Around one third of the websites we’re entrusted to manage had serious connectivity issues yesterday. Sorry about that. This was caused by a massive and sustained DDoS attack on the London data centre by persons unknown. The service provider (WPEngine) and end-point data centre (Linode) worked very hard to deal with the sustained attack and […]
Trying to stay ahead in the digital world. Every year we (bravely) have a stab at what’s going to be big during the year. This year we weren’t a million miles out. We predicted: Wearables, Internet of Things, Client-centric Marketing, Design Frameworks, Collaborative Economy, SmartPay and Privacy and Security. I reckon that’s a solid four-and-a-half […]
WordPress Support. Well another year goes by (our 20th Christmas since we founded) and it’s “service as normal” for us. It’s now Week 51 of 2015, and our last full week of the year. We officially shut-up shop for the Christmas period at midday on Friday the 18th – and will continue to monitor and […]
WordPress Hosting. Security, hacks, privacy and more hacking seem to be major theme of 2015. And now the whole of the cloud is rebooting for the second time this year. As part of an undisclosed security vulnerability, most of the cloud will go down for up to 30 minutes – usefully not all at the […]
Today, the 10th of December, WPEngine (a WordPress only managed hosting company and one of our primary hosting partners) informed us that they had experienced a potential data breach – “We are writing today to let you know that we learned of an exposure involving some of our customers’ credentials.” They recommended that we reset […]
Lessons from 2015. In the digital world, every year is different. A combination of challenges, rushes, highs and lows … and when it’s all over there are lessons to be learned, wisdom to distill. In the last 20 years, if there is one thing that we have learned it is that the world moves pretty […]
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Peerless WordPress Support. Are we lucky – or just plain good at what we do? Two and a half years ago we started openly publishing our WordPress support statistics, and we were pretty proud of them at the time. Average response was around 1 day (in an industry that often takes days to respond to […]
Being Agile. We’re old hands at agile, having adopted agile development methodology back in 2009. How we implement it is fairly unique to us. If you’re reading this, then you’re probably already well versed in agile. However, our version of the five founding principles are most definitely worth repeating: Individuals and interactions over processes and […]
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WordCamp, a WordPress Gathering. The inaugural WordCamp US event is in Philadephia. What can you expect and how to survive. Philly is a great place, famous for being home to the Liberty Bell, the Declaration of Independence, and Philly cheesesteaks! It’s a great place, and for three days in early December it will play host […]
Being a WordPress Agency. Work/Life balance is one of the most contentious subjects in the workspace today. But substantial evidence exists that a shorter working is better for everyone. As part of our 2011 Better Working Initiative, we relaxed the working week to 30hrs and instigated 100% location independent working. It had mixed results initially, […]
Digital publishing. Sure it’s been tough in content publishing for the last decade, but 2015 and 2016 will probably go down as watershed years. Content is no longer controlled by news agencies as the printed world dies – and with it the super-massive advertising models that drove the news industry for half a century. For […]
Peerless WordPress Support. 100% client satisfaction, sub 3-hr response, 350 support tickets. In the 3 years since we started using a formalised support ticketing system (Zendesk) we’ve seen a 300% growth in the volume of tickets. Using a formalised ticketing application has changed how we approach supporting our clients, and we’ve seen a huge improvement […]
Inside our agency We’ve created some pretty innovative e-commerce solutions over the past three decades, but until 2014 we’ve never supported off-the-shelf solutions. And here is why. We’re huge fans of being transparent; it’s in our culture to be open and honest about what we do, what we don’t and, more importantly, why. So here […]
Privacy and Security. The privacy backlash might have been coming for years, but very few organisations are really ready. In a remarkable parallel of the mobile explosion in 2012, the growing privacy drive is looking like it will catch out thousands of organisations in the UK. You probably recognise the little green padlock next to […]
Read More… from Move to HTTPS now: Do not delay, do not get left behind
Being a WordPress Agency. As every facet of doing business is changing, the good old days are most definitely gone. The shape of our digital agency in 2015 has little in common with how we looked in 2005. And here is what we’ve found as we’ve grown from being a 20th century start-up into a […]
Just a bit of fun. Today, Oct 21st 2015, is “Back to the Future” day, the fictional day that Doc & Marty travelled to in 1985’s top-grossing film. Sadly we don’t have hover boards and much of the other various stuff predicted or imagined some 30 years ago (we do have retro 1980’s cafe’s though). […]
Data Protection & Privacy. The commonplace transfer of personal data out of the EU zone is now illegal – how it that going to affect us? For fifteen years the US Safe Harbor Framework allowed US companies to self-certify that they would protect EU citizens’ data in the US. That all stopped late last week, […]
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Being a WordPress Agency. Freelancers represent the cream of the WordPress industry. They are better skilled, more experienced, devoted to WordPress and are more creative. By a long way. WordPress has grown-up using the incredible freelance community that surrounds it – mostly these talented individuals worked at agencies before out-growing the old-tech, old-world agency environment. […]
The changing face of eCommerce. A decade ago, the use of eCommerce platforms was heavily fragmented – often local purchasing decisions meant companies might operate a handful of different, and incompatible, platforms. Much like the growth of WordPress itself, a new player WooCommerce has come to dominate the eCommerce space. And in doing so has […]
WordPress Optimisation. For over a decade, “Landing Pages” have been the go-to technology for improving on-site conversion. Is this true … and what’s the best way to implement landing pages on a WordPress installation? In the days before integrated web platforms such as WordPress, building and tracking landing pages was a real pain in the […]
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