Category: Case Study

As we have developed our maintenance service WP Insure we have added some additional features that are pretty hard to describe in sales copy.

Over and above our maintenance services of backup, updates, monitoring and security we also offer little support jobs we call tweaks.

Our clients will call in support for a tweak usually when something goes wrong with their site.  In this post I want to talk about the hard to describe feature of our plan.

The Tweakmeister

There is a dedicated member of the team at WP Dude (John) who looks after tweaks for our client sites.  If anything goes wrong or you need help it’s probably him you will be dealing with.

Clients get access to a members only help desk where they can send in their issues.  They send the tweak into that and we take care of it.

Example Tweaks

Here is a short list of the kind of things we will do for our clients.

Memory Full – we’ve been called in when memory capacity is exceeded when new plugins are added or the site becomes busier, we will update memory settings to make more available to WordPress

.htaccess issues – .htaccess is a configuration files that is used by WordPress in a number of ways, it holds permalink details, redirection details, cache plugin details, the list goes on, we are at hand to make changes to this file

Email Consulting  – sometimes our clients want to know what is the best way to do “X” on a WordPress site, we act as consultants via email to our clients.  We’ve worked on thousands of WordPress sites and have probably done what you want to do on other sites.

Hack Recovery – we have recovered hacked client sites before.

Database Optimisation – many site owners are not aware they need to optimize their WordPress database on a regular basis,  tables fill up , junk gets left over from unused plugins, it’s good practise to spring clean your database regularly, we do this as a matter of course.

Crash Recovery – if your site goes down we will recover it.  Nothing more to say on that point.

Plugin Install and Config – We’ve helped clients with troublesome plugin installs.  This tends to be complex plugins such as e-commerce or multi language plugins.

Premium Theme installs  – the call usually sounds something like “I just bought a new theme and installed it and it looks nothing like the demo”.  We are available to wade through the documentation, find out about short codes and custom post types to make your site look like the one on the advert.

Hosting migration – We’ve already got the tools in place to clone your site to a new hosting company if you are our maintenance client.

Backup Restores – Should anything go wrong and you need to roll back to an earlier point in time, we can do it with one click.

Weird PHP errors – Once we get into trouble shooting PHP ( the scripting language used by WordPress), most site owners don’t want to know, we will look into the issues, be it file upload size too small, headers already sent errors, just send it to the help desk.

Plugins broken after updates – Sadly this is a fairly frequent issue, WordPress is updated but the plugin is not and it breaks, we roll back updates, work with plugin developers to find solutions or install alternative plugins that do the same job but work.

Theme tweaks  – want to change the colours, use a snazzy new font, we are the team to tweak your CSS file of your theme.

Training – In the same vein as email consulting we also create small training videos for our clients to show them how to so that thing they need to do, We record screencasts using Jing and send them over to clients.

Script Integrations – we’ve linked up WordPress sites with third party scripts such as Facebook, Pinterest, Zapier and Google Analytics.

The list goes on – just ask we can probably do it for you (the not so small print we don’t do custom theme development, custom plugin development or graphic design as part of the maintenance plan).

Outsource Your Technical Hassles

When you sign up for our maintenance plan you are getting access to a team of WordPress experts.  Outsource the worry of maintaining and supporting your site to us. Concentrate on the real work of building your business.

Wrap Up

Our maintenance service is not just backups and updates it is support when things go wrong, or just when it gets too technical for non-techie site owners we are there.

If you are looking for hassle free technical support for your WordPress site, then we are the team, for full details and a 30 day free trial check out our maintenance service WP Insure.

One of my maintenance clients was having an issue with a scraper stealing his content and
posting it on their site as original content without attribution, he asked me via email how to stop scrapers stealing his content.

What Is A Scraper?

A scraper is one of the dark denizens of the internet along with trolls and spammers.

Scrapers steal other people’s content and add it to their own site passing it off as original content, and usually monetise it in some way.

They might sell it as original guest post content or they may own the target site and wrap it in ads or sell products or services.

Steps To Stopping A Scraper

The first step is to identify that you are being scraped.

One good way is to setup a Google alert for you content.  You can go this at google.com/alerts.  With google alerts you can get an email alert if certain things appear on the net.  Add an alert for something you have in your content such as a post title of your most popular post and you will be alerted if a scraper takes your content without asking.

Once you have a hit record the URL of the offending site

Look at your logs.  In your hosting account there will be an option to look at your webserver logs, search for referrers of the offending URLs and you will be able to find the IP address of the scrapers.  Record these for the next step.

Plugins To Stop Them

RSS Footer – the majority of scrapers will grab your content with one of the autoblogging plugins out there.  This will grab your rss feed and add it to their site automatically.  I personally use rss footer on my site and add an image link advert back to my hire me page so the scraper becomes my unpaid advertiser.  But you can use this plugin to add a footer to your rss posts so people know it’s from your site.

WP Ban – once you know a scrapers IP address or referral site, you can add them to wp-ban a plugin that locks particular IP addresses out of your site and stops them scraping your content.

.htaccess – if you are more tech savvy you can do exactly the same thing by adding the following statement.

order allow,deny
deny from 192.168.44.201
deny from 224.39.163.12
deny from 172.16.7.92
allow from all

Getting Scraped Content Removed From The Internet

Probably the best way to get scraped content removed is to send a DCMA notice to the offender.

If that doesn’t work approach the hosting company and get them to remove it.  Remember you have copyright of all your content, here is my  hosting companies policy https://www.bluehost.com/copyright-claims-policy

Please note if the offender is outside of your Jurisdiction you probably won’t get remedy.

My Personal View – Let It Go

In the words of Elsa from Disney’s Frozen, I let it go … (an apology to any parents of Girls from the age of 0-10 you’ve heard enough of this already 🙂 )

The effort of monitoring for and chasing down people who are scraping your content is just too much, I’ve already got too many things on my plate and policing the internet is not one I want to take on.

Adopt the mindset that it’s a compliment, people only steal good content and that the massive heads at Google will be able to spot a real authority site rather than a shoddy pasted together one.  They will know when article X was published and when article X+scrape is indexes I’m sure they can see through it.

Wrap Up

This kind of email consulting / help is something I offer to all my maintenance clients, so not only are you getting backups, updates security and monitoring, you also get a WordPress expert on your team for consults via email at a very reasonable fee.
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I want to present a case study from a project I did with one of my clients where standard WordPress roles were not enough and we needed to extend the editor role.  I’ll show you the process for extending WordPress roles in this post.

What Are Roles

Roles are the access control system of a WordPress site, they say what a person can do once they are logged into the dashboard, for example the admin role can do anything on your site, but the editor role can do anything regarding content, but cannot do admin style tasks such as installing plugins or themes.

Standard Roles

WordPress has a number of predefined roles that users of your site can be assigned to, from most permissions down to least, the default roles are:

• Administrator
• Editor
• Author
• Contributor
• Subscriber

One Size Does Not Fit All

For the vast majority of people the six standard roles are more than enough, but there are certain scenarios where they are not quiet right, that is where we need to create a new role or extend an existing one.

The Editor That Needed More

In the case of my client, they were building a multi language site, they had a number of people on staff to create content for their site, and organised them into admin and editor roles.

The problem was that they wanted to send out content for translation to a third party translation company that was integrated into their site.  Because there is a cost involved in this, the plugin in question WPML sets this function as an admin level task.

What we needed to do was extend the editor role and grant them a capability of wpml_manage_translation_management.

Capabilities

WordPress roles are assigned capabilities, there a hundreds of capabilities, some are default WordPress ones like activate_plugins whilst others are added by plugins and sometimes themes.

Here is a list of default capabilities to give you a feel for the granularity of control in WordPress.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities#Capabilities

User Role editor

The plugin I like to use to create custom roles is User Role Editor,  This is a great little visual tool that allows us to create new roles or extend what we already have.

Once installed, under users -> user role editor you get this screen

To fix my clients problem, I simply opened up the editor role, and under the custom capabilities section I checked wpml_manage_translation_management.  Simple as that.

Editors could see the translaton tool set and send out jobs for translation.

Wrap Up

The roles ad capability system within WordPress allows for a lot of granularity on what someone can and more importantly cannot do once they are logged in.  Consider using roles to stop the less technically able members of your team from breaking your WordPress site.

If you need help setting up custom roles for you WordPress site please feel free to request a quote from us.

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So you have setup your multi language website and you are taking orders for your products or services from multiple territories.

But are you really setup to do business across languages?

The Website Is Just A Gateway

Your multi language website is just a gateway to new markets, there are some back end issues to consider once you open your business up to people who speak a different language to you.

Handling Multi Language Leads

You work in English, have a French version of your contact form and your potential customer has the audacity of filling that form in using French, what do you do?

Do you staff your sales department with bi-lingual skills or do you have some sort of translation service on hand ready to field your requests and replies.

This all adds to your bottom line.

Customer Service

When customers come to you for customer service, there is normally a problem.

Imagine the scenario of an unhappy customer on the phone and no-one can speak their language.  They have a problem and that is exacerbated but a break down in communication.

My suggestion are the many translation conference call services that are out there.  You dial in to the conference call, add your customer and a translator on the other end acts as a go between.

Here is a UK based company that does exactly that http://www.absolutetranslations.com/en/telephone_interpreting_services_company, but you may want to find a company local to you that does the same thing.

Contracts

Are your business contracts valid across borders, do you need to get a local lawyer to draw up contracts for different territories you do business in?

I’m in no way qualified to give out legal advice to please consult with a professional in the target market or a local law firm experienced in import / export law.  Which leads me to…

Import / Export Rules

If you supply a physical product can you export them to your country of choice?

If you send staff to perform services can they can visas to enter that country?

What’s the point in selling into a country and the expense of writing up a website if you cannot deliver your products or services?

Local Tax Rules

Do you understand the local tax rules of selling into your target market?

There are certain countries which have tax withholding rules, which mean they have to keep a portion of your payment and return that as tax to their local government.

You could find your self with a nasty shock when a large chunk of your payment is withheld as tax.

Understanding these rules means you can price your services appropriately.

What I Do

The first thing that I do is to tell potential clients that all correspondence and phone calls will be conducted in English.  this sets an expectation.  I have high school French language skills and Italian / German holiday skills (I can buy a meal and book a hotel room).  I cannot conduct business in any language other than English.

If I get a foreign language request, I send it out to my translators at ICanlocalise.  I do this pretty easily because my website it plumbed into their translation system.  I create a draft post, and send it out for translation, I get the reply  and create another post with my reply, also stating that I prefer to use English if possible.

All of my contracts are written with England and Wales as the jurisdiction,  I have no idea if they will stand up to scrutiny in a foreign court, but in all my years in business I have not had to test that.  I mitigate this risk by taking deposits on my projects.

I sell knowledge services so there is no import export restrictions on that yet.  I’m sure our governments would love to tax what is between our ears:).

Wrap Up

Setting up a multi language website is just the first step in doing business across languages, be prepared and have your back end in place too.

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In my maintenance service package I talk about site owners having a number of tweaks per month over and above the standard maintenance work we do.  These tweaks can be called down as and when required, but what are tweaks?

In my mind they are small packages of development work to enhance your site.  In this post I want to clarify what tweaks are to potential maintenance clients.

Example Tweaks

Probably the best way to show you what a tweaks are is to list out some examples we have done for our current clients:

Install and Configure Plugins

We have been asked by our maintenance clients to install and configure plugins that are too complex for them.  We have installed simple plugins like widget logic, up to more complex ones like s2member.

We have been asked to replace plugins that no longer work as expected, for example one client was using a search plugin that was no longer supported, we swapped that our for Google search.

Fix plugins that have stopped working; our client spotted that a post rotator plugin was not working after an update to WordPress. We fixed a jquery conflict.

The list goes one.

Managing Complex Content

We don’t look after your normal posts and pages content, but some plugins such as e-commerce have very complex content in them, we have added new products to plugins if our client is struggling.

Theme Changes

We are often asked for small tweaks to our clients site theme, we will happily make small changes to css to change colours fonts etc.

We have also been asked to completely replace themes with new ones.

Theme Updates

When a theme has been customised it’s a tricky thing to apply the latest theme update, we will get the latest theme files, apply updates and re-apply customisation.

Building Development Environments

We have been asked to clone live sites and build development environment so our clients can test things out without impacting their live sites.

Errors On The Site

When a client spots an error on their site and reports it to us we raise a tweak call to fix these too.  Errors such as warning notes appearing, malware reports, missing PDF files.  Again the list of errors goes on and on, as long as it’s an error to your existing site we can fix it.

Fix Database Issues

One of our new clients, had an absolutely enormous database due to spam comments that weren’t being deleted we fix that database issue and optimised their database for performance.

Fix Menus

We have been called in to setup and fix menus, such as creating new menu areas, adding new menu items or changing text.

Add Third Party Scripts

We have been asked to install third party scripts, for example Google Analytics javascript code and Facebook like widget code.

Consulting

Client will ask us what is the best way to do X, and with our years of experience we can suggest a solution.

We Spot Errors Too

As part of our maintenance work we often spot errors and fix them too, we will raise them and treat them like a tweak but they are not part of your monthly draw down of work.

Some of the things we have spotted are

• Backups not working
• Security issues
• User permissions wrong
• Hosting run out of disk space
• Issues with domain registration

What Are Not Tweaks

Anything that involves a large amount of development work such as coding up a plugin, or creating a custom theme.  These would require a separate project over and above your maintenance agreement.

Just ask us, we will let you know if it is a tweak or not,

How Tweaks Work

When you sign up for our maintenance service, over and above plugin updates, backups, WordPress updates, security monitoring and database optimisation, we will give you access to a support email address.

Send you tweak request to that address and Rod will raise and manage a tweak project and our team will fix your problem.

Wrap Up

If you would like to take a test drive of our maintenance service and have us do some tweaks to your site then why not check out our 30 day free trial.  There is no credit card required and nothing to cancel if you don’t want to go forward.

Sign up for a free trial now>>

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I’m a big fan of client testimonials as social proof you can do what you say you can do.  I’ll not rehash the whole subject here, but I wrote a post called the Power Of Testimonials.

I’m also a big fan of automating repetitive tasks, and typing in testimonials I’ve solicited for clients manually is a big old pain in the backside, so I looked at automating the whole process.

A Tale Of Three Plugins

I’m using three  plugins to automate the whole process:

1) Testimonials By WooThemes

I’ve selected this testimonials widget over the plethora of others out there because it is compatible with my theme and it’s incredibly easy to add testimonials to pages, sidebar and the home page too.

Before anyone starts I know there are other testimonials plugins that offer this functionality out of the box, but none fitted with my theme as well as this plugin.

2) Gravity Forms

Ah probably my favourite plugin, and so well worth the investment in a developers license all those years ago.  Gravity form does so many automated tasks excellently, like add emails to Mailchimp, adding client details to Freshbooks.  But it also allows us to add testimonials with it’s post creation functionality.

3) Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types

This final plugin is the key, it allows the gravity forms functionality that adds posts add custom posts types.

How It Works

I’ve set up a form on this page https://dev.neilmatthews.com/add-testimonial using gravity forms, but it is a special type of form.

When someone adds an entry it creates a draft post on my site, but not just any old post a custom post type of testimonial.  So entering data on that form automatically generates a testimonial entry on my site that I need to review and publish.

No more re-entering text, automated testimonials woo-hoo!

Automating The Ask

I’ve als0 automated the request for a testimonials.  I use Freshbooks for my invoicing, and there is an automated email sent out to clients when their invoice is paid.  I’ve added the following text.

If your project is complete and you enjoyed working with me a testimonial is always appreciated, you can leave one automatically here https://dev.neilmatthews.com/add-testimonial

Automation Rocks

Whenever I find myself grumbling about a routine task in my business processes I always looks for at three things remove, automate, systematise.

Can I remove this from my business – answer no testimonials are very important, can I systematise it so it can be outsourced, well yes I could but why pay a VA to add testimonials when it can be automated.

Results no more tedious copying and pasting of testimonials plus more testimonials coming in because I’ve automated the ask and don’t forget to do it.

Wrap Up

What are you automating in your business?  I’d love to hear what you have done in the comments.

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