Peter Warwick-Mahoney

Back in…purple?

June 22, 2018 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

There’s a new force in Digital Marketing in New Zealand – which I may have more than a little to do with.

As an ex-New Zealander I still like to keep myself appraised of what’s going on down there, and have decided to throw my hat in their digital marketing ring. People who have worked with me before will know I work a little differently:

No nonsense, up front pricing, and everything delivered on time and on budget.

And every market needs a company like that!

🙂

Purple Web Marketing in NZ is a new company I’ll be overseeing, but it’s a team effort rather than just myself. I’ve been using contractors to help out as the business has grown, but it’s time to call a spade a spade and say it’s a proper agency.

The UK business will be brought up to speed as well in the next few weeks, becoming the UK headquarters for Purple Web Marketing. So make the most of this black website while you can – it’s all going very purple very soon.

I remember at high school a guidance counselor once promised that “one day, we’ll all be working remotely from anywhere in the world!” and I’m pleased to say she was right. You’ll find me all over the place, working hard and delivering great results.

I love a good new year

January 12, 2018 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

Welcome to 2018!

I don’t usually do resolutions or anything like that, but as this site is now a few years old it makes sense to resolve to make myself a new one.

It might take a bit longer than usual because I’ll be doing it all with a “static site generator”, which is simply a useful way to generate sites that don’t have really advanced features, like e-commerce. But it allows for blindingly fast sites (in fact they load about 4x faster than a WordPress site!) so is a good direction to head in.

Of course if you want a new website for 2018, or just to make sure your existing one gets as many visitors as possible, let me know.

I’ll be here all year.

Webmaster of the Year Award

November 2, 2017 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney 2 Comments

I was recently awarded the “Webmaster of the Year Award” by international skills marketplace PeoplePerHour.

They interviewed me about running my own business, and using their platform.

Moving email between servers

February 27, 2017 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

There are plenty of reason to move servers for your website, but email is often an afterthought. Even though it’s something we use hundreds of times a week.

Speed issues, cost and possibly (hopefully) needing to upgrade to cope with all your traffic are all excellent reasons to consider a server move.

Moving the website is one thing, files, databases and DNS work all need to be done – but what about all your emails? Inbox, folder, sent items, drafts. How do you get those across?

And if you’re a server admin with full control over them, then this post isn’t for you. Because you have some clear pathways to move email from the old server to the new one.

But what about everyone else? The 99% of people who just pay for shared space with an existing hosting company, who just have a web based control panel (like Plesk or cPanel) they log into?

If that’s you, prepare for pain. Well, to varying degrees.

Simply put there’s never been a decent tool made to move email from server to server.

If you connect to your email currently via POP, that will mean you’re downloading your email to you local computer and therefore have a local copy. So losing the email from the existing server wouldn’t be a problem.

If you connect via IMAP (and most people do) then all your email is stored on the server, and would be lost. In this case you have 3 courses of action*:

Be prepared to lose your existing email.
Change it so you do connect via POP, then have all that email download to your local machine. The downside with this is usually you’d only end up with the emails on one machine. If you’re used to checking the same email accounts via perhaps two computers and a mobile, then you’d lose the option to have old emails on those.
Get the new server setup and running. Set up the new email address (using IMAP too) and get those all setup on your computer. Then connect to the old email accounts again (you’ll need to change the server address to the IP address, which is a tad cumbersome). But then the really awful bit comes in, you have to drag the emails from the old accounts to the new – and because they’re set up on your local machine it downloads them all then uploads them as it copies them across. Sometimes I can copy a folder at a time, sometimes you need to do emails one at a time – it depends on the setup of the old server.

That last one is a horrible job. I’ve done it on request before, but for an average small office email setup it can easily take a day.

My preference is to start again. Suck up that there’s going to be email lost, make sure you have copies of any current message threads and communication, and bite the bullet.

* = If you’re moving from one type of hosting control panel to another one that’s the same (for example cPanel to cPanel) – you have another option fortunately. Again it’s messy: you need to download your mail folder then recreate all the same email accounts on the new server and upload the mail folder to the same place on that new server. This often falls down though because of permissions issues, or server settings you can’t control (where mail is stored, etc.)

Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56

February 8, 2017 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney 2 Comments

Over the past week I’ve seen more than my fair share of emails from Google regarding “Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56″.

It’s a big change, but not exactly a surprising one.

Google has been pushing to make the web more secure for a long time. Seeing HTTPS and green padlocks all over the web has been a key direction for them – they’ve even given secure sites a ranking boost as part of their algorithms. This new change is really an extension of their general SEO ethos.

So anyone running the latest version of Google’s Chrome Browser (version 56) will see a warning when browsing any web page that asks for sensitive information. The examples they’ve given are passwords or credit card details but undoubtedly there’s other situations a user would be presented with a warning too.

I’ve been recommending web owners migrate to HTTPS for a few years, but now it’s become really important especially if you have any page users can log in through (including I expect WordPress Dashboard login pages like wp-login.php) or e-commerce.

These things may well be frustrating when they first crop up, requiring immediate changes to your website. But bear in mind Google has been open about their general desires for the web (that it be easy to find useful information, that it be secure, mobile friendly and fast) for a long time. So as long as you apply those same concepts to your own site as soon as you can then changes like this will actually put you ahead of the curve.

In case you know this impacts you but haven’t yet had the email from Google about it (or don’t use Google Search Console in which case you’d never get one) here is the text of their message:

Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56 for http://www.domain.com/
To: owner of http://www.domain.com/
Beginning in January 2017, Chrome (version 56 and later) will mark pages that collect passwords or credit card details as “Not Secure” unless the pages are served over HTTPS.
The following URLs include input fields for passwords or credit card details that will trigger the new Chrome warning. Review these examples to see where these warnings will appear, and so you can take action to help protect users’ data. The list is not exhaustive.
{examples are given here}
The new warning is the first stage of a long-term plan to mark all pages served over the non-encrypted HTTP protocol as “Not Secure”.

Google Apps is now called G Suite

September 29, 2016 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

Google Apps (used for business email, file sharing, calendaring etc.) is now rebranded as G Suite.

Which sounds like a bad mid-90s R&B group. (Try as I might, I can’t forget “Rappin’ 4-Tay”.)*

In their official blog post, Google said this is more in keeping more with their mission to provide a series of tools businesses use to further their own purposes. Basically rather than a series of individual applications coming together they see it as a stock set of tools within one Google system.

Fair enough.

Google Apps proved to be an invaluable tools for companies, schools and universities, and I do hope G Suite continues to build on and improve those systems.

But I do have one niggling concern in the back of my mind. Google Apps used to be free for small firms, then overnight all new accounts were subject to a subscription fee. Existing free accounts continued to run with charge – but any change to Apps brings a fear they might start to charge for those grandfathered accounts.

And with a change this big, well – Google Apps keep free accounts, but will G Suite?

Read the original Google blog post
*Although I thought of making this joke myself, I wasn’t the first, so credit goes here

Turning off comments in WordPress

July 27, 2016 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

I get asked this a lot. You’ve made your WordPress site, launched it, then noticed all the empty comment sections and wondered where they came from.

Commenting in WordPress is turned on by default.

To switch it off, got to:
Dashboard > Settings > Discussion

and untick:

Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles
Allow people to post comments on new articles

That sorts out all your future posts and pages. But what about the ones you’ve already published?

For all current posts you have to do each manually. The easiest way is to go to:
Dashboard > Poststhen click “Quick Edit” under them one by one, and unticking these options:

Being sure to “Update” after each one.

It’s a faff, especially if you’ve already published a lot of content. But a learning experience nonetheless.

Comments on this post are (incidentally) open.

🙂

Google mobile search

June 27, 2016 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

One of things I’ve talked about a lot in the past couple of years has been Google’s move toward “mobile friendliness”. Last year they made a small change that meant sites that are mobile friendly would appear higher in search results when someone was looking from a mobile device.

Well they’ve really increased this as a search signal – sites that are NOT mobile friendly will now have a very hard time competing with those that are.

They’ve also updated their mobile friendliness test to make it more restrictive—it’s worth retesting your sites to make sure they still pass. Of course the best test is always the information displayed within Google Search Console which reports on the entire site, not just one page at a time.

The extra good news for those of you with mobile responsive sites is that any of your competitors who do not have mobile friendly sites will now suffer in their rankings.

One related point, there is a growing body of data that suggests this change also affects (in a smaller capacity) sites from normal desktops – that Google is prioritising sites that are mobile friendly on searches from ALL devices.

They haven’t confirmed that yet, so it’s not certain, but I am keeping an eye on it.

If you don’t have a responsive site for mobile devices yet and you don’t want to get caught out, please contact me and I can help make you a new, fully mobile complaint one.

Google descriptions

May 17, 2016 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney 1 Comment

I’m often asked about how to change the description Google shows in their search results. (This post applies in part to many search engines, but Google in particular.)

The answer is slightly more complicated than any of us might like. The old response (going back a decade or more) was to just change your meta description tag. Those used to be picked up verbatim.

But these days Google isn’t beholden to anything we provide (with the exception perhaps of your own domain name). They can pick and choose what they think will be most useful to their users. They don’t have to use the description we provide–they can choose to ignore it and create their own.

If we want to give our descriptions the best possible chance of being picked up, they need to conform to the following:

be between 150-159 characters*
be in sentence structure
not include too many commas or ands – basically avoid things that make it look like it could be a list of keywords
ideally, it would be a whole sentence or two taken directly from the text of the page
in fact, really ideally it would be the first sentence or two from the page

and on top of all that of course it needs to fit our own needs of being informative and enticing people to visit the site.

Enjoy.

* = Normally 130-160 (or some other variant within that range, but usually ending with 160) is touted as acceptable. Recent data suggests in fact 160 may be too long, many pages with 160 characters exactly are finding their descriptions are being truncated before the last word with a ellipses (…) added, making it look unfinished. So 159 seems the current practical maximum.

Buying backlinks 2016

April 4, 2016 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

It’s been a while since I wrote a post about backlinks. But it’s always worth re-iterating this.

In short, my stance on these has only become stronger, because Google has become even more clever.

The shortest answer to the backlink question is that having backlinks is very beneficial.

But the longer answer is actually more important. Google has become incredibly adept at working out which backlinks are natural (i.e., someone liked your site and linked to it) as opposed to bought, meaning you paid for them.

Natural backlinks help your SEO, generally speaking. As for manipulated ones, once Google realises what you’ve done (which can take a few months) they will usually hurt your rank, often quite drastically.

There are a lot of people selling what they called “safe” links, or “Google friendly links”. In truth Google is very clear that any attempt to buy or create links is contrary to their ethos and something they will try to find and penalise you for.

And they are very good at it.

The reason people still sell them is a quirk of Google’s algorithm. When Google first see new links come in for a site they will almost always improve that sites ranking. It’s not until they’ve seen the patterns emerge and they realise they were faked links that they penalise you.

So when someone first buys links they usually do see an improvement, and feel happy with the service that made them. Months later when their site takes a hit—it’s too late.

So, are backlinks good? Absolutely. Should you try to have them created on your behalf? Absolutely not.