1. NEVER open attachments from unknown senders, especially ones like ‘invoice.zip’
2. Scammers rely on only a few people in a thousand (or million) to open or click on links, don’t be one of them.
3. Banks, online stores, PayPal, TradeMe etc never need you to confirm your login, especially via email.
4. Hover over any links to see a preview of the destination before even thinking of clicking on them.
5. If in any doubt, delete it! If they know you and it was important, they’ll call you

The post Don’t open that email!! appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

Adrian was made redundant from council at the end of June, ending a seven year employment with them. So for the last six months has been working full-time in the business from home.
It’s certainly exciting as he can walk his kids to and from their school at Otonga Primary, and can expand his offering in terms of solutions.
One new such offering is high quality photography, perfect for websites to showcase your property or business much more professionally online.

This year also saw us move house in September and are now working out of a home office at 92 Springfield Road.

2014 saw the updates and new builds for the following clients

• Redwoods Rotorua (responsive redesign)
• Anchor Lodge Coromandel
• Expandasign Rotorua
• Oakridge Equestrian
• Rotorua Duck Tours
• Rotorua Museum (responsive redesign)
• AH Architectural Design & Drafting
• Rotorua Retreats
• Solid Wood Innovation
• CeeMee
• Rotorua Superpasses (responsive redesign)

Work in progress

• Rotorua Airport (responsive redesign)
• Robert Caldana Builder

The post Wrapping up an exciting year for Rotorua web designer appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

Today I start growing this business full-time!

That’s right, since I started building websites for friends and family back in 2001 after finishing a course at Waiariki Polytechnic, I’ve only been working in the business in a part-time capacity outside of my full-time employment.

Today is the start of something new, and I’ve got some exciting things planned.

I’m excited to be able to provide an even more swift service to all my exiting and new clients.
I’ll be able to provide a greater range of services (including photography) to help business owners take full advantage of the growing online landscape.

Some people find it incredible that I could build this business at all while holding down a full time job and helping raise two amazing children with my beautiful wife.

Of course I was only able to do a few hours every night, so it’s been a constant juggling act between emails, admin, accounts, design & development. Working on multiple projects at any one time was also common, so truth be told I am looking forward to being able to focus fully on my business in a full-time capacity and to be able to get through the work quicker.

I’ve been working for the Rotorua District Council full time since May 28, 2007.
For the first 4 years and 3 months I worked in the tourism department as their web development co-ordinator and for the last 3 years I’ve been within the core council as an application developer.

In my time there I’ve managed 76 domains, built 19 websites, created 3 custom website applications and developed multiple Facebook applications for the various council departments.

It’s also a pretty sad day as I’ve worked with some very clever people over the years at council and have made some lifetime friends. I’ll miss the laughs and office banter the most, but I am looking forward to being able to crank the music up loud and enjoy some tunes.

The post The start of something new appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

Upon further investigation I discovered that the domain name had recently expired. No problem I thought, lets just get the domain renewed and bob’s your uncle!

Unfortunately, that 5min job was not possible.
This was due to the fact that 247hosting, the company who was originally contracted to register the domain and host the website had registered the domain under their company name, making it legally theirs.

Of course they were not contactable and the registry who holds the domains said they couldn’t release it to us as the contact details for the registrant were not in my client’s name.

It’s extremely important as a business owner to have your domain registered under your company name, with all your company contact details as the domain registrant.

We register all clients domains under their name and NOT ours. Meaning you own and have control of your domain.

The registrant details of the expired and new domains

Now we have to wait for the domain to be released back into the pool of available domains before we can re-register it.

In the meantime, we managed to rescue most of the site thanks to the brilliant Internet Archive, which last took a snapshot of the website back in March this year.

Be sure to checkout the website we recovered here: http://funkygreenvoyager.co

The post Importance of owning your domain name appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

GoPro™

Stoked Energy Drink

The world’s leading wearable camera manufacturer is branching out into energy drinks.
Reporting to contain a “soupçon of something not unlike the chemical composition of Woodman’s epic sweat” should make for an interesting taste!

Visit website

Samsung™

Universal FREE Wi-Fi

Samsung has come up with an ingenious way to deliver FREE WiFi to everyone using some feathered friends.

Visit website

Google™

Google Magic Hand

Who needs to operate their mobile device when a robotic hand can do it for you!

Google Maps Pokémon Challenge

Google Maps want you to become a Pokémon Master!
Scour the world on your mobile in search of 150 hidden Pokémon characters. Think of it as an early global Easter egg hunt!

TripAdvisor™

Unforgettable destinations

Claiming that “you’ll be talking about these trips for years”, TripAdvisor is hoping that popular locations depicted in movies would make amazing holiday destinations.

Trademe™

BlinkMe

A new way to browse New Zealand’s leading online trading site, with the blink of your eye!

Rydges Hotels

uClean™

Want a discount on your next hotel accommodation stay, who wouldn’t?
Well, Rydges Hotels across Australasia have come up with an ingenious idea, self clean!

MORE TO COME

The post April Fools Day Pranks appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

She’s aiming high and training hard, her goals include:

• win BMX 2014 World Championships in Rotterdam, Netherland
• retain No.1 title in New Zealand for my age
• to be an olympic BMX gold medalist

Megan recently entered a competition to win an AMP scholarship.
The applicant with the most votes takes home a $10,000.

Please show your support by voting for Megan Williams here.

Visit Megan’s website.

The post Supporting NZ’s No.1 BMX star! appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

Create a php file ‘page_secure.php‘ in your theme folder and paste in the following code.

Then when ever you add or edit a page, you can choose the ‘Members Only’ template from the Template drop down under the page attributes panel (shown right).

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Members Only
 */
?> 
<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php if (is_user_logged_in()) : the_post(); ?>
    
  <h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>            
  <?php the_content(); ?>    
	  
<?php else : ?>
	
  <h1>Members only: <?php the_title(); ?></h1>
  <p>Please login with your account information</p>
  <?php wp_login_form(); ?>
  
  <p><a href="<?php echo wp_lostpassword_url(); ?>" title="Lost Password">Lost Password</a>
| <?php echo wp_register('', '', false); ?></p>
	
<?php endif; ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

The post Securing ‘members only’ pages in WordPress appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/My-Business-Name/123456789012345

Then you can have a vanity URL or custom username which is a way to customise the URL of your Facebook businesss page to anything you want it to be after facebook.com (as long as it’s not already taken).

For example Waimangu Volcanic Valley Rotorua New Zealand’s Facebook page URL is:

facebook.com/pages/Waimangu-Volcanic-Valley-Rotorua-New-Zealand/125335127492981

Since 318 people like this page, they could set a custom username.

Simply visit facebook.com/username and select your page from the drop list of Pages, enter your text, e.g. WaimanguVolcanicValley as their username, check availability and set it. Then you could direct people to:

facebook.com/WaimanguVolcanicValley

Now, isn’t that so much nicer? This would mean people could more easily remember your Facebook page address and you could use it more effectively across your traditional marketing.

If you haven’t got a Facebook business page yet, what are you waiting for?
There’s over 750 million active users worldwide and over 2 million users in New Zealand alone with over half of them on the site at least once a day.

Contact us and we can set you up a custom Facebook business page.

The post How to: Claim your username for your Facebook business page appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

The post Top 10 benefits of using Google Analytics for your website tracking appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.

Site structure/architecture

• Ensuring entire website can be readily accessed & crawled by search engine spiders.
• Good text:code ratio meaning page is not bloated with excessive code.
• Required tags (Title, Metatags, H1) are defined and unique to each page using the keywords and key-phrases you wish to rank for.

Quality Content

• Ensuring appropriate content is present in the right amounts and in the right places for search engines to index & readily interpret.
• Focus on only 1 or 2 primary keywords / key-phrases per page.
• Other relevant sites will want to link to useful content because they think it’s worthwhile.
• If your intended audience likes it, then the probability is that search engines will too.
• If pages are updated periodically with new content, then search engines and site visitors will keep coming back for more.

Inbound Links

• A key aspect of good organic ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) is quality inbound hyperlinks, linking to your website.
• Enhancing a website’s reputation by securing inbound links from thematically relevant and authoritative sites.
• 60+% of SEO success depends on it.
• Use key-phrases in the linking text you want to rank for and link to the specific page that has that information.
• Ideally linked from a web page of higher Google pagerank than your own.

If you found this useful, please comment or share.

The post Key aspects of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) appeared first on Hodgeman Web Design.