Welcome to the O’Brien Media Insider – Your Go-To for Digital Insights and Business Know-How
The O’Brien Media Insider is your behind-the-scenes look at all things digital, creative, and business-focused. From web design trends and SEO tips to small business insights and local Swindon highlights, our blog covers a bit of everything – just like we do at O’Brien Media.
Whether you’re a client, collaborator, or curious visitor, this is the place to catch up on the latest from our team, explore practical advice, and get inspired to grow your digital presence. Dive in and see what’s new!
WordPress 5.0 will most probably be released this Thursday, December 6 2018. This comes as a surprise to a lot of people, including us. WordPress 5.0 includes the Gutenberg editor, giving users a brand new editing experience. While we initially see this as an improvement, we doubt if everyone is ready for it at this point.
We often get asked how to install a WordPress plugin – here’s a 3 step guide that gets straight to the point. This will apply to most plugins – although if you’re installing a plugin that needs additional settings or configuration you may need to follow additional steps from the plugin developer.
Now is the time to give PHP 5 some attention. In less than two months, on December 31st, security support for PHP 5 will officially cease. (Note: Some Linux distributions, such as Debian Long Term Support distributions, will still try to backport security fixes.)
What is Focused Inbox? Focused Inbox intelligently presorts your email so you can focus on what matters. It places your most important emails in “Focused” and the rest
The meteoric rise in popularity of social media over recent years may have made you – and other business owners – wonder whether email marketing has had it’s day. On the contrary, email marketing is still a powerful tool. If you doubt that, simply check your email inbox and see how many businesses and organisations have sent you information today alone about what they offer. The businesses that send you these details know that email marketing is still as powerful and effective today as it was 10-20 years ago.
When WordPress 5.0 is released this month – currently planned for November 19 – your site needs to be running WooCommerce 3.5.1+ to avoid breaking changes. This is even more important if you have auto-updates toggled on.
The latest guidence from the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) could be relevent to anyone operating a website that allows users to log in, whether it’s staff, volunteers, customers, or the general public. Although the GDPR does not say anything specific about passwords, you are required to process personal data securely by means of appropriate technical and organisational measures.
Cyber criminals are attempting to blackmail unsuspecting victims by claiming to have used the victims’ password to install spying malware on the victims’ computer. The criminals claim they’ve recorded videos of the victim watching adult material by activating their webcam when they visit these websites. What makes this scam so convincing is that the email usually includes a genuine password the victim has used for one of their online accounts.
WordPress 5.0 is still software in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site, but it’s advisable to test your site with the new version to make sure there are no issues and to allow time to fix anything that does go wrong. Please contact us if you need your website tested with WordPress 5 and we’ll be happy to take a look and provide an estimate for testing.
If you follow Google guidelines to get a decent amount of traffic on your site, you know one thing for sure and that is SEO changes from time to time. Right? Since Google rolled out Pigeon update in July 2014, Penguin 4.0 during 2016 and more recent updates throughout 2018, local competition has been heating up fiercely. So, if you are on the lookout for a way to target the customers of your area, you should start focusing on your local search rankings.
