When we build our websites we try to use the best plugins and resources that we can. Over time we have chosen what we consider the best to use on our clinets sites. It is interesting to see so many of the tools we use being voted as the best in class.

There are some differences (especially SEO and Caching plugins) but we believe our set of development tools works best for both us and our clients.

Here are the winners in full:

• Astra – Best WordPress theme
• Elementor – Best page builder
• Gravity Forms – Best form plugin
• ACF Pro – Best dynamic data plugin
• Kadence Blocks – Best Gutenberg addon
• Crocoblock – Best Elementor addon
• All-in-One Migration – Best backup migration plugin
• RankMath SEO – Best SEO plugin
• Wordfence – Best security plugin
• MemberPress – Best membership and courses plugin
• FluentCRM – Best marketing automation plugin
• Automatic CSS – Best developer tools
• GiveWP – Best WooCommerce tools
• Cloudways – Best hosting service
• WP Rocket – Best performance plugin
• WPML – Best content tools
• ManageWP – Best WP support and service
• WP Beginner – Best WordPress blogs
• WP Builds – Best WordPress podcast
• The Admin Bar – Best WordPress community
• WPTuts – Best YouTube channel
• Website Owner’s Manual – Best WP learning and resources
• The Events Calendar – Best event and planning plugin
• WP Social Ninja – Best niche plugin

The post Winners at the WordPress Awards 2022 first appeared on SAJE.

In this issue: SEO Workshop / SEO Review Special / WordPress Meetup Group

Well summer is mostly over and we are now into the new financial year. Things are moving along here at Deepweb where we are working on a number of projects large and small.

We have been involved in the start up of a WordPress Users Group in the north, for those developers, designers and users of WordPress to facilitate discussions about the use of WordPress on the web. You can find out more about this group here on the Meetup Website. We are thankful for the support of Bizspace in Kerikeri for hosting our events.

SEO Workshop:

On the 14th of May, we are running our SEO workshop, this gives you the opportunity to learn how the search engines work and what you can do on your site to influence where you appear in the rankings
Date: 14th May
Time: 9:30am to 1:30pm
Morning Tea provided (and yummy coffee)
Cost $99+gst

Half Price SEO Review Special:

If you can\’t get to the workshop, or if you want to leave it to us, we are having a special on SEO reviews and updates.

We can look at your site and update the SEO to look to improve it\’s performance on the search engine.

It\’s a 2 hour review, normally costing $320+gst, but you can get this done for $160+gst

Get in touch if you want a review done or call us on 09 4016656

Tips and Tricks

A great tool for managing tasks on the web is Todoist. We use it to keep track of things and it is a great free or paid tool. You can categorise your tasks and put due dates to keep everything on track.

There is an app as well that synchronises between it and your computer, meaning you can add items to your list when you are out and about and see them at your desk when you get back to the office.

Thoroughly recommended

Get in Touch

If you want to chat about anything web related, drop us a line at webmaster@deepweb.co.nz or give us a call on 09 4016656

Have a great May
Joanne and Steven

The post Spiderbyte May 2019 first appeared on SAJE.

We have seen the New Zealand WordPress community when we have attended WordCamps, the large unconferences that happen each year in NZ to discuss all thibgs WordPress (and some no WordPress specific topics)

The closest local community (Meetup) to Kerikeri was in Auckland and try as we might, it was too difficult to get to one of these events.

After support and encouragement from the organisers of the Auckland event, we decided to start one in the North.

WordPress Meetups are open events, open to all who are interested in WordPress: people who code for it, people who design for it and people who use it daily to run their business.

We had an initial get together earlier this month and have been wonderfully supported by Judy at BizSpace (https://www.bizspace.nz/) who is providing us the venue.

Next month is all about Security, and we will talk about the best way to secure your website and some of the plugins you can use to achieve this, we\’ll also talk about other security aspects like passwords to help protect your site.

If you are interested in coming along, we have a Meetup Group here: https://www.meetup.com/Northland-WordPress-Meetup/ Sign up and you will get notifications about when the next Meetup will be.

It will be great to see you there.

The post WordPress Meetups in Northland first appeared on SAJE.

We have turned to Really Simple SSL

It is really simple and it takes care of the redirects and also the mixed content issues (when you have content that is both SSL and non SSL)

What does it do?

• It handles most issues that WordPress has with SSL, like when you’re behind a reverse proxy/loadbalancer, or when no headers are passed which WordPress can use to detect SSL.
• All incoming requests redirected to https. It defaults with an internal redirect, but can be done as a .htaccess redirect.
• Both site url & home url are changed to https.
• Insecure content is fixed by replacing all non ssl http:// urls with https://, except links to other domains. It\’s done on the fly, so no database changes are made (except for the siteurl and homeurl).

With AutoSSL now on most hosts, it makes sense to do this final step to make you site secure

The post Best SSL Plugin for WordPress first appeared on SAJE.

(Currently in Beta form, here is the link to the latest info https://wordpress.org/news/2018/11/wordpress-5-0-beta-4/)

Whenever you see a piece of software tick over to the next major version (in this case 4.9.8 to 5.0) it can be nervous times for website owners and website developers like us.

In this upgrade WordPress\’ editor is up for a rejig. This time though it is not a small change, but a significant change with the way most WordPress users generate and edit their content.

Gone is the old \”classic\” editor and in comes Gutenberg, the new block driven editor.

To be fair WordPress is playing catchup with other Content Management Systems in the market like Squarespace and Wix in the way their users interact with the websites in a more visual and intuitive way.

To bridge the gap a range of Page Builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Composer and SiteOrigin have forged a large section of this space. It will be interesting to see how each of these builder integrate themselves into the Gutenberg editor. So far many of them are releasing their own blocks as Gutenberg blocks so users can continue with the system they are used to using.

The day of release is currently set to November 27 and time will tell how bug free the initial release will be.

Our recommendation is to NOT upgrade to version 5 as soon as it is release. Generally there will be two or three patches (5.0.1, 5.0.2 etc) fixing bugs and sorting out teething problems.

Only after this will we contemplate moving our clients onto version 5.

We are testing the migration at the moment to see what issues will be thrown up and this is something that will need to be done with all clients before they make the leap.

Change is necessary, but in some cases it might be a bit messy. We\’ll have to test and find out

The post WordPress 5.0 – The Big Upgrade first appeared on SAJE.

We have just finished Phase 1 of a website using Elementor as the page Builder inside a template called Phlox. It took me a good 10 days to get my head around all the functionality available and even more time to learn how to use it! However having worked out most of the Blocks that I needed I am now keen to build more websites using this massive system. It has Blocks for almost anything you can imagine and a few more things I didn\’t know I could do! There are so many layers that can be added to an image that you can quickly become lost trying to revisit what you have created. However, I started off unable to make anything work, I even broke the template and had to start again to now, loving how much I can do with this combination of template and builder that I even think I can now fix the first template that I broke! It is not a cheap option, with a starting package near the top of our range but it has created a sleek, almost magical website that I can\’t wait to show everyone!!!

Walker & Co Real Estate – Check it out!!!

The post A Different Way To Build Websites first appeared on SAJE.

One of these items is the visitors IP address.

This is useful to determine where people are visiting your website from. In the new GDPR world this can be seen as personally identifiable information (PII) and to take care of this we can anonyimise it.

To do this is in the All in One SEO plugin, you will need to:

1. Go to All In One SEO > General Settings
2. Scroll down to the section title Google Settings
3. Make sure Advanced Analytics Options is enabled
4. Go down to Anonymize IP Addresses and tick the box
5. Save the Settings

See the screenshot below

That\’s all there is to it

Let me know if you have any questions below or contact me here

The post Anonymising Visitors IP addresses for GDPR compliance in Google Analytics and All in One SEO first appeared on SAJE.

\”What amazingly valuable training.  I can now work on my website all by myself.  I leave the course inspired, confident and skilled. Thank you Steve and Jo. Absolutely highly recommended\” Justin Smith, Business Owner, Oakura Fish, Dive and Cruise

This 4 hour session will be hands on, where we will take you through updating your own websites during the session.

The workshop is limited to 6 people to enable more time to work with each participant. This is where you get to work on your own site, improving it\’s SEO before you leave the session.

The system used to demonstrate the SEO techniques will be WordPress, but the information will work for most online systems. Please bring your login details to your website, so you can fully participate

Cost is $99+gst includes morning tea

Fill out the following form if you would like to book your place on the workshop, or call us on 09 4016656

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The post Hands On Search Engine Optimisation Workshop – 24 May 2017 first appeared on SAJE.

This 4 hour session will be hands on, where we will take you through updating your own websites during the session.

The workshop is limited to 6 people to enable more time to work with each participant. This is where you get to work on your own site, improving it\’s SEO before you leave the session.

The system used to demonstrate the SEO techniques will be WordPress, but the information will work for most online systems. Please bring your login details to your website, so you can fully participate

Cost is $99+gst

Fill out the following form if you would like to book your place on the workshop, or call us on 09 4016656

[si-contact-form form=\’2\’]

The post Improve your SEO Workshop – 23 Mar 2017 first appeared on SAJE.

It had been well overdue.

I decided at the start of the year that we needed to get out an involved in these sort of things, learn more, network with developers and others in the wider industry.

Wordcamp was the first of these and it was a great experience.

Wonderfully organised, everyone was looked after and apart from Bill Bennett\’s tech destroying session on writing content, went off prettyy much wiothout a hitch

Re: #wcakl2017 \”Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence.\” That was the lights & the projector. Thankfull we didn\’t get to three times…

— Bill Bennett (@billbennettnz) March 12, 2017

There were some awesome speakers on board, ranging from HTTP2, REST API\’s and speed to content, support and Impostor Syndrome!

I got some great learnings from the weekend, not just specifics from each talk but widening the scope of what is possible.

Getting out of the trenches and taking the time to learn and absorb new things has been a wonderful thing

Maybe it\’s time for a WP Meetup in the North…

Photo credit Chaitanya https://chait.photo.blog/2017/03/12/wordpressers-wordcamp-auckland-2017/

The post Wordcamp 2017 Auckland #wcakl2017 first appeared on SAJE.