Google Analytics 4

For some people, their site analytics are only a subject of interest to them. For others, analytics are a key performance indicator of how well their website is supporting their business.

If you are one of the latter then you are probably already aware of Google’s upgrade of Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). You probably also know Google will no longer be processing data from 1^st July 2023 for Universal Analytics.

Why Should I Care?

You will be able to continue using Universal Analytics all…

Two Factor Authentication

au Direct Domain Registration and What it Means for You.

You may have seen or heard about the new .au direct top level domains becoming available recently. We’ve prepared a short-ish guide for you.

What’s Going On? (Short Version)

All Australian domain names that end in .au are administered by .au Domain Administration Limited (auDA). Go4 Multimedia purchase and look after your domain and make sure that it points to your website.

auDA have recently released .au direct domain names – like yourdomain.au. These are shorter, simpler domain names that will be available as a new option for Australian Internet users from 24 March 2022.

.au direct names are…

Managing documents on your website

Make sure you’re not giving people fake news.

As well as your pages, Google and other search engines also index and show in search results pdfs and other documents you upload to your website, so it’s important to manage these efficiently. We’ve seen lots of cases in the past where people end up getting hold of incorrect information, usually because there are multiple versions of a document that have been uploaded to a website. A classic example is with conference websites with last-minute program changes.

The best way to avoid is to have a clear process for managing your website…

What to do when your website brings up a ‘Your connection is not private’ error

If you haven’t moved to running your website over a secure connection with an SSL certificate yet now is well past time. Without this your visitors will get errors, search engines will rank your site lower and the security of your information might be at risk.

A ‘your connection is not secure’ error can mean a number of things…

1. You don’t have an SSL certificate

For the reasons mentioned above, you need to get one 🙂

What to do

Talk to your web host and get a certificate set up on your web hosting account.

If you have a certificate and everything…

How to help us troubleshoot a problem

Sometimes things go wrong. To help us help you get things sorted out quickly we need as much information as possible. 

For example…

MORE DETAIL PLEASE

The website’s not working 🙁 

Better

When I try to go to the about page it brings up an error message.

1,000,000 points

• I’m having trouble accessing this page: https://www.mysite.com/about/.
• I can view other pages on https://www.mysite.com ok.
• When I go that that url I get an error message saying ‘The requested URL was not found on this server.’
• I’m using Google Chrome on my Apple laptop.
• My IP address is 12.345.67.89.

Some of the things that help us troubleshoot are

Are you GDPR-ready?

From 25 May 2018 Australian businesses of any size may need to comply with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

Your inbox has probably been flooded this past month with emails asking you to review updated privacy policies.

This is because from 25 May 2018 Australian businesses of any size may need to comply with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

The GDP-what?

The GDPR aims to give EU citizens greater control over their personal data. If you have an office in the EU, your website targets or mentions customers or people in the EU or you track…

Free SSL certificates for our premium hosting clients

In 2017 we’ll be setting up SSL certificates for all of our premium* web hosting customers’ sites and changing things over so they use encrypted https connections

What does that mean?

Short answer

People visiting these websites will see https and a padlock or ‘secure’ message in the address bar of their browser.

Longer answer

Websites without an SSL certificate will likely have issues in the not-too-distant future.

This is because browser makers are getting more strict about about what they consider secure. The way web browsers communicate with web servers is something like this: when you visit a website your web browser and the web…

What’s the deal with WordPress upgrades?

Short version: if we host your website we deal with all upgrades for you automatically.

From time to time you may have noticed info in your WordPress admin dashboard about upgrades – ever wondered what that’s all about?

What are upgrades?

Upgrades fix bugs and security vulnerabilities and sometimes add new bells and whistles. There are so many nasty people out there that it’s essential to keep everything running your website up to date because otherwise it may be at risk.

What type of upgrades are we talking about?

There are upgrades to WordPress itself and to the plugins that add extra functionality to your site.

WordPress…

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Census 2016 – what exactly is a hack, a DDOS attack, geoblocking?

The jury may still be out on the exact cause of Australia’s #censusfail but whatever happened that fateful evening has brought up a few terms that are often misunderstood.

Hack

A hack, generally speaking, is when someone gets into places they shouldn’t on a website or server. This can be by exploiting a security weakness in the actual site or on the server that hosts it.

DDOS attack

A Distributed Denial of Service attack is when a huge amount of requests are made on a site with the aim of completely overloading it. Sometimes these are undertaken by ‘botnets’ of infected computers from all over the…

A guide to migrating your email to G Suite (Google Apps)

Update October 2016: Google Apps is now called G Suite

Google Apps for Work G Suite is Google’s business grade suite of tools and is a good choice for dedicated email hosting. Splitting your web and email hosting using Google Apps for email gives you

• 30gb of storage per account
• the ability to access your emails through any web browser, through mobile apps, and in some cases through your existing desktop email program
• access to Google’s full range of tools including Calendar, Drive, Hangouts, Docs and more, all ad-free
• phone and email support 24/7

Read more about Google Apps Email →

At time of writing…

What’s the difference between web hosting and email hosting?

I’m often asked to explain the difference between web and email hosting.

Web hosting is server space where your website lives. When someone types yourdomainname.com into their web browser the elders of the internet direct their browser to a web server and your website is served to them.

Email hosting is server space where your emails are stored. When someone sends an email to you@yourdomainname.com the elders of the email world send it to an email server and it’s stored there for you to look at.

Together or apart?

Traditionally smaller businesses had their web and email hosting on the same server, while larger organisations  had them split between dedicated web and email servers. Splitting the services…

Giving website design feedback

At the risk of stating the obvious, design is subjective. Blue really works for some people but for others… meh. Same with Arial, or circles, or ‘flat design’, or fullscreen background images, or … you get the picture.

Getting something designed is an exciting collaboration between you and the designer. But what’s the best way to give your feedback? Here are a few tips I’ve learnt from many years on the receiving end…

1. Give feedback thinking about the overall aims for the project

The best feedback is specific and focussed on the aims for the project (“I think the ‘Join Now’ button should be more…

Hick’s Law and making your menus smaller

Keep it simple and avoid overwhelming people.

You might have noticed that over the past few years the main navigation menus on websites are getting smaller. There’s a reason for this and it isn’t because websites are getting smaller too. On the contrary – it’s because when you have too many choices your brain gets overloaded.

Hick’s Law is named after British psychologist William Hick whose work in the 1950s showed that the more choices people are offered the longer it takes for them to make a decision. If you offer too many choices people are more likely not to choose any…