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So you’ve gone to all the trouble of building a multi language website, now you need to start brining people to your funky new site.

Social media, as we know, is a great way to get your message out there.  In this post I want to talk about how you can create a multi language social media presence.

I’m not going to go into the mechanics of social media marketing, that’s far beyond the scope of this post, but I will talk about how you can segment your social media efforts over different languages.

There are two main ways you can approach multi language social media, they are multiple accounts or single account multiple languages.

Multiple Social Media Accounts

The first approach is to have multiple social media accounts, one per language you support.

For example I could have the following twitter accounts @webpolyglot, @webpolyglot_ft, @webpolyglot_de.

Linking People To The Correct Account

The way I like to code up social media widgets to point to a specific URL is to use a great plugin called widget logic https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-logic/.  So I will build the site using WordPress, install WPML the multi language plugin then setup a series of social media widgets and control which one is shown dependant upon the language code that is set.

With WPML when a language is selected, a constant called ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE is set, we can test this with widget logic to decide if a widget should be shown.

Pros And Cons Of Multiple Accounts

The benefits of multiple accounts is they are dedicated to one language.  People will be more likely to share your content if it is in the languages your followers and their peers use

The downside of this approach is you are diluting your social media efforts, the reach of a tweet for example doesn’t go as far if you only have 100 followers in Italian.

Single Account with Content In Multiple Languages

The second is to have a single social media account and to have multi lingual staff look after that account.  This could be a single polyglot or it could be a team of people looking after updates for a particular language.

You could send out a tweet in English, then French then Spanish, or you could batch Facebook updates in English, then a little later translate those updates to French.

Schedule Your Content To The Appropriate Timezone.

If your multi language work is for a particular geographic area, perhaps you could schedule updates to happen at a particular time.  If you support Japanese and all your tweets go out during European working times, you are defeating the point a multi language social media.

Pros And Cons Of  A Single Account

You may need multiple people to have access to one account which can cause scheduling issues and update confusion.

People may be turned off by updates in a language they do not understand, and you could see follower loss as a result.

On the plus side there is a single account with a much larger reach to  your message gets out there more easily.

Social Media Landing pages

On most social media accounts,  you can setup a landing page where people go to, to learn more about your “thing” make sure you have these in multiple languages, and if you go the multiple account route, link to a landing page in their language.

Wrap Up

Next up I’ll talk about running ads in multiple languages so you can bring paid traffic to your site in multiple languages.

Need help setting up multi language social media?  Get a no obligation quote.

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One of the most useful suite of WordPress websites tools comes bundled under the plugin Jetpack.  In this post I want to talk about one feature of the many available and that is availability monitoring.

You can download Jetpack from this URL http://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/.

What Is Availability Monitoring

Availability monitoring is the process of checking your site is up and reporting if it goes down.

There are many tools out there such as Uptimerobot that do this, some premium some free,  but Jetpack is a very lightweight and simple way to monitor the availability of your site for free.

Why It’s so Important

The majority of site owners I know do not spend 100% of their time on their site.  Unless they have an availability monitor they don’t know when their site is down.

More importantly the message sent out to potential clients or customers about their products and services is impacted if your site is down when they visit, you only get one chance to impress and a down site will ruin that chance.

Examples:

I’ve had my site down when running pay per click campaigns, every click through to my down site was costing me money, and there was no way to recoup that money via leads.

I’ve had a client running their site on a poor quality hosting supplier, the availability monitor proved how poor their service way.

How Jetpack Monitoring Works

The good people at WordPress.com will ping your site on a recurring basis testing to see if it is up and running, if it detects error messages or the correct responses are not sent, an email is activated saying your site is down.

The point of this is that it’s an external site that is checking your site just like a user would.  It’s not something internal on your site that will fail when the rest of the site is down.

Your site will be pinged again and alerts will be sent every few minutes saying you are still down until your site comes back up.  Then you get an all clear message.

See this page for full details http://jetpack.me/support/monitor/

How To Setup Jetpack

Install and config the plugin from the URL at the top fo this page.

Create an account and WordPress.com and sync jetpack with that account.

Go to Jetpack -> settings, scroll down to monitor and activate it.  Set your email address and it’s as simple as that.  Here is a quick video to show you how.

[youtube http://youtu.be/5KgoQWMBiOc]

Wrap up

Jetpack has a host of really useful tools like an improved spell checker which used to be known as After The Deadline , Infinite Scroll and Carousel to name just three, Jetpack is something I recommend for all site owners.

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A number of our maintenance clients have asked us to build development environments for them, I thought it would be a good idea to outline how we create development environments, in case you wanted one too.

What Is  Development Environment?

A development environment is a clone of your live site that you can work on without impacting your live site.  You could use your development site for any of the following reasons:

• Installing and testing new themes without changing live.
• Adding new plugins and testing if they work with your live site.
• Coding up changes to themes or plugins, such as CSS tweaks.
• Load testing your site with thousands of users

The point is, it’s a clone of your live site you can play with and not harm your live site.  This is a tried and tested principle of software development, you develop and test in the development environment, then promote to live once you are happy.

The Process.

I’m going to teach you how to build a development environment in the following format.

Your live site is at yourdomain.com.  We are going to build a completely separate site at yourdomain.com/development.

Step 1: Create A New Database

We are going to build a  new database for development so any impact on the database does not affect your live site.

To create a new database login to you hosting account and look for the control panel.  Under there will be a number of database tools.  I cannot give you exact details as each hosting company does things slightly differently.  If you host uses cPanel, which the majority do, the tools will look like this.

Run the MYSQL DB Wizard, this will step you through creating a new database.  Remember to note the database name, user name and password you will need them later in the process.

Step 2: Clone Your Live Site

The next step is to clone your live site, I like to use a plugin called duplicator to do this.

 https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/

Install the plugin and create a duplicator package, this is an archive of all your files and your database.   Here is a quick video to show you how to create an archive with duplicator.

[youtube http://youtu.be/eiiKFhDfGZw]

Step 3: Build The Development Area

Connect to your site using ftp and create a subdirectory called development.

Upload the installer.php file you just created along with the archive files you have downloaded to the subdirectory /development.

In a web browser open the file yourdomain.com/development/installer.php.  This will run a script to duplicate your site to /development.

The first thing the script asks for are the database details you created in step one .

Once you can connect to the database click run deployment and the script runs duplicating your site.

What is so cool about duplicator is it changes all the URLs in your site so if anything was pointing to yourdomain.com/image.png it would be changes to yorudomain.com/development/image.png.  In the past I used to write database scripts to do all this for me.

That’s it, your site is cloned.

Mark It As Private

The last thing to do is mark your new development site as private.   You have cloned all your post and pages so you don’t want Google slapping you with a duplicate content penalty do you?

On the new development site go to settings -> reading search engine visibility and click on “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”

Test To Your Hearts Content

You now have a clone of your live site that you can mess around with to your hearts content.  Sometimes these sites are called sandboxes after the kids play area where you can mess around, build castles, poor water everywhere and not worry about your live site.

Wrap Up

Want you own development site but are not confident to do it?  Why not join our maintenance program and we can build one for you.

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I’m offering a new service called the “Multi Language Website Readiness Review” and I want to tell you more about this service and why it can help people thinking about building a multi language website.

What Is It?

This service is part consultation, part technical review of your website.

I will book a Skype call with you to discuss your potential multi language website build, get details of your project and an understanding of your problems.

I’ll ask for access to your current website to technically review it and see if you are ready for a site that can support multiple languages.

Is This Service For Me?

This service is for people considering building a multi language website.

You have a problem in your business that needs your website to support multiple languages it could be:

• Expansion into a new territory
• Making your site more usable for existing clients in different countries/territories
• Statutory Requirement to make your site multi lingual

If this is you then the service can really help.

What WIll I Get?

The output of this consultation and technical review is a detailed report.  The areas I will cover are:

• Can your current infrastructure work with multi language, do you need to invest in new technology?
• Cost benefits analysis, will the investment in development create at least a x2 return on that investment?
• Detailed breakdown of the investment cost to implement a multi language website?

You also get the consulting call where you can pick my brains about multi languages websites.  This is a two way consulting call, not just me collecting details of your project.  If you have any questions or concerns about supporting multiple languages, prepare them for our call.

Why Do I Need A Readiness Review?

I’ve created this low cost service so people can get a real feel for the investment they need to make to build a multi language website.

Many clients I work with greatly underestimate the work and requirements for this type of site, use this entry level service to avoid costly mistakes down the line.

The areas people are not aware of are

• Infrastructure – do I need new coding or hosting
• Translation costs, many people have no idea what professional translators costs, and how much content they have.
• Development costs to make a website work with multiple languages.
• On-going costs, websites are not static, how can you keep your site up to date in all languages.
• Hidden costs, what happens when I start to get lots of new leads from customers using foreign languages.

Cost

This service is a fixed price package of GBP 99.00

Book A Review

If you would like to book a review please complete the form below.

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Many of us have an email provider such as Mailchimp or Aweber attached to our WordPress sites.

Are you sending out an image heavy, highly styled newsletter or are you optimising for mobile devices?

Would it surprise you to hear that a large percentage of your newsletter readers are using mobile devices?

Are you yourself reading lots of email on a small hand held device, and do you find it frustrating?

I think it’s very important to optimise your email newsletters for mobile.

Optimise For Mobile Devices

What do I mean by optimising for mobile?  I mean that when someone opens your email newsletter on their phone, they can very easily read and understand your message.

They are not bombarded by huge images.

They don’t have to re-size and swipe left and right to read your message because your template is too wide.

It means removing a barrier to entry so your message (be it information or sales) gets to people on whatever device they choose to use.

Cut The Fluff

Here are the things that will drive your mobile readers mad:

• Sidebars
• Wide formats that requires swipes left and right to read
• Tiny fonts
• Huge images taking up all the screen

Cut out everything that you don’t need in your email, it should be a short message that leads people to a bigger call to action on a blog post, landing page or sales page.

Test It

Once you have optimised your email for mobile, please read it on your mobile device.

Test it, make sure it looks good and is easy to read on a small screen.

Test it on larger tablet screens too, doe it still look good.

Finally test is again on a desktop screen, is it responsive to a bigger screen too, you don’t want to alienate the rest of your readers.

What I Did

I found out from stats in Mailchimp that over 35% of my readers were on mobile devices, that is a third of people who would struggle to read my newsletter.

Here’s a screen shot to show the break down.

So I redesigned the template on my newsletter, I cut out the sidebar and the images, leaving only a minimal template that shows off a header, a brief description of my post or offer and link to my main site.

I also have a call to action to sell my services

This is plain black and white and shades of grey text, nothing fancy but it is very easily read on all types of device.  Here’s a screen dump of my new template.

Remember A Responsive Website

What’s the point in making your email template readable, but when your reader clicks through to your main site you have an unresponsive main website that they cannot easily read on their phone.

Select a theme that is responsive or go for one of the many mobile ready plugins such as wp-touch that do the job for you https://wordpress.org/plugins/wptouch/

What You Should Do

My advice to you is look at the various templates your email provider has and select a responsive one, Mailchimp and Aweber both have these and I’m pretty sure the other main email providers will too.

If they don’t there is always the option to have a text only email.

Wrap Up

We are moving away from our desktops at a rapid pace, responsive websites and native iPhone/iPad and Android apps are taking over from our websites.  We need to embrace the mobile device or our desktop optimised websites will not serve us.

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I’m often asked if I offer monthly retainer packages, and the answer is yes I do.

I’ve never had a formal page detailing my retainer packages so I’m going to write one up first as a blog post then move it over to a full time page.

What Is A Retainer Package

It’s when you have an on-going requirement for WordPress development and  support and would like to retain my services for a prolonged period of time.

I’ll set aside X hours for you per month and you pay a recurring invoice for that number of hours each month until your project is completed.  Tell me how many hours you need and we can setup a recurring payment.

I Offer This On A Limited Basis

I only book about 30% of my time out to retainer clients so I have time to manage my team, grow my business and take on one off projects too.

I limit myself to five retainer clients per month.  I have two slots currently available.

What Do you Get As  A Retainer Client

I offer the following benefits to my retainer clients:

• Discounted rates – because you are buying my time in bulk I offer a discounted rate.
• Priority On Your Projects – I’ll set aside time for your project.
• Direct Access to project updates on Basecamp  – I will give you your own secure area on my project management tool where you can send me tasks to do on your site, this will also be the central place all updates will be stored.
• Access to a timesheet to check on your available hours – I’ll give you a link to my Freshbooks account so you can see what I have been working on and how many hours you have left on your retainer.
• Free Maintenance And Updates – all my retainer client also get free access to my maintence service.  My team will backup your site, monitor and maintain security.  Update WordPress and any plugins as updates become due and give you a weekly report.  That’s a saving of $39 per month.
• Skype access so you can ping me about your projects

Retainer Packages

I have retainer packages of 5, 10 and 15 hours respectively.  The more hours  you buy the more discount is available, get a quote below.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q) Can I have you working on multiple sites?

Y) Yes you buy a a package of hours not dedicated to any one site.

Q) What if I go over my X hours?

Y) You can buy an additional package or I can bill you on a per hour basis, this is all at the same discounted rate.

Q) Is there a minimum number of months I need to commit to?

A) No, you can take on a one month retainer and end it after your hours are used.

Q) Do I pay up front?

A) Yes it’s like a pre-paid mobile phone contact, you buy X hours and use those until they are done.

Q) Is there a minimum usage?

A) I record time in in 15 minute increments I’ve found that allows you to call down small jobs like a plugin install and not burn through your hours too quickly

Q) Can I roll over hours I don’t use in a month?

A) No they don’t accumulate, but that being said if you go over your X hours and didn’t use all last months I’m not  going to nickel and dime you for an hour here or there.

Q) What about when you are on holiday / vacation?

A) I do take time off, but I will let you know well in advance, and there are other members of my team available to deal with any emergencies that might crop up while I’m away.

Still Interested in A Retainer Package?

If you are interested in a retainer package complete the form below and I’ll prepare a quite for you.

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Image of Don Quixote and His Loyal Retainer Sancho Panza  by Picasso