Usergroup Roundup and news from EU

November 18, 2011 2020media

It’s been a busy week with a Joomla and WordPress usergroup sessions, as well as a meeting with Eurid, the registry for .eu domains.

Joomla Usergroup

Joomla Usergroup London logo The regular monthly meetup of the London Joomla usergroup took place on Tuesday. Phil from SoftForge gave us some insights into the Akeeba Backup tool. Many people already use the extension to make backups of their site. What is not so well know is that the Pro version (a very reasonable $50 or so for unlimited sites) easily adds the ability to copy the backup to offsite storage. Currently DropBox and Amazon Storage are available. Phil also pointed out the security feature of Akeeba to setup a secret key as attackers could trigger your backup repeatedly and cause a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. This setting is in the top right Parameters button. Akeeba Backup is even being used to non-Joomla websites.

2020Media will setup Akeeba for any customer using our hosting competely free of charge. Just ask!

WordPress Usergroup

Two talks this week – WordPress SEO and a newbies guide to Custom Post Types. The evening began with a quick roundup of WordPress news (download the podcast).

WordPress 3.3 is almost out. New features include a drag and drop interface for adding images and other media.
Akismet, the anti comment spam service is continuing it’s march towards a paid model
There’s a plugin to check your website for vulnerability to the tomthumb problem.
WP Install Profiles is a Drupal-like idea for developers who want to pre-fill their installs with their favourite plugins and themes.

David Bain, an internet marketing expert who uses WordPress in his work, talked about getting your WordPress website noticed in the search engines. David talked us through his 3 “P”s – Preparation, Publishing and Performance. Lots of great tips and well worth attending if you were able to get to London. His slides and our podcast will be available soon. Download the podcast

Keith Devon gave us a great introduction to Custom Post Types, which was very useful for the new developer or designer. Simply put, setting up Custom Post types allows you to add a new section to the admin menu for a adding content to a specific type of page that you design. For example if you had staff profiles, you can create a page entry that has boxes for their name, position and job description, and then on the front end display this in a particular way. Download the podcast.

Eurid Meeting

Aliette Boshier from Eurid — Aliette Boshier

The team for the .eu registry were in London to convince the euro-sceptics in the UK that getting a .eu domain is a good idea! Whilst the argument “show you are European” may not be terribly popular at the moment, the EU is still Britains largest overseas trading partner. If you run a business that trades with the European area, a .eu domain is a wise choice to link to your website.

The .eu domain is 5 years old this year and is now considered a well established and trustworthy domain extension. There are over 3 million .eu domains in use, and it’s the 5th most popular extension in the UK (behind .uk, .com, .net and .org). .eu domains are now available from 2020Media with multi-year periods of 1 to 10 years, and were one of the first domain extensions in the world to offer a registry-backed DNSSEC (secure DNS) support.

Domain Names

Secure your .uk domains

November 15, 2011 2020media

The .uk country code domain currently offers a single registration period – 2 years.

Starting from May of next year we will be offering the more common registration periods of 1 to 10 years for .co.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk domains. The allows users of .uk domains to have the same protection that they have in .com, .net and other top level domains.

.uk market

A recent report shows that .uk registrations grew by 10.5% over the past 12 months, bringing the total number of domains to 9.7 million by the end of September 2011. .uk also maintains its position as the world’s second largest country code registry after Germany’s .de.

The report also shows that the global market for domain names is healthy and growing with an increase of 9.5% this year, taking the total number of domains globally to 218 million, an increase of 19 million. Generic Top Level Domains now make up 60% of the market while 39% are country code Top Level Domains.

Tips and Tricks

Privacy Matters

October 26, 2011 2020media 1 Comment

Google adverts and many others set cookies in your browser that allow them to track you across the web. Google (as an example), uses this information to display adverts that it thinks you are more likely to click on, based on the kind of sites you’ve visited in the past. Here’s how the world’s 3rd biggest search engine Yahoo! describe it:

“To make our ads more relevant and useful for you, we make educated guesses about your interests based on your activity on Yahoo!’s sites and services.”

Quite apart from the privacy concerns this raises, it can make SEO (search engine optimisation) of your website harder to do. If you are checking keywords in search engines, how do you know if you are seeing the same results as an ordinary user who’s never heard of you before?

Fortunately you can opt out of these networks (well most of them).

Because the default behaviour is opt-IN, these methods set a cookie that tells the advertiser to stop tracking. If you clear all your cookies, this preference it lost and you will have to revisit these pages again to opt-out again.

Location information is also commonly being captured by search engines so it’s important to clear this as well when you are doing research on your website’s search engine ranking. Google call it location-based customization.

2020Media can help

Use the links above to check your browser’s current settings – if you use more than one browser you will need to use each in turn.

2020Media are beta-testing a new free service to all customers – SEO Panel. This is a complete open source seo control panel for managing search engine optimization of your websites and works independently of your browser settings. If you’d like to be in the trial, let us know.

Customers can update their communication preferences with 2020Media by logging in to the customer portal, clicking My Profile and editing the Bulletins tab.

2020Media takes privacy matters extremely seriously. We have a privacy statement on our website. This describes the policy that is in place to protect your personal information.

When changes are requested to your services, website or email, expect us to be robust in challenging the person making the request to prove they are authorised to do so, especially when the change requested could affect the availability of that service. 2020Media prides itself on being “small enough to care, large enough to cope”; so our staff attempt to speak to each and every contact during the service. This helps improve security as well as emphasises that we are not just a faceless supplier – we’re trusted partners in your internet presence.

Opinion

Publishing with WordPress

October 21, 2011 2020media

The Telegraph were hosting this month’s London WordPress meetup at their headquarters in Victoria.

Talk 1:
- BuddyPress core developer Paul Gibbs talked about how the Telegraph uses WordPress.

Talk 2:
- WordPress and Web Accessibility: Why it’s Important

Graham Armfield talked about accessibility. The presentation covered some issues that disabled and elderly users experience with websites, then discussed steps that we all can take to improve accessibility – and why it makes business sense.

How the Telegraph uses WordPress.

The Telegraph media group have two websites running WordPress. There is Telegraph Blogs, which is where 40 or so journalists have their own blogs; and MyTelegraph which is where the public have their say.

Telegraph Blogs

Telegraph blogs uses WordPress multisite install to host a blog for each of the journalists. In turn these are split into several headings such as News, Sport, Culture, so that an editor can manage the content for each section. For speed, they use memcached and Akamai content delivery. The Akamai network in particular helps with spikes in traffic when a particular topic gets a lot of traffic in a short space of time. The themes are fairly static, but new plugins are added regularly and comprise a mix of off-the-shelf contributed WordPress plugins, and in-house plugins that have been built to meet a specific need for Telegraph Blogs. All undergo thorough manual and automated testing for security and scalability and are usually tweaked in some way. Some of the plugins used include: yoast breadcrumbs, WordPress SEO, Widget Logic.

MyTelegraph

MyTelegraph is probably the largest BuddyPress installation in the UK, with over 90,000 users. It’s no surprise then that Paul is a lead developer of BuddyPress. The MyTelegraph is a mix of groups and personal member blogs. The groups section includes categories such as Politics, Travel, Book Club and Football and uses the power of niche communities to maintain focus and engagement with members. Community managers guide the site and help new users find their feet. Groups are a feature of BuddyPress. Users can also create their own blogs, which is deployed with WordPress Multisite. The sitewide tags plugin allows their posts to appear on the MyTelegraph home page. Other plugin used include yoast breadcrumbs, blackbird pie (a twitter integrator), WP report posts, BuddyPress group blog, and of course BuddyPress itself.

You can listed to Paul’s talk on our podcast – the audio quality isn’t great as no-one told Paul to use the mic until 30 seconds before he finished!

WordPress and Web Accessibility

52% of people who meet the legal definition of having a disablilty prefer not to describe themselves as disabled. There are around 10 million people in the UK with some kind of impairment – if your website doesn’t address basic accessibility then you could be losing money and clicks.

Graham used Tesco as an example – a redesign of their website to improve accessibility cost £35,000, but after the relaunch, the website turnover was up £1.6million.

Accessibility – why it matters

Graham Armfield speaking at London WordPress — Graham Armfield

Graham’s interesting and informative talk covered what WordPress does well and not so well when it comes to helping the disabled access your content. Screen readers are commonly used by those with a visual impairment (they convert the text to speech). The other common accessibility method is tab – instead of using a mouse, users will hit the tab key to move around a web page.

With these two tools in mind, Graham demonstrated how some WordPress generated sites could be severely lacking in usability if you looked at them without a mouse or only a screen reader. Some drop-down menus weren’t showing up when hitting tab, meaning those sections of the website would be totally inaccessible. Screen readers can give misleading information due to over-use of the title tag (which is extensive in WordPress).

There are a few WordPress plugins that can help: Remove Title Attributes; My Read More; Accessible Tag Cloud. Graham called for developers to help extend and create more plugins to improve accessibility in WordPress.

Some tips for users of WordPress:

Image Alt Tag. Read out by screen readers to make it descriptive
- For decorative images leave blank
- Background images are usually ignored by screen readers so don’t bother.
- If image is a link, describe the destination
Links. “Read More” is no use to a blind person. Make the link text mean something
- If the link opens a new window, say so in the title attribute. It’s confusing for screen readers otherwise.
- There’s no need to repeat the same text in the title tag as on the hyperlink – screen readers will read out the same thing twice
Headings. Often used as a navigational shortcut. As per good design practice, break up your content using heading tags.
Lists. Lists like this one should be coded using appropriate html (the UL, LI tags) – the screen reader will tell the user they are in a list and how many items it has etc.
Video. Avoid auto start, Add captions using tools like subtitle-horse.com
Menus. Make sure you can tab around the menu.

Graham finished his presentation with a collection of links for further reading. These included the WAI-ARIA project, W3.org, HTML5accessibility.com, Accessify and his own blog at Coolfields.

Download the podcast, or watch Graham’s slides at SlideShare.

Paul Gibbs speaking about WordPress use at the Telegraph — Paul Gibbs

Organizer Chris Adams with Graham and Paul — WordPress London

Do you need help with a WordPress website? Why not talk to 2020Media – we have oodles of enthusiasm, buckets of knowledge and tons of techies who are eager to help!