Blog — WordPress

Hosting your WordPress site

March 27th, 2013 Posted in Services, WordPress No Comments

When deciding to work with WordPress as a framework for your web site or blog, you have two options.

  1. The first option is that you can use the hosting provided by WordPress.com, and choose to either use a subdomain or your own domain.
  2. The second option you’re presented with is self-hosting your WordPress site.

Unfortunately, many consumers and businesses are unable to distinguish between the differences these two options present. Today, we’re going to be looking at some of the advantages of self hosting your own WordPress site, as opposed to hosting it through using the service at WordPress.com.

The first benefit of self hosting your WordPress site is that you’ll be able to take complete advantage of the plugin functionality that WordPress presents. Unfortunately, when you use WordPress’ hosting solution, you are unable to install any and all plugins into your installation. Only those plugins WordPress.com let you.  As such, you aren’t able to take full advantage of the software. WordPress is powerful because of the third-party plugins that have been built. Not to mention, you’ll be able to take complete control of the themes which you use and the reliability of your businesses website.

Here is a simple infographic kindly provided by WPMU.org to further explain the difference between the two options.

WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com

In short, when you choose to use the standard, WordPress.com hosting provided by WordPress themselves, you cannot take full control of your own website. You’re limited by their own restrictions. As such, self-hosting your WordPress site is always preferred in all cases, as you’ll be able to completely optimize your site for you and your visitors/customers.

Lastly, hosting your WordPress site with an experienced, friendly web host ensures you get the support you need, wehn you need it.  As always, you get what you pay for and free hosting services won;t provide the dedicated support a serious web site owner demands or expects.

Host your WordPress site with a host that can do all of this and more.

Benefits of Blogging for Business

March 19th, 2013 Posted in News, SEO, WordPress No Comments

Blogging has been around since the start of the internet, and it’s quickly grown to become one of the most popular reasons as to why people now access the internet each and every day. As the internet has expanded and grown, so has blogging. Now, with new social trends such as Twitter and Facebook, getting your blog noticed, read and talked about is easier than ever.

Blogging is not just for individuals to share their daily lives either, far from it. Now it’s for businesses to interact and engage with their customers and clients. Customers of a business are always looking for ways to interact and engage, so it’s wise for you as a business owner (or employee!) to give them the chance to. Whether that means sharing a picture every Friday, or blogging weekly about the new products you’re selling – there’s no doubt that blogging is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation / Rankings) and customer retention.

Developing customer relations is of paramount importance for your business, and that’s why you should start the process of blogging early. Blogging is a slow process, and it will take a while to develop a readerbase. Potential customers can sometimes be more comfortbale making subtle contact by commenting on your blog than firing a contact form to your sales team. Don’t be in a hurry to force sales, they’ll come in time and the sales team will get their moment. Be helpful, informative, expert on your subject and honest. Readers will return to keep learning and enjoy the interaction.

Business Blogs ignite conversation and interest, questions about your products/services often follow in blog comments and it can be a great opportunity to develop trust or gain a sale. Don’t be over ambitious, start slow and be consistent! One post a week, every week, is far better than 4 posts in one week and then nothing for 4 months.

It’s now easier than ever to feed your blog posts to third party social media sites and draw in more and more followers/readers/customers! Before you know it, you’ll have thousands of readers who are subscribed to your blog eagerly awaiting your next blog post. It’s times like these that you truly become engaged with your audience, because you have developed a strong relationship with your most loyal fans and followers. You’ll then have your own platform and finely targetted audience to launch and promote products and services to.

Start your blog today

WordPress 3.5 – Get the latest

December 21st, 2012 Posted in News, WordPress No Comments

First, we’re sorry for the delay from the release of WordPress 3.5 and this overview post. However, we have a good excuse – our time and focus over the last week, has been on making sure a smooth upgrade to the latest, greatest WordPress version for all of our Managed WordPress customers.

We’re happy to report a smooth transition for all.

As many of you will have noticed from the indication at the top of your WordPress admin panel, version 3.5 is available. As WordPress fanatics, we’re very excited about this new release.

This release is focused on media and it has a rebuilt media upload and management section. Making it simpler and more streamlined to handle your media within WordPress.

Watch the official video below for a 90 second view of the key features.

View the official press release here: http://wordpress.org/news/2012/12/elvin/

Learn how to update from your dashboard here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Dashboard_Updates_SubPanel

Please, ALWAYS BACKUP ! before carrying out any upgrade or major change to your site.

If you would like us to carry out the upgrade (Managed WordPress customers get this service automatically and included as part of their package), you can order via a support ticket

WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin Video Guides – FREE

December 7th, 2012 Posted in SEO, WordPress No Comments

For those of you who already make use of the WordPress Video Guides, available to all WordPress hosting customers.  You know how fantastic these videos are in helping either you or your clients to use WordPress. A true time saver right inside the WordPress admin.

Today, I’m pleased to tell you that the one and only Joost De Valk has now included video tutorials teaching you how to use the incredibly popular WordPress SEO by Yoast.

If you’re not already using this plugin, you’re missing out. It provides everything you need to maximise the SEO of your WordPress site and give you the best chance of moving up the Google results.

If you’d like these new videos enabled within your WordPress site, just submit a support ticket with the request.

Oh, don’t forget to tell your friends about this great feature of our WordPress hosting :)

Managed WordPress Hosting – What is it?

November 27th, 2012 Posted in Services, WordPress No Comments

For some time now, we’ve provided WordPress Management services to many customers.  Over the years we’ve tailored the service to suite the needs of those wanting a ‘hands-off’ approach to running their WordPress site.

We thought it would be a good idea to go over the details of what our Managed WordPress Hosting service actually provides, in a little more detail and in plain English.
Managed WordPress Hosting

Backups

We take a daily backups of both site files and database.  Which is an essential part of every websites scheduled maintenance. This allows us to easily roll-back a site to a previous version, should you (or we) require this.
In addition to a daily backup we also carry out a full backup prior to any WordPress core, plugin or theme updates that we carry out. This is good practice whenever an update is made, however trivial. This is also part of the Managed WordPress service.

Updates

Keeping WordPress core, plugin and themes up to date (within 24 hrs of release) is a key aspect of your sites security. One which is often overlooked. Hackers will run searches for specific WordPress versions they know to carry known vulnerabilities. They then attempt to exploit these, whether it’s WordPress itself or via a plugin or theme used on the site.

Security & Performance Best Practices

Over the years we’ve developed our own Best Practice procedures for securing and optimising the performance of WordPress. This comes from in-depth research, testing and real world experience.  It does include a number of proven plugins, however – fully comprehensive enhancements can’t all be found in a plugin. So we apply a variety of tweaks and settings of the installation and server environment settings.  This hardens the site, making it as robust as possible.  At the same time we improve the performance using compression, minification and a number of other methods.

All in all, the result of applying our Security & Performance best practices, is a secure, fast site.  Which is resilient to all the threats a web site faces and is fast and responsive to visitors and search engines. Both very important factors of a successful web site, whatever you’re site is working to achieve.

Conclusion

WordPress is a fantastic platform for building your web site.  The tens of millions of web site (large and small) owners using it, are testimony to that.  But some find themselves spending more and more time taking care of WordPress, than actually selling their service/product. Or worse still, not taking care of WordPress…until it’s too late.

So, if you either don’t have the know-how or time to keep on top of your WordPress site, this could be the service for you. Check out our Managed WordPress plan and start focusing on what’s important…your business.

We really value your thoughts and feedback, please leave a comment below.

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