As of recently, Google have ‘broken’ Google Shopping. It appears they have set up a blacklist of words which cannot be used in searches. The problem is commonly called the Scunthorpe Problem. This is where certain words or phrases are caught by a spam filter or search engine because the words used contains a string of letters which have been deemed to be unfit to be used. As can be seen with with the words Scunthorpe, Shitake...

It’s an ongoing debate – users do not like videos to autoplay (apart from YouTube), and designers want their website to feature their video and audio immediately on visiting the page. In the distant past, this has often been ‘solved’ by using Adobe Flash to play videos. Browsers soon caught up to this madness, and added ‘click to play’, forcing users to click to view Adobe Flash players. Since the replacement...

Whilst designing new websites, it’s common to use an off-the-shelf theme as basis for a new site. However, making changes to a theme or plugin can cause problems when it comes to upgrading. When making changes to plugin or theme code, it’s important to be aware that when these plugins or themes are upgraded – your changes will be lost. There are often two very different schools of thought on this. If you’re developing...

Mozilla have put together a tool for testing many areas of SSL security. We’ve recently discussed using the free Let’s Encrypt service to secure your site, but it is also important to ensure the security settings are up to date. “While we’d love to say that any site that scores an A+ on the Observatory is perfectly secure, there’s a lot more that goes making a website secure than what we can test.” It may not...

Probably the most tedious part of running a website is the constant maintenance and updates. Continuing our previous post on WordPress, we’ve put together a quick guide of routine checks and changes for both Magento 1.x and 2.x. A poorly maintained website can be a security nightmare, or even impact on your website appearance and search position with potential attacks and spam. Backups Always always keep a backup – but more...

WordPress maintenance is a tedious and thankless chore, but absolutely essential to the smooth-running of your website. A poorly maintained website can be a security nightmare, or even impact on your website appearance and search position with potential attacks and spam. We’ve put together a basic list of the most essential WordPress maintenance; Backups A backup is only ever useful when you’ve forgotten to make them! It’s an...