, unsupported browsers) but what does it mean for the web at large?
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Here’s an interesting conundrum I came across yesterday. I had a domain set up in Plesk on my VPS server, didn’t want to point the domain at it just yet but did want to access it in the browser. Seeing as it was set up as a virtual host, I needed some easy way to…
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We’ve all had it; you put a website on the server and are hit with odd issues which, after much toil and trouble, come down to being all about file permissions. Recently, after putting a Rails application on to a server, I started getting the following error ActionView::Template::Error (No such file or directory – Asset…
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There are a multitude of online sales chat & online support clients out there which, when installed on your website, allow you to communicate in real-time with your visitors. “Great!” you may think “I can talk to all my visitors, provide great customer service and increase my conversion rate!”. This post is all about describing…
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More and more we’re finding ourselves working with skilled partners to deliver web site and web applications that really deliver. We’re very proud if our latest work on the Vanessa Arbuthnott Website, which we think shows the excellence that can be provided by working with expert partners. Vanessa Arbuthnott approached Jealous Design with a brief…
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A really interesting use of Twitter! This popped into my feed a little earlier today, retweeted by someone I follow (@markjames19). Check out the coordinated profile pictures.
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Today, an email dropped into my inbox from Number10.gov.uk; a website which allows each eligible member of the UK to sign petitions online which the government may then respond to. I was less than impressed with its contents to say the least.
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Recently, during a subcontract job, I had cause to use cPanel to set up Ruby on Rails for an app; the contractor I was working with was using UKHost4u who only support it via this method. After a few trials and tribulations, I managed to get a working application running through Mongrel. Now, to get…
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So, I was trying to import a .eps file into Inkscape and finding that it would only import half of it. The .eps itself was meant to be landscape but it appeared Inkscape was only able to import it portrait, cutting off the half of the image that didn’t fit. The fix is a relatively…
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Got slightly caught up today whilst using the uniq! method on a Ruby array. I expected it to exhibit the same behaviour as Array#uniq, just in place (uniq goes through an array and returns an array with no duplicate elements). So, by that logic, `[“1”].uniq!` would return `[“1”]`. However, that’s not the case. `[“1”].uniq!` actually…
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I used to get into work and think “I’ve got in really early but I’ve got no idea what to do with my day”. That led to a problem; I had no way to measure whether I’d accomplished anything that day.
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I’m always on the lookout for beautiful shorthand in Rails and recently I found something lovely in the `Rails#Enumerable` package. If I have a number of records with an attribute (like “amount”, which contains some sort of number) I wish to sum up, I can so this. payments.sum(&:amount) This is because the above is shorthand…
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So, you’ve just pushed your site onto your production server and you’re getting something like the below: [error] [client xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx] malformed header from script. Bad header=[“a”]: dispatch.fcgi It’s likely you’re code is trying to write out something before it delivers a webpage. Check your code for `puts` statements. This includes your helper methods, which is…
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I moved Mehta Web out of my flat and into an office on Tuesday 17th August, 2010. It was a bit of a defining moment in the company history, to say the least. I was once told that running your own company is like having a child; you need to spend time with it and…
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After trading for a few months sans website, I finally got my act together yesterday and put something together. Primarily, this site will be for people to view what Mehta Web offers in terms of services and products but I’ve included this blog to post about the happenings behind Mehta Web. Expect product reviews, technical…
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