We know WordPress, having built hundreds of sites since 2007. Today, with ample themes available, building a nice looking site has never been easier. But few live up to expectations, getting little search traffic and generating few business leads. This is where we can help. Speed is always the first thing we look at, since WordPress sites are often 2-3x slower than most others. … read more
Our top 20 Articles
The Best Value Marketing Automation Options
Updated for 2017 - Marketing Automation is on the rise, helping companies large and small reduce their sales costs whilst building up their client base, automatically. Online success often starts with web subscribe forms to build up an email list, linked to an email marketing system … [Read More...]
EIG Webhosting Nightmares
More bad news out this week for those needing a webhost. The infamous EIG group, which maintains dozens of brands, including Hostgator, Bluehost, Site5, Arvixe, Small Orange, are sacking staff. http://bit.ly/another-eig-nightmareTheir press release on these layoffs states "... to … [Read More...]
Woocommerce + Stripe payments coming to New Zealand
February 2017 Update - Those of you who have setup WooCommerce sites will know the frustration in establishing credit card payments. Most just use paypal which is easy to setup and works. But it has limitations, like transferring money to your banking account, which takes time. For a … [Read More...]
Deals on WordPress Hosting
It's hard to find good, fast, reliable hosts today, especially if you're on a tight budget. For businesses, the VPS (Private Server) option is always the best, rather than the common 'Shared Server' hosting. But a VPS can get expensive. Inmotion in the US provide an affordable, … [Read More...]
WordPress Upgrades – To Keep Out Hackers
WordPress sites do need routine maintenance. Like a car, regular monthly or quarterly updates are needed to keep the site fast, secure, reliable. But the one-click upgrades of WordPress alone is never enough. WordPress coding itself is seldom the security problem. It's very robust, … [Read More...]
Selling Art, Photos or eBooks on WordPress?
We've had a few larger, more complex projects recently involving sites with thousands of images and users. These are not your normal WordPress installs and often standard tools and plugins don't work well.If you do a search in the WordPress repository for gallery, there's 1,000+ … [Read More...]
The Two Best WordPress Lead & Sales Tracking Tools
We've been working with a few clients this year on integrating their WordPress site with third party CRM systems. From a sales and customer service perspective, this makes a lot of sense. One system we're come to love is Leadin. Their free Leadin plugin we've had running on this and … [Read More...]
My WooCommerce Cart is Broken – Do I need a WordPress Geek?
We come across many with broken or sickly shopping cart sites using the popular WooCommerce cart extension. Most often, the business has employed a web design 'expert' in WordPress to build it, but it inevitably fails to meet expectations.From my developers perspective, … [Read More...]
WordPress Websites for Local Sports Clubs
Want a slick, affordable, up-gradable website for your sports club? You've come to the right place. There are some slick themes and plugins specifically for those who run sports activities for their school or local club. One we love is WPClubManager. The basic plugin is free, with … [Read More...]
Broken Website? Different Skills Needed Today
Websites have certainly got more complex over the years, especially if the goal is to be fast, reliable and search-friendly. Since the 90s, it's gone from simple brochure sites put together by a graphic designer, to complex content-managed, database-driven sites. The visual design is … [Read More...]
A Slick Shopping Site for under $2000?
We get regular requests to build shopping cart sites for small businesses and startups. Their budgets are often limited and expectations high. The average industry quote for a basic cart site, without much content or products is $6,000. And this excludes any SEO or traffic-building … [Read More...]
Tech talk – WordPress 4.5 update breaking sites
We've seen a stream of sites where the most recent WordPress core update is breaking the site. Issues around media (upload errors), sliders, even WooCommerce editing problems. An outdated, incompatible theme is the most common problem, although specific plugins like visual composer … [Read More...]
New Websites – Speed, ranking & capturing leads not included?
We fix a lot of WordPress sites, many using popular pre-built themes. Some look very slick, yet 6 months after it goes live, there's little to show for it. It's slow and gets little traffic. Often, the first time we get involved is when the site is hacked and the designer can't fix … [Read More...]
WordPress & WooCommerce – For Serious Business Use
WooCommerce, the free shop plugin for WordPress, now has over 750 plugin feature add-ons. This is more than any other cart on earth. Some enhancements are cosmetic, others providing highly advanced tools. And recent updates to WordPress mean it's becoming even easier for developers to … [Read More...]
New WordPress to Shopify Plugin
Yes, WordPress has it's own cart, WooCommerce. We've built or maintained hundreds of sites using it. Woocommerce is the most popular cart in use today, used to sell a few or a thousand products. If you're an existing WordPress user, then Woocommerce is the obvious and best choice. But … [Read More...]
Beyond Design – Speed, Leads, Being Found…
This year we've seen a big increase in enquiries from annoyed website owners - Often it’s a pretty website, but 6 months after a costly build or design makeover, still isn’t getting much traffic. Many have even tried those SEO experts from India that flood our email boxes each week, … [Read More...]
Themeforest themes – Optimisation and tuning service
Themeforest is very popular today. This site provides cheap, ready-to-go themes, saving businesses thousands in design fees. But any new site using these pre-built themes can look nice but still be very slow, not function well, or lack traffic. This is especially so for those using … [Read More...]
Need a WordPress Expert to Speed up Your Site?
Search engines love speedy sites, as do visitors. Site speed is one of the key factors that determine whether you get a decent placement in Google search results. On top of that, it's also crucial for user-friendliness and getting a good conversion rate. Slow WordPress sites are … [Read More...]
Google AdWords – Good Value for Money?
There's a bit of a scam going on these days with Google, called AdWords. I'm not saying the product (or Google) is bad, but the simple fact it's being used by companies for the wrong reasons.To me it's a sign of failure. They haven't been able to get their website ranked … [Read More...]
WordPress Website Migration, Backup & Restore
Moving hosts is becoming common as the popular cheap shared systems seldom meet expectations. The first hurdle is just ensuring your new host is going to be better than the last! With hundreds of migrations under our belt, you can trust us to know the best hosts and the correct … [Read More...]
