UPDATE: This extra pop has now been removed and replaced with a CAPTCHA – read more here

Some hosting providers have blocked access to the WordPress admin area altogether, however we wanted to avoid this approach as it would stop you accessing your site to make changes. Instead an extra layer of security has been put in place to stop these automated attacks from gaining access to /wp-admin address. You will notice this when you next attempt to access your WordPress admin area as you will be asked for a separate username and password – the details are below:

Username: protected
Password: wordpress

Once this attack has stopped this extra step will be removed – you can follow progress on this here sgis.co.uk/system_status.php

UPDATE: This extra pop has now been removed and replaced with a CAPTCHA – read more here

Other things you can do

1. Change your password especially if it is weak password. Make sure it contains upper and lowercase characters as well as numbers and symbols.

2. If you are still using admin as the username update this.

3. Add anti-spam checks to wp-login – wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/captcha

4. Add two step authentication to login. wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/authenticator

If you have any questions please contact us.

Website testing

It’s important to test your site across multiple bowsers to ensure your site renders correctly. There a few services out there that take screen shots of your website on multiple browsers and versions so you can check your site’s design.

Browsershots – browsershots.org
netrenderer – netrenderer.com

Form creation

It can be a time consuming process creating web forms. Thankfully there are a lot of web tools available to help.

phpForm – phpform.org
Wufoo – wufoo.com
EmailMeForm – emailmeform.com
JotForm.com – jotform.com
Free Online Surveys – freeonlinesurveys.com/free-online-forms

Favicon creation

A Favicon is the small icon which appears next to your web address in most web browsers. It’s a nice addition to your website’s design and there are some helpful tools out there which create Favicons in the correct format.

Genfavicon – genfavicon.com
Favicon – favicon.co.uk

Responsive Frameworks

Responsive Web Design is the latest approach to dealing with the increasing amount of devices that can access the interent. Responsive Frameworks adjust the site’s appearance based on the the device viewing it by using CCS3 media quieres. For example if a smart phone visits a responsive site they will see the same content as computer but in a different layout. Luckily you don’t need to start these frameworks from scratch as there are plenty of templates to choose from. We have listed some of the popular frameworks below:

1140 CSS Grid – cssgrid.net
Less Framework 4 – lessframework.com
Bootstrap – twitter.github.com/bootstrap
Skeleton – getskeleton.com
Kube – imperavi.com/kube

Website Reporting

Keeping a track on what your visitors are doing is so important. You can highlight popular pages as well as pages causing your vistors to leave. We offer a range of reporting installations on our Business hosting package and Google offer some great free tools to track visitors.

Google Analytics – google.co.uk/analytics
Google Webmaster Tools – google.com/webmasters/tools
Available on the Business Hosting package.
Piwik – piwik.org
AWStats – awstats.sourceforge.net
Open Web Analytics – openwebanalytics.com

Some CMSs, such as WordPress, take care of this for you but if you’re CMS or website doesn’t do this as standard we have included instructions and code below to force www.

1. Open the public_html folder on your hosting account.
If you already have a .htaccess file in the public_html folder please open it and go to step 3 – please make sure to backup your .htaccess file before attempting any changes.

2. Click on the create new file button and enter .htaccess as the file name.

 
3. Paste the below code into the text area and hit save.

# Turn on the Rewrite Engine
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Force www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

N.B. Please remember to replace yourdomain.com with your actual web address.

4. Test the change by entering yourdomain.com into your web browser and you will be redirect to www.yourdomain.com.

If you have any questions please contact support.

1. You have copied the same content you used on your last website.
2. You have used the content you wrote for your offline marketing material.
3. You left writing your content until the last minute.
4. Your core content per page is more than 500 words long and made up of hefty paragraphs.
5. Your content contains acronyms or words that most people will need to look up in a dictionary.

If you have answered yes to any of the above, you are not alone. In reality there are very few website owners who are also professional writers. The mistake that many website owners make though, is to assume that because they know their business inside out, they will be able to write about it on their website in a way that grabs readers’ attention and makes them want to use the products or services on offer.

In practice, there is much more to consider when it comes to writing for your website, including:

Being found
Are you using the right words and phrases associated with your industry to be found by people looking for your product or service?

Grabbing attention for the right reasons
This means thinking about your core messages. What first impression do you want to give? What is your most important point? Why should somebody contact you?

Setting the tone
Your tone of voice can make a huge difference. Being too formal could put people off, and so could being too informal – it all depends on your target market.

Of course all of this takes time, time that you may well prefer to spend running your business. Which is why we have launched our new copywriting service to help you to make your website work as hard as it possibly can.

We have teamed up with an expert copywriter to help you to get your website content right. Whether you just need somebody to give you feedback on your writing or want your whole website written from scratch, we can help.

Our copywriting service includes:

Keyword research – helping to ensure your website is found
Advice on copywriting best practice – for when you want to add more content yourself
In-depth research to ensure that we understand your business and its needs.

How much does it cost?

This will depend on your needs, but as a ballpark figure, around £25 per page of content, plus a couple of hours for research. If it is just a review and some advice this will be charged at an hourly rate of £25 per hour.

If you think we can help you with your content, get in touch.

If you have any questions please contact our support team here.

1. Purchase hosting picking the “Use an existing domain” option – This will allow us to set-up hosting without affecting your current site. See Hosting packages.

2. After hosting has been order access the control panel via extendcp.co.uk using the login details supplied.

3. Once you’ve logged in you’ll have full access to the hosting control panel before your website is live. Scroll down to the CGI Scripts section where you will see an option to install WordPress.

Please note – If you want to install WordPress to the root of the site you will need to remove the default index.html file created with your hosting package first. To do this navigate to the File Manager menu option and remove the index.html file.

4. The installation script will install WordPress on the server IP rather than the web address, for example http://79.170.40.232/sgis-demo.co.uk/

5. Follow the WordPress installation steps and you will then have access to create your WordPress site via the server IP.

6. When you are happy with your WordPress site and want to make it live you can then either transfer your domain or point it towards our servers – click here for more information.

7. Once the domain has transfered or is pointing to our servers the site will be live.

8. The final step is to remove the IP from the WordPress setup. To do this go to Settings >> General and you should see two boxes with the IP address in. Just update these to the correct address and hit save.

Please note – before doing this please take a backup of the site and MySQL database as incorrect set-up can cause the site not to load. Details on how to backup are found here.

If you need any further advice please contact us.

Joomla! 3.0

Joomla! 3.0 is the latest release from Joomla! and has some great improvements, especially to the admin area which has had a complete over-hale. You can demo the administrator area and the fontend from joomla.org – Demo Joomla! 3.0

Key improvements:

• Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
• Incorporation of Bootstrap into a jui media package.
• A new responsive administrator template Isis and interface.
• A new frontend template Protostar built using Bootstrap and updated accessible template called Beez3
• Installation of language packages directly from the extension manager
• Guest user group present by default
• Saving blank articles allowed
• New administrator statistics module
• Improvements to Smart Search
• Updated system tests in the CMS

SilverStripe CMS

SilverStrip is another popular content manage system that uses a WYSIWYG page editor. Some of SilverStrip’s key features are listed below and we’ve also included their introduction video to give you an overview of what it does.

Key features:

• Create new pages and drag and drop them where you want them to be in the sitemap.
• Edit and style content in an editor that uses a formatting toolbar that is familiar to anyone who uses word processing software.
• Easily insert links, images, Flash animations, and video into your content.
• Copy and paste content directly from Microsoft Word.
• View a draft of your content changes before publishing them on the live site.
• Publish multiple changes to your site with one click.
• Assign different user roles and permissions for each section or page of your site.
• View older versions of a page, and roll back to a previous version, if needed.

 
To see a full list of our install scripts please visit our hosting page.

Why don’t you offer this option during hosting sign-up?

We decided not to offer this option to avoid confusion. For most people what platform they’re on won’t make any difference, so it made sense to remove this as an option and instead offer it on request for our customers who needed it.

What is better?

There isn’t really much difference to the majority of users. Traditionally Windows hosting is more expensive due to the licensing but that’s not the case with us. The main difference is the ability to code in ASP.NET on Windows which isn’t possible on our Linux platform. We have highlighted the main differences below:

	Linux	Windows
Hosting Costs	£10 – £50 per year	£10 – £50 per year
Install Scripts	65	17
IIS Management & Applications
ASP.NET
Case sensitive files*

*Index.html, index.html and INDEX.html can all be separate files on Linux and can be individually visited on the web, Windows will treat any of these files as the same – non-case sensitive.

For most people having 65 install scripts, rather than 17, is probably more important than being able to code in ASP.NET which is why we have opted for Linux as our base operating system.

To see the full features of Linux hosting please visit our Hosting Page

For full details of our Windows Hosting please visit our Windows Hosting page

If you would like to move your hosting over to a Windows operating system please contact our support team for more information.

A full list of our 65 install scripts can be found here.

If you already have one of these scripts installed you will need to update these yourself following the software’s instructions. Please remember to backup your website before attempting any updates.

We’re always looking to improve our list of one click install scripts so if you would like to see one added then please leave us feedback.

Please note, only Home+ and Business hosting packages can host WordPress on a sub-domain as sub-domains are not available on the Starter package. If you are on the Starter package and wish to upgrade in order to add a sub-domain you can do so via our control panel – upgrade now

1. Create the Sub-domain

Before starting the WordPress installation the first step is to create the sub-domain. The sub-domain menu option can be found from the hosting control panel under the Web Tools heading. Once you’ve access the sub-domain page you will see the below form.

From here you can create the name of the sub-domain and where the files will be stored in the public_html folder. In the example we are creating the sub-domain “test” and saving the files in the “test” directory. The two names don’t need to match however it makes things easier when navigating the File Manager. If the chosen directory doesn’t exist this process will create it for you.

Please note it will take an hour for new sub-domains to become active so give it time before installing WordPress

2. Install WordPress

Once the sub-domain is active you can now install WordPress to the sub-domain. To do this navigate to the WordPress Blog menu option under the heading CGI Scripts and you will see the below form.

This form allows you to choose where WordPress gets installed. You don’t actually install WordPress on the sub-domain, you install it to the directory the sub-domain points to. So in this example we will install WordPress to yourdomain.com/test, not test.yourdomain.com.

To install WordPress to your chosen directory simply add the directory name into the text field and hit Install Now.

3. Setup WordPress to use the sub-domain

Once WordPress is installed you will be given a link to finish the setup. To ensure that WordPress is installed to the sub-domain, and not the directory, the best option is to visit the URL manually by typing yoursub.yourdomain.com – this will then ensure WordPress is installed on yoursub.

Once the setup is complete you’ll be able to use WordPress as usual and published content will be posted to the sub-domain.

If you have any questions or need further assistance with this setup, please contact support.