WordCamp Phoenix was held a couple of weeks ago and it is great to spend two full days with other WordPress users of all levels. One of the speakers that always delivers great content is Aaron Campbell. His main job is working on the security of the core WordPress software and he has a real knack for explaining complex security issues in an easy-to-understand way.
His talk at the most recent WordCamp was titled “Why the Open Web Matters” and he gets his point across by talking about video games and tractors. Yes, tractors! You can watch the entire session on WordPress.tv or I have embedded it below.
This is not a problem specific to tractors. It also affects the fastest production car ever made. The only way to maintain that car is with a specific Compaq computer from the early 90s. Read McLaren needs a 20-year-old Compaq laptop to maintain its F1 supercar for the details.
Cleaning Up a Hacked Site
While there are many things you can do to protect Web sites, the hackers won’t stop trying. If you don’t have good protection, the hackers are far more likely to succeed in hacking your site. Should your site get hacked, you’ll need to get it cleaned.
Sucuri is one of the leading providers of Web security and they have authored detailed steps for How to Clean a Hacked Website. There are separate instructions for WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal sites.
We’d love to help protect your site so the likelihood of getting hacked is minimized. Please consider one of our WordPress Maintenance Plans. They are a small investment into keeping your site working hard for you!
If you have a Web site, security is extremely important. The bad guys are trying to hack it, no matter how big your site. Having a few layers of security in place is an absolutely must.
Just over a week ago was WordCamp Phoenix and one of the speakers was Aaron Campbell who is one of the core developers for security in WordPress. He provided a lot of great information and he stressed that you absolutely must have strong passwords that are different on every single site. No matter how good your memory, you will never remember them all. I’ve always relied on Roboform as our method of creating and remembering passwords. I checked with Aaron and he said it is a great option.
Just a few days before that, I was at the GoDaddy Pro Summit and one of the speakers was Tony Perez of Sucuri. To say Tony is very animated when talking about security would be an understatement. I just felt more secure listening to him. Or did I feel more worried about security on my sites? Hmmm, I’ll need to think more about that. Sucuri provides a service to help you protect sites and is something you may want to consider for your sites.
When I read it, I had my own thoughts on the reasons listed so I’ve taken the seven reasons from that post and have provided my answers below. Three other reasons came to mind as I thought about why I feel Unleashed is a great choice and they are included after the initial seven. As we focus solely on WordPress development, the solutions below are all based on WordPress.
1. Professionals can customize beyond templates
Every WordPress site has a theme (template) that determines the design and features of the site. Sure, there are a bunch of free themes available and some of them are OK. We’ve tried a lot of themes and found that there are many of them that are difficult and/or don’t work nearly as well as the demo.
Over time, we’ve developed a small number of themes that we use on most of the sites we build. We know how they work in depth and know that we can deliver a wide range of designs from them. There are also ways to extend our favorite themes to give them even more features and options.
Should you build a site yourself, you might choose a great theme and it’s possible you get a really bad one. When a bad theme is used to build a site, it can be very hard to switch to another theme at a later time.
2. The ROI is worth the initial cost
Let’s say you want a pizza for dinner tonight. It is simple to go to your favorite pizzeria and get a large pizza with a few toppings for $15-20. The alternative would be to make your own crust, either purchase or make sauce, get some cheese and the other toppings. Then add the time involved to take the raw ingredients and make the pizza. In the end, you could have a gourmet pizza or a complete dud and you will have spent a lot more money and time to get there.
Yes, a good Web site is an investment. If you work with a developer and provide the content required, it will save you money. Even if you built it yourself, you’d still need to come up with the content. What is your time worth? Expect that it can take you 3-5 times as many hours (minimum) to build a site as well as a good developer. In the end, will your creation be a masterpiece or a dud?
By using a pro, your site will be working for you sooner and will be designed to meet (or exceed) your goals. This brings a return to you sooner and that return will likely be much greater.
3. You can choose the right developer
No single developer is the right fit for every project and you’ll find many choices when looking for someone to build an awesome WordPress site. Clients sometimes judge only the cost and not what the developer can delivery. The goal is to have a site that best delivers on your goals while delivering a great return on investment.
We pride ourselves on being part of the GoDaddy Pro program as well as being a Google Partner. The online world changes every single day and we focus on educating ourselves on those changes so that we can deliver sites that follow all the latest standards. This also allows us to minimize the time and costs involved.
4. Managing your own content is still possible
At its heart, WordPress is a CMS (content management system). It is designed to allow multiple users to change content to varying degrees. Some clients only want minimal abilities to change a few words or photos. Other clients want full control of a site. Either option is possible and the abilities can even be changed at any time.
This also brings up the famous Spiderman quote “with great power comes great responsibility.” If a client has the ability to edit anything on the site, they also have the ability to accidentally create problems by clicking the wrong thing. We work with clients so they know how to complete the processes most important to them to minimize potential problems.
5. eCommerce functionality is doable
With a WordPress site, eCommerce functionality can be as simple as installing a plug-in. While it is technically quite easy, a good eCommerce site is much more complex. What types of products and/or services are you going to sell? What types of payments are you going to accept? Do you need to ship products? Are they downloadable? These are just some of the questions that need to be answered.
WooCommerce is often mentioned as it is the most popular tool for adding eCommerce to WordPress. That does not mean it is the right answer for your site. We have found other tools that are better choices for our clients. Not only do we recommend these tools for clients, we use them on our own eCommerce sites so we know them inside and out.
6. Your site will be mobile-friendly and responsive
With nearly 2/3 of all Web traffic coming from mobile devices, it is an absolute must that your site works great on mobile devices. Visitors to your site could be on a computer screen that comes in nearly any size. Throw in the variety of tablets and mobile phones and there is just no single size anymore.
When we design a site, it is designed to be responsive. That means it adapts it to the screen of the device on which it is being viewed. Not only does it need to adapt to every screen, it needs to be usable on every screen. Your blog post must still look great on every screen. Visitors should be able to shop in your eCommerce store on every screen. Google created a certification test to make sure developers followed mobile best practices and all of our designers have passed the test.
7. Websites are constantly changing
One of the best parts about building a Web site on WordPress is that the platform itself is being regularly updated. We prefer to work with themes and plugins that are also regularly updated. First and foremost, this helps to keep your site secure. But these changes also support new and improved features.
Not only does the technology itself improve, we also focus on improving our skills and knowing that latest best practices in Web design. While you may choose not to have your site updated regularly, we’ll be ready to update it when you need it.
8. Keep all elements maintained and secure
It is thought that once a Web site is launched that all work is done for a long period of time. That just isn’t the case. It is not uncommon that some element of the site has an update almost every single day. If a client prefers, they can handle all of these updates. A far better value is to select a maintenance plan where all the updates are installed on sites for clients.
This keeps elements updated and keeps the site more secure as well. Additional layers of security are available for clients who want true peace of mind.
9. Your pages can be tested and optimized
If a user builds a site, will they test it on a variety of devices or do they decide it looks great on their own computer so it must be perfect? We want to test pages on computers, tablets and phones so that the user experience is consistently good.
Even when a site looks good on devices, it may not be optimized. Are images the right size in both dimensions and download size? Will the page perform well in search results? Can adjustments be made to make the site load as fast as possible? These are all tasks a pro will perform so that you get the best results from your site.
10. Resource for support after the site launches
When a site is first launched, it is only the beginning. Changes will inevitably be made. New content will be added. Quite possibly new features will be needed. Where is your time best spent? Is it becoming an expert on WordPress or working on your own business? Regardless of whether you are going to update the site or you want a developer to do it, we’re here to help.
We’d be happy to discuss your needs to see if we are the right developer for your project. Visit our Contact Us page or give us a call at 480-595-0065.
As we work with clients on designing a Web site, we are interested in other sites they like. Sometimes they have an existing Web site of their own for which we need information to give them a quote on the makeover. When we see these sites, we want to know what WordPress theme was used to build them. It may be a great site we want to emulate, it may also be a theme we’d prefer to avoid. Below are three tools you can use to determine the theme used. With each, just enter the URL of the site and the tool will try to determine the theme used.
Note that these tools may not have an answer for a variety of reasons. The most obvious would be if a site wasn’t built with WordPress. Some themes have been highly customized and they are very hard to detect. Lastly, it could be a custom built theme for the site and therefore it isn’t a theme that is available for free download or purchase. We encourage you to test each of the tools as you’ll find that a theme that stumps one tool may be identified by another tool.
Not only is the name of the theme provided in the results, there is also a link to go to a page where the theme is available. You may only need to know the name of the theme yet it is nice that you can also purchase it as needed or simply to do more research on it.
With any site built on WordPress, there are three major components that regularly get updated. There is WordPress itself, the theme or themes installed and the plugins. If they are not all updated in a timely manner, problems could arise. We recently saw evidence of this on a couple of sites.
A client contacted us about an order placed in their online store. On a specific order, the wrong amount of shipping was charged. We investigated the shipping rates on their site and it had all the right info so there was something else causing the issue. Anytime we go into the back end of a site for a client, we take the time to install any available updates.
On this shopping site, we tried a few sample orders and couldn’t re-create the problem. Why had the problem happened the first time? Quite simply it was because the plugin for the shopping cart hadn’t been updated recently.
While visiting another site recently, we ran into an issue with the business directory. We could search the directory, but the page would not scroll on the results page. This was great for whichever business was listed first, but really bad for anyone else. As this wasn’t a site we built, we contacted the business to let them know about the problem. It was fixed within an hour and it turned out the problem was a plugin that needed updating.
Making sure a site is updated regularly was the driving force behind our decision to offer maintenance packages. We wanted to make the entry-level package as inexpensive as possible and our Bronze package does handle the updates described above. For clients that was more service, we offer Silver, Gold and Platinum packages with increasing levels of services.
Clients can choose to do the updates themselves. Some do visit their site regularly and keep things updated. We find that most don’t. They can choose to have it done when other changes are made, though often this ends up costing more. Lastly, they can choose a maintenance package that install updates very regularly so that everything runs smoothly.
Sucuri is one of the leading providers of Web security and they have authored detailed steps for How to Clean a Hacked Website. There are separate instructions for WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal sites.
With nearly 2/3 of all Web traffic coming from mobile devices, it is an absolute must that your site works great on mobile devices. Visitors to your site could be on a computer screen that comes in nearly any size. Throw in the variety of tablets and mobile phones and there is just no single size anymore.
