A business details on a mobile

Google is showing competitor ads on local business profiles (and you can’t do a thing about it)

Google has been slowly ramping local search monetisation over time. It introduced local search ads in early 2017, which put ads in local packs, and began putting ads in local Knowledge Panels roughly two years ago. Now, the company is starting to show competitor ads in local business profiles. A ‘Local Campaign’ placement Part of Local Campaigns, the ads are designed to drive visits to...
Read More
A desktop with a mouse, a pen, a mouse pad and a jar of pencils

1991 to 2019 – How many websites are there now?

Today we've got an infographic from Statista, showing the number of websites online since the very first one was created back in 1991. When Yahoo! came online in 1994, there were 3,000 websites while there were 2.4 million when Google was launched in 1998. Back to the beginning - 1991 On 6 August 1991, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland published the first-ever website, the...
Read More
Forest View Yoga responsive website

Mobile-friendly website with online booking for Forest View Yoga

From the business owner, Casey Stickland "O’Brien Media has been fantastic with being adaptive for my yoga studio’s website during Covid-19, and I’ve always felt confident that their pricing has been competitive and fair according to what I’ve needed done. Very responsive and trustworthy!" Project images
Read More
Tumblr log in form

WordPress buys Tumblr for “less than $3m”, down from $1.1b in 2013

Sarah Krouse reports that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is buying Tumblr from Verizon. WordPress is the software reportedly powering a third of the world's websites and was itself originally focused on blogging. Tumblr was (and still is for the most part) the blogging service of choice for millions of young people, but floundered after being sold to AOL Yahoo and subsequently...
Read More
code displaying on a laptop

Redirect Old Domain to New Domain via .htaccess

When you migrate a site from one domain to another, it is very important that you don’t break all the links that you built to your old domain. Proper redirection of all the pages on the old domain to the same location on the new domain will ensure that visitors to the old domain will end up in the right place.  A failure to redirect will result in a loss of visitors as well as search engine...
Read More
Modern web network and internet telecommunication technology. Website programming code

Malicious plugin found to be being used to encrypt WordPress posts

Recently a new customer came to us needing their website cleaned up after a hack, as part of the cleanup we found an interesting little malicious WordPress plugin, called "WP Security", that was being used to encrypt blog post content. The website owner complained of a newly installed and activated plugin on their website that was rendering their original content unreadable. The hack The plugin...
Read More
a drop of water from a tap

Is your website homepage leaky?

They say you should never judge a book by its cover but sometimes you just can’t help it, right? When it comes to your website’s home page, you should judge away because you’re likely missing out on a large number of leads and sales. After all, your home page is most often the first web page someone engages with. The majority of your inbound home page traffic is coming from and to here. It...
Read More