Categories are a great way to help your visitors find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily on your site. This video walks you through the steps.
Common Ways Attackers Are Stealing Your Password
Today passwords are a part of our everyday life. It is critical to protect our information from getting into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, a weak password is a weak defense against hackers. Here are a few ways hackers are trying to get a hold of your information and how you can help stop them.
1: Credential Stuffing
This happens when an attacker already has your login info – typically from a data breach at a large company like Target, Bank of America, etc. who store credit card and login info for their clients. They will log in as you and impersonate you to make changes on your account. If you have used the same password on different accounts, they now have access to all of them. Your best defense is to make sure you have strong passwords and different passwords for every site.
Read how to use a password pattern.
2: Password Cracking Techniques
These are techniques that attackers use to “guess” passwords to accounts. They have algorithms that can crack a weak password. The best way to prevent this is to make sure you have strong passwords that aren’t repeated for logins to other sites. Use a mixture of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers and characters. Never use names or real words. Not even your favorite cat’s name!
3: Shoulder Surfing
Shoulder surfing is when someone around you watches to see the private information you type on your keyboard or on your screen from over your shoulder. It can happen at the grocery store or the ATM. We have to be aware of our surroundings whenever we are typing in sensitive information in a public place.
4: Social Engineering
This is when someone tries to get you to reveal sensitive information by pretending to have clearance for it. If a customer service agent is calling you and wanting to verify your credentials, make sure you verify them first! Never give passwords or private info to strangers no matter who they claim to be.
Microsoft, Google, the IRS, Dell will never call you. Never.
5: Phishing
Phishing is similar to social engineering but it’s more specific to email. Hackers will create an email looking like it’s from a legitimate source prompting you to type in information. If you are ever questioning the legitimacy of an email, call the person sending the email. If it’s a large corporation, open a new browser window and log in directly from their website. Never click the links in the email to log in.
6: Wireless Sniffing
This happens when a hacker collects data that is being sent between your computer and someone’s server. If a site isn’t using a TLS/SSL Certificate, the information being sent isn’t secure. You should see a closed padlock symbol on the left end of the site’s address telling you it is a secure site. If the padlock isn’t there, don’t give them any information! Not even your email.
7: Man-in-the-Middle Attack
This is similar to wireless sniffing but the information continues on to the server and back to your computer while the “man in the middle” is observing it. Once again, your best protection is to make sure the sites you visit have an updated TLS/SSL certificate. If you are using the Chrome browser, Google will alert you as to when a site’s certificate is bad and if it does you shouldn’t input any information.
Your Computer Lady recommends Last Pass as a storage vault for passwords and private data. Visit their website.
The information for this article was found here.
Word Press 5.5
WordPress is rolling out a new version with some big changes and new features.
- Improvements to the Editor for creating pages or writing blog posts.
- On-the-page image editing.
- Improved content preview (more WYSIWYG!!)
- XML sitemaps which help search engines index your site
The roll-out will begin any day now.
If you are on our WordPress Site Maintenance program, your site will be updated at the end of the month.
If you aren’t on the program, you should be! Let’s talk! Regular maintenance prevents those nasty surprises when you discover your site has been down for some unknown amount of time!
You need to check your site 2-4 times a week for the next month or so to know when WordPress is updated and to be sure your site is still functioning properly.
A WordPress website is made of multiple components: the WordPress software (the frame of your site), the theme (the design components) and the plug-ins which give you special features like spam protection, a rotating testimonial space, a photo gallery, etc. The three pieces have to be kept in sync for your site to function well.
In our maintenance program, we make a back up of your site for safety. Then we update each component to be sure everyone stays happy.
How To Keep Your Website Updated
Google Partners With WordPress
Google has started partnering with WordPress. This gives all of us WordPress site owners a little lift in Google juice. Read the Article.
Why?
- WordPress now represents 59% of all content management software websites. That’s an estimated 1/3 of ALL websites.
- Google is focused on speed! They have made upload speed a priority and an algorithm factor. WordPress sites are speed friendly. You do have to be careful about the size of photos, PDFs or other uploads to your site. But the basic WordPress structure is speed-friendly. (If you’re concerned about the upload time for your site, let’s take a look and see what we can do. We have tools to shrink photo sizes, delete comments, improve the site.)
- Google is prioritizing mobile-friendly sites because so many searches are now done from mobile devices. WordPress and WordPress themes are responsive aka mobile-friendly. (If you have an old WP site, let’s make sure it’s responsive. This is urgent!)
If you aren’t using a WordPress site, let’s talk about your options. Every site needs to take advantage of every opportunity to be Google-friendly.
New version of WordPress
On Dec. 6th, WordPress released a new version with a new editor. We were aware of the coming change. One of my programmers has been participating in the beta test team.
The new release is supposed to make the web experience better for your visitors and speed up load times. So far we are not impressed!! The upgrade has caused more problems than anticipated. Previous upgrades may have conflicted with a plug-in for a little glitch. This update has caused major issues on a couple of sites. On one of my sites, every blog was pointing to the same blog post! On another site, the payment processing glitched. I encourage each of you to carefully look at your pages and test all of your forms. (It’s good to review your site 2-3 times a year any way!)
In addition, WordPress published a new editor. Again, we are not impressed! The new editor does not seem to be as versatile as the previous one. It is definitely not “What you see is what you get” which makes pages and blogs easier to create. Fortunately, we are able to return/switch to the previous editor.
Please email if you have questions.
What is Duplicate Content? Does It Harm Your Site?
A great way to beef up your website content and educate your visitors is to share websites and articles from other sources. Industry sites. Industry magazines. Expert articles.
Your best method is to write a short intro using your keywords and showing your expertise on the topic THEN link to the article.
There is a proper way to it and this article walks you through the pros and cons.
What is Thin Content and How Does It Hurt Your Website?
This article goes into detail explaining what thin content is and why it is so harmful to your website. Thin content briefly is any page of your site with too little content or rambling content without keywords.
Duplicate content is also considered thin content. We all have some duplicate content on our sites. We have to balance giving our readers good, interesting content and making the search engines happy. However, writing this intro piece before linking you to the article puts keyword content on my site and shares the expert article.
We can all write original content however. We are the experts on our business! So figure out the keywords you want to rank for and write content using those words.
Review your pages. Make sure those words are used as often as possible. I’ve found the best method is write your content for the visitor. Then go back and insert the keywords where possible.
WordPress is Here to Stay!
“98 Versions of WordPress to Date
There might only be 229 employees, but those 229 sure are kept on their toes. Major updates are rolled out once every few weeks.
In addition to that, the WordPress.com source code is updated 60-80 times per day, pushed out many times throughout the day. These changes are synced with the WordPress.org platform daily.
46 Million Downloads of WordPress.org
The free WordPress.org platform that supports self-hosted websites has been downloaded 46 million times up till July of 2013, which approximates to 100 downloads every day since 2003. You might not have downloaded WordPress and uploaded it to your FTP manager yourself, but when you installed it using Fantastico or the much loved 1-Click, it was counted as a download.
Since it’s only in the recent years that blogging has suddenly become quite a bit more popular, the downloads per day in 2014 are significantly higher (think tens of thousands) than they were in 2003.
WordPress Is Most Popular With Business Websites
Of the top 1,000,000 sites in the world, the number of business sites (most popular with WordPress) powered by WordPress is five times the number of WordPress-managed news sites (least popular with WordPress).
This statistic is not all that surprising, as online marketing circles will often discuss WordPress more than any other CMS out there. WordPress also ranks high as one of the most blogged topics in the online marketing niche and nearly all its keywords have very high PPC competition.
Akismet Is the Most Popular Plugin
Of all the 19,000 free plugins available for download, Akismet has received the most downloads. The main reason for this is that Akismet comes auto-installed with the newer versions of WordPress.
Akismet has been downloaded a total of 18 million times, a truly mind-blowing figure. The spam protection plugin alone has been responsible for close to .06% of all plugin downloads at WordPress.org. The All in One SEO Pack from Michael Tolbert comes in at a very close second, with a total of 17 million downloads. In third place,with 14 million downloads, is Contact Form 7 , another familiar name to most bloggers.
Wrapping Up
The statistics that make WordPress the world’s most popular CMS are truly mind-numbing.
In its eleven short years of its existence, WordPress had dominated the CMS market. From what we can tell, it isn’t going anywhere, either.”
Found on https://managewp.com/blog/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpress-usage
WordPress
WordPress sites aren’t going anywhere. Here are some more interesting statistics about it.
“A 2012 survey revealed that the average rate for a WordPress project clocks in at $50/hr. It’s nothing to write home about, but $50/hour is a decent sum for most.
Desk, one of the most popular outsourcing sites in the world, lists WordPress development as the fifth most-requested skill. Freelancer.com, a similar website, has thus far recorded over $3.5M in revenue for WordPress developers.
WordPress development is clearly a valuable skill to learn — one that can definitely pay off in the future. The need for it won’t be going anywhere for a while.
Without doubt, the number one feature that sets WordPress apart from any other CMS is their plugins. Plugins extend and capitalize on the functionality of WordPress — removing access to them would cripple WordPress users (and that’s one of the reasons why WordPress.com falls second to Blogger).
Fortunately, nothing of the sort is happening. On the contrary, WordPress.org’s database of plugins has recently hit 29K and a new one is added nearly every hour. In total, these plugins have been downloaded 286,000,000+ times. Give it a few years and all you’ll be hearing is “there’s a plugin for that”.”
Statistics found on https://managewp.com/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpress-usage