We’ve all seen the headlines. “Yahoo confirms major breach — 500k accounts affected” … “JPMorgan Chase hacking affects 76 million households” … “Hackers selling 117 million LinkedIn passwords” … and the list goes on. Hackers are out there, scouring the web and looking for sensitive information they can use or sell for profit.

Even with these well-known companies being hacked, many site owners don’t take the steps to protect their own systems to thwart intruders. Many business owners may not consider the potential liabilities if a security breach does occur.

Every site is a target

There’s a common misconception that hackers only target sites with lots of traffic. Continue reading “Your responsibilities as a site owner and the liabilities if you are hacked” …

If you have a WordPress website and are using a theme purchased from ThemeForest or another theme marketplace, the best practice is to use a child theme for your customizations. This allows you to update your theme in the future without overwriting the custom code that adds additional features and functionality. However, there’s a growing misconception regarding child themes and this post will help clarify the situation.

Recently, both Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce came out with new versions that changed how code should be written to change functionality within the shopping experiences. We started receiving messages from site owners who had placed code within their child themes and were wondering why the updates would have affected them if they used a child theme.

Some believe that if you place code within a child theme, that means it will always be compatible with future “updates”. This may be true when it comes to theme updates (depending on how much your theme’s developer cares about backwards compatibility), but there is no guarantee that your code will work with future plugin or WordPress core updates. This is a huge difference. Plugin developers are under no obligation to make their plugins work with previous code snippets that placed in a child theme – and it’s likely that any custom PHP code you place there will need to be updated due to a WordPress or plugin update in the future.

[bctt tweet=”‘A child theme keeps you compatible with future theme updates – not plugin or WordPress updates'”]

In short, if you place PHP code within your child theme, test your site when new plugin or WordPress updates are released to make sure everything is still compatible and know that you may need to tweak the code in the future to keep your functionality alive.

Did your site’s functionality break due to a recent plugin update – and you need some help getting back in shape? We can help get your site back to normal and maintain it regularly so this doesn’t happen again. Contact us here.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. (Alan J. Perlis)

Your computer’s software was written by some of the smartest minds in the world. Yet, it has bugs. Errors. Security holes. That’s why your computer prompts you  to update all the time- new patches and fixes are introduced to take care of bugs that are uncovered.

Websites are compromised of software, as well. And just like computers, they can have bugs that affect their performance or usability. But how are bugs discovered and patched?

Uncovering the bugs

When code for a website is written, it goes through a QA (quality assurance) process by the development team. This means someone is performing each task on the site – adding a product to the cart, going through checkout, writing a review, etc – and ensuring that it’s working as expected. QA will also cover testing on different screen sizes and browsers. A great number of bugs – especially showstoppers that prevent core features from working at all – are found during this phase. This means that the majority of issues never make it to the live server.

However, some bugs manage to get past QA. There’s a multitude of different tests that can be tried during the QA process, but bugs can be discovered when something new or different is attempted. Here’s a short list of things that can affect websites:
Continue reading “How to report technical issues to your development team” …

A tale of two business owners

Two competing business owners, Luther and Eileen, are looking to grow their companies with a new marketing platform on the web.  They both have the same vision in their head about how the platform should look and what results they should expect over the next few years.

Luther finds a web developer online who charges $20/hour. After explaining his vision for the platform, the developer gets to work right away with great enthusiasm. Just a few weeks later, the platform is launched and Luther is only out $2,500.

Eileen asks her friend for a referral and is recommended to speak with a web consultant. After listening to her concept, the consultant comes back with a list of ideas for alternative approaches to the platform and how it can be more readily adopted by customers. The platform project has turned into a marketing + sales tool that will take $10,000 to build. Eileen approves the project. Continue reading “The difference between a web consultant and web developer” …

When a potential customer fills out your contact form, how important is it that you get notified? How much money could you potentially lose if you don’t receive one important email notification from your site? An upcoming change from Gmail could affect your site very soon.

Following in the footsteps of AOL & Yahoo, Gmail will soon change a policy that will stop contact form submissions and other emails from “looking like” they are coming from a Gmail email address. In short, if your contact form uses the submitter’s email address in the “TO” field for the notification, it will fail and won’t ever hit your inbox.

AOL already made this change for AOL email addresses in 2014, as did Yahoo. As such, you may want to check your contact form plugin’s entries list and see if you missed some important notifications…

What’s the fix?

The policy change – or, in technical terms, the “DMARC policy being updated to ‘reject'” – means your automated emails must be coming from a different domain besides @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @aol.com.

To prevent the emails from failing, set the “TO” address in your contact form to [email protected] or simply set it to your own email address.

Bonus tip: to make life easier when you’re responding to the email notification, set the “Reply To” to the submitter’s email. When you hit the reply button in your email app, it’ll be set up to reply to the submitter rather than the noreply email address.