Practical writing on web design, development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting. No filler, no recycled advice.
3233 Articles / 23 Topics / 4.2M Words
3233 articles
Consulting
You pasted the client list in to summarise it.
Consulting
It answered confidently. The answer was wrong and the customer believed it.
Consulting
It cited a regulation. The regulation does not exist.
Consulting
It wrote nine hundred words. None of them were yours.
Consulting
It writes the draft in nine seconds. Checking it takes twenty minutes.
Publishing
One account suspension away from no revenue at all.
Publishing
They said no. That impression is now worth a fraction.
Publishing
You earned it in March. It arrives in May, if you cleared the minimum.
Publishing
You set a floor. Your CPM rose and your revenue fell.
Publishing
A quarter of your readers are worth nothing to advertisers.
Publishing
Last month's revenue, adjusted downward, with no detail.
Publishing
More bidders, more money, slower pages. All three are true.
Publishing
Rejected. No reason given. Try again in thirty days.
Publishing
Your CPM went up and your revenue went down. Both are true.
Publishing
A file most publishers copy from somebody else and never check again.
Domains
Everything was fine until the card on file expired.
Domains
You have renewed it six times. You have never used it.
Domains
You closed the old site. Every link to it now goes nowhere.
Domains
The sale completed. The domain is still in the old owner's account.
Domains
Do you need a local domain to sell in another country.
Domains
They want you to send it first. They always do.
Domains
Somebody offered you two thousand dollars. Is that a lot.
Domains
Eleven domains, four registrars, three cards, one person.
Domains
You registered it first. That is not the test.
Domains
Your name, with a hyphen, registered last week.
Accessibility
Both audiences are reading your page without looking at it.
Accessibility
You passed every test. They still could not book.
Accessibility
Your newsletter is one big image with no text in it.
Accessibility
Yes, we build to WCAG. Ask the second question.
Accessibility
The chart shows a clear trend. To most of your readers.
Accessibility
Something went wrong. That is not a message.
Accessibility
Technically conformant, and still incomprehensible.
Accessibility
Your menu is a photograph of a menu.
Accessibility
Forty tab presses before the first paragraph.
Accessibility
Fully accessible is a claim. Somebody may hold you to it.
Compliance
Nothing broke. The rules moved and the site stayed still.
Compliance
A tick box saying yes I am nineteen is not age verification.
Compliance
Somebody in Berlin bought something. Does that change anything.
Compliance
A laptop went missing. There is now a clock running.
Compliance
This call may be recorded. Somebody has to actually say that.
Compliance
A text feels casual. The legislation does not treat it that way.
Compliance
A gift card is somebody else's money sitting on your balance sheet.
Compliance
They forgot they were paying you. That is not a strategy.
Compliance
Your first Quebec order arrives with rules attached.
Compliance
You are handling other people's card details. That comes with conditions.
Technical
The site being down and the domain being down look identical.
Technical
Valid markup describing the wrong hours is worse than no markup at all.
Technical
A 404 means the page is not there. A 500 means something is broken.
Technical
The transfer is easy. Everything that depends on the domain needs planning.
Technical
Go to enforcement too early and the mail you block is your own.
Technical
Your domain, your website, and your email are three separate things joined by DNS.
Analytics
Watching ten sessions answers questions no report will.
Analytics
A three percent conversion rate can be six on desktop and under one on mobile.
Analytics
Facebook, facebook, and FB are three different sources in your reports.
Analytics
The first question is not what caused it. It is whether anything actually dropped.
Analytics
The last click is usually the least persuasive thing that happened.
Analytics
The direct traffic bucket is where measurement goes to give up.
Search
Search traffic rising can mean your marketing worked, or that more people knew you.
Search
The only place you can see what people searched before they found you.
Search
Most posts that are not ranking are not broken. They are new and unlinked.
Search
Schema does not raise rankings. It makes a page unambiguous.
Search
FAQ markup no longer produces a search feature. The questions still do work.
Search
They are rarely doing something clever. Usually one thing you are not.
Search
Five half-finished topics achieve less than one finished one.
Search
Volume counts who typed it, not who wanted to hire someone.
Search
Ranking for a term nobody buys from is a result rather than an outcome.
Web Design
Projects rarely stall on the building. They stall waiting for content.
Web Design
The raw material only exists inside your business. The shaping does not.
Web Design
Design changes are cheap. Structure changes break links and rankings.
Web Design
Your site is judged against two others open in adjacent tabs.
Web Design
A half-maintained second language is worse than one language done well.
Web Design
The page count follows from what people search for, not from what a template provides.
Web Design
Visitors cannot always name what is wrong with a stock photo, but they notice.
Web Design
Most service pages describe the service. Very few answer the questions being asked.
Web Design
Nobody reads an About page out of curiosity. They read it to decide something.
Local Marketing
You can spend a year on a website and lose the job in the first thirty seconds.
Local Marketing
One good partner sends more work in a year than a hundred happy customers.
Local Marketing
You will not outspend them. There are things they structurally cannot do.
Local Marketing
A second location does not inherit the reputation of the first one.
Local Marketing
A page for every neighbourhood is a plan to write forty pages with nothing in them.
Local Marketing
The searching that produces October's calls started in August.
Local Marketing
Directories copy each other, so one old number can propagate for years.
Local Marketing
Hiding your address is allowed. Not having one at all is a different problem.
Local Marketing
Upload nothing and your listing is illustrated by whoever passed by.
Local Marketing
Profile posts are not a ranking tactic. They are your one editable surface.
Conversion
Most of your traffic is not ready to buy, and most sites offer that group nothing.
Conversion
Spam does not cost you time. It costs you the enquiry you deleted with it.
Conversion
A tapped number that rings out is a conversion you paid for and threw away.
Conversion
Nobody hesitates over a button. They hesitate over what they think it starts.
Conversion
Every step between arriving and acting is a place to leave.
Conversion
Booking works when the job has a standard shape. Most trades work does not.
Conversion
You have never had more of someone's attention than right after they enquire.
Conversion
Removing one channel does not redirect those people. It loses most of them.
Performance
On a mobile connection, the number of requests matters more than their size.
Performance
A perfect speed score and a slow site for real visitors are entirely compatible.
Performance
A background video can outweigh every other element on the page combined.
Performance
Several layers hold a copy of your site, and they do not update together.
Performance
Your second visit on office wifi is the least representative test available.
Performance
Lazy loading the top image delays the one thing the visitor came to see.
Performance
A chat widget nobody answers still costs every visitor the same to load.
Performance
Four families at three weights each is twelve downloads before a word appears.
Performance
The most expensive mistake is sending a desktop photograph to a phone.
Hosting
Sites rarely outgrow hosting all at once. They hit one ceiling at a time.
Hosting
An expired certificate does not degrade the site. It replaces it with a warning.
Hosting
Editing live means your customers are the testing environment.
Hosting
How a provider answers these ten tells you how the first outage will go.
Hosting
Uptime guarantees describe what a host will refund, not what they will prevent.
Hosting
A migration should be invisible. The order of operations is what makes it invisible.
Hosting
You cannot choose your neighbours on a shared server, and you inherit their behaviour.
Hosting
The advertised price and the price you pay in year two are rarely the same number.
Hosting
A shared address means inheriting the behaviour of everyone else on it.
Hosting
An untested backup is a belief rather than a safeguard.
Hosting
The question is not whether your site will go down. It is who finds out first.
Consulting
Month one should produce clarity, not campaigns.
Consulting
Cutting marketing in a quiet quarter is how a slow season becomes a slow year.
Consulting
Finished and handed over are two different things, and the gap is rarely accidental.
Consulting
A low quote is not a discount on the same project. It is a different project.
Consulting
A build circling through revisions is usually solving a strategy problem with design.
Consulting
Plans fail on capacity far more often than on ambition.
Consulting
A report says what happened. A review decides what changes because of it.
Consulting
Spreading $1,500 across five channels produces five results too small to read.
Consulting
The real question is where the boundary sits, and who owns each side of it.
Consulting
Bursts of effort followed by six weeks of silence is the signature of work with no owner.
Consulting
The gap between what you pictured and what arrived is nearly always a briefing gap.
Consulting
Three figures set a defensible budget, and none of them is a percentage of revenue.
Web Design
Describe your business in three sentences, then read your homepage.
Compliance
An American template describes obligations that do not apply to you and omits the ones that do.
Local Marketing
A list of people who asked to hear from you is unaffected by anyone else's decisions.
Local Marketing
Three neglected accounts produce nothing but doubt.
Compliance
Eight months of silence followed by a large campaign is the most reliable route to a spam folder.
Compliance
The sender has to prove consent. If you cannot demonstrate it, the law treats it as absent.
Domains
The system depended on one email address staying monitored for a decade.
Hosting
Choose it when you are choosing anyway. Do not migrate a working site for it unless a contract requires it.
Hosting
If your site is slow, fix the site first. If it is still slow, then consider the hosting.
Domains
Buy the name because it is the right name. Treat any inherited standing as incidental.
Domains
The most expensive thing you can reveal is how much you want it.
Domains
The restriction is what gives .ca its meaning. Not anyone can get one, and that is the point.
Domains
Say it aloud once to someone who does not know your business, then ask them to type it.
Technical
A CDN distributes your problems efficiently. It does not fix them.
Technical
Google found 89 percent of users misread the padlock. That is why it is gone.
Technical
A decision made carelessly in week one is still costing money in year five.
Technical
The most valuable thing a sitemap produces is the gap between submitted and indexed.
Technical
One character separates blocking nothing from blocking everything, and the failure is silent.
Technical
It is a hint, not a command, and it does not remove anything.
Technical
If you are unsure which type you need, you almost certainly need permanent.
Search
Nobody finds a plumber through image search. Fix the file sizes anyway, because that is where the benefit is.
Search
Add something that was not there before. Rearranging an adequate page rarely helps.
Search
Low traffic and no value are different things, and the difference is where the damage happens.
Search
Competitors are writing service pages while customers are typing symptoms.
Search
There is no penalty. There is selection, and the difference changes the remedy entirely.
Search
Invisible work with no deliverable, which is exactly why almost nobody does it properly.
Search
One of these influences ranking. The other does not and is usually rewritten anyway.
Analytics
A metric incapable of delivering bad news cannot inform a decision.
Analytics
The practitioners telling you the aggressive setup is safe are mostly the ones selling call tracking.
Analytics
If this number doubled, would revenue move? Most tracked events fail that test.
Analytics
The old metric counted an eight-minute satisfied reader as a bounce. That is why it produced so many bad decisions.
Analytics
For an owner wanting simple visitor numbers, GA4 is genuinely a worse tool. That is a real cost, not a misunderstanding.
Accessibility
Most form accessibility problems surface within two minutes of trying to complete it without a mouse.
Accessibility
Light grey on white looks refined on a calibrated monitor. On a phone outdoors it is close to invisible.
Accessibility
Not what is in the picture. What the reader would need to be told if it failed to load.
Accessibility
A national regulator examined the central marketing claim of this category and found it unsupported by evidence.
Local Marketing
The most valuable thing in your reviews is not the praise. It is the vocabulary.
Local Marketing
A claimed profile with stale hours and two reviews is worse than no profile at all.
Local Marketing
It arrives dressed as customer service, which is why so many businesses adopted it without noticing what it was.
Local Marketing
The reviewer is usually a lost cause. The readers are not. Write for the readers.
Local Marketing
Asking is encouraged. Several of the standard methods became formal violations in 2026.
Web Design
A 404 from an external link is a visitor someone else tried to send you.
Conversion
Those colour case studies are measuring contrast. The label is doing the actual work.
Web Design
Screens grew considerably. Hands did not. Convention still puts the main action in the hardest place to reach.
Web Design
Solutions could mean anything. The visitor has to translate before they can decide, and a proportion will not bother.
Conversion
The reader knows you selected them. Only specificity survives that.
Conversion
The competitor objection is the most cited and the weakest. They can just phone and ask.
Web Design
The top of the page is not where you put everything. It is where you earn the rest of the page.
Conversion
Every business claims to be trustworthy. What survives is anything a sceptic could go and check.
Conversion
The most expensive field is whichever one you do not need to take the next step.
Web Design
Sending is the easy part. Arriving is decided by reputation systems you cannot appeal to quickly.
Web Design
Rarely malice. Usually a sole operator whose circumstances changed, and everything sitting in their accounts.
Web Design
One of these mistakes removes your site from search entirely, and it is usually noticed weeks later.
Web Design
One cause accounts for most of the damage, and it is preventable with an inventory taken before anything is touched.
Web Design
Ask for the itemised list and check it against your platform. Some of it may not apply to your site at all.
Web Design
Core had six low-priority vulnerabilities all year. Plugins had 91 percent of eleven thousand.
Web Design
Three separate assets, routinely treated as one. Control fragments quietly and only becomes visible under pressure.
Web Design
Most disputes are not about quality. They are about the four things nobody wrote down.
Web Design
Two honest builders can quote the same brief tenfold apart, because they are pricing different projects.
Web Design
The deciding question is almost never the technology. It is who will be editing the site a year from now.
Search
Fewer businesses shown, call buttons removed. Rankings can hold while the phone goes quiet.
Web Design
What does my business do that a generic version of my industry does not?
Search
You cannot make a model cite you. You can make sure it has consistent material to work from.
Search
Twenty minutes to set up, and whatever it reports is a floor rather than a total.
Search
If your answer arrives in paragraph nine surrounded by context, there is nothing anyone can lift.
Consulting
Well-executed work on the wrong priority still produces nothing.
Hosting
Storage and bandwidth are on the comparison page. The things that determine the outcome are not.
Web Design
Websites do not fail loudly. They produce a business getting fewer enquiries with no idea why.
Consulting
If the retainer cannot be described in a sentence that mentions an outcome, the structure needs revisiting.
Search
Rarely a technique. Almost always consistency over time, which is why so few sustain it.
Publishing
Traffic falls, rates fall, and because revenue is a product, the declines multiply.
Publishing
Programmatic is a utility. Direct is a business. Stop treating the choice as a matter of principle.
Web Design
The changes that break websites are the ordinary consequences of a business doing well.
Web Design
Websites do not expire, they fail in specific ways. If you cannot name the failure, you have an itch.
Publishing
Poor vitals cost ad revenue too. Most of this conflict is losing money in both directions at once.
Publishing
Four terms multiply to produce ad revenue. Publishers obsess over the first and last.
Publishing
It is about whether finishing the page leaves the reader with another question.
Publishing
The cost is instant and visible. The benefit is slow and confounded.
Publishing
Three failure modes, three completely different fixes.
Publishing
Half the pixels for one continuous second. That explains why the top banner underperforms.
Local Marketing
The keyword is usually untouchable. The ad copy is not. And the answer is often to do nothing.
Local Marketing
Everyone writes 24/7 emergency service. Almost nobody answers the three questions being asked.
Web Design
Most trades sites optimise the form and leave the phone number in the footer as an image.
Web Design
A homeowner cannot judge your technical skill. They can absolutely judge a photograph.
Local Marketing
Location pages are legitimate until the only thing changing is the town name.
Performance
There is no single cliff, but there are three bands that matter.
Web Design
Five years of $99 a month is $5,940, and in most arrangements you own nothing at the end.
Local Marketing
Your profile probably wins today. That is changing as AI local results drop the call button.
Local Marketing
Referrals are the best work you get and the hardest channel to grow on purpose.
Web Design
Most trades websites are built like brochures when they should be phone-call machines.
Industry Guides
They want a ten by ten, this week, and to know what it costs.
Web Design
One page that is finished beats five that are half-written.
Content
If they are charging you to publish it, it is an advertisement.
Search
Eight weeks and the page does not exist as far as search is concerned.
Advertising
Search advertising answers a question. Social advertising asks one.
Local Marketing
Forty searches a month, and you want all forty of them.
Consulting
Twelve months later, did it work? Nobody can say.
Ecommerce
They own the customer. You own the fulfilment.
Email Marketing
Fifty addresses in the bcc field is a deliverability problem waiting to happen.
Reputation
The customer does not know it was not your crew. Neither does the review.
Security
The record-keeping obligation applies whether or not the breach was reportable.
Conversion
Silence usually means they got busy, not that they chose somebody else.
Technical
Every one of these has gone live broken on somebody's site this month.
Branding
Nobody searches for a Comfort Assurance Package.
Social Media
An account that stopped in March says something. Make sure it is what you meant.
Industry Guides
The tenant wants a repair form. The owner wants your fee. Same site.
Hosting
The hosting goes dark. The domain gets sold.
Accessibility
Close your eyes and try to find your phone number. That is the test.
Web Design
Nobody visits a team page to admire your organisational chart.
Analytics
Enquiries fell twenty percent since October. So did they last year.
Compliance
The skill-testing question is not a formality. It is why the contest is legal.
Industry Guides
They have one date. The first question is whether you are free.
Content
A property manager and a homeowner want opposite things from the same page.
Search
Ranking for that term would be impressive and would produce nothing.
Advertising
Pausing is free. Restarting is not.
Local Marketing
A translated service page is a page nobody local is competing for.
Performance
You cannot ask why it was built this way. Change what cannot break first.
Industry Guides
They love the work. They have no idea whether they can afford you.
Web Design
They printed your price list and got four pages of menu.
Consulting
Your site says I. There are now two of you, and the customer will notice.
Ecommerce
Your customer lives four streets away and the checkout is charging for courier delivery.
Email Marketing
A message to past customers before the season beats anything sent to strangers.
Reputation
A site you never heard of has your old phone number and a rating you never earned.
Security
A green dashboard is not the same as being secure.
Conversion
An unattended chat widget is a promise you are not keeping.
Technical
The site broke on Tuesday. Nobody can say what happened on Monday.
Branding
The uniform works at the door. The invoice works at the kitchen table.
Social Media
Four hundred followers, twelve of whom live in your service area.
Industry Guides
The parent wants results. The student wants to not feel stupid. Address both.
Content
Published in October, useless by December, still on your site three years later.
Search
You are first. For you, in your office. Nobody else sees that.
Web Design
Three competitors bought the same theme. Only one changed the photographs.
Advertising
A falling cost per click can mean the campaign got worse.
Local Marketing
You spoke to sixty people and collected four names. That was the problem.
Industry Guides
They want to know about availability, cost, and who works there. In that order.
Hosting
You put their site on your account as a favour. Now their downtime is your evening.
Accessibility
Your required fields are marked in red. Some visitors cannot see that.
Consulting
One client at forty percent of revenue is not a client. It is a risk.
Ecommerce
If you quote the same job at the same price twelve times a year, it is a product.
Email Marketing
Your booking confirmation is the most-read message you send.
Reputation
If you can buy the award, it is advertising rather than recognition.
Security
You restored last night's backup. The intruder was in there three weeks ago.
Conversion
They are hesitating over the phone field. One sentence would fix it.
Industry Guides
They are leaving a family member with a stranger for three hours.
Content
Their inspection report says three things they cannot look up anywhere local.
Search
One listing for two locations means you rank well in neither.
Web Design
Your best customers are the ones your interface was not designed for.
Domains
Nobody types your domain. They search your name and click.
Analytics
Six months later, nobody can remember what the numbers were before.
Compliance
You have to prove they agreed. Remembering that they did is not proof.
Technical
Six things happen before your logo appears. Any of them can be the slow one.
Branding
The new logo is the easy part. The redirects decide whether it works.
Social Media
Thirty seconds of the thing you are already doing beats a scripted studio piece.
Industry Guides
Half your website visits are somebody frightened at an hour you are closed.
Advertising
Following someone for ninety days after one visit is how remarketing got its reputation.
Local Marketing
Five thousand flyers and no idea whether any of them worked.
Web Design
Ninety photographs means nobody sees any of them properly.
Content
They are not worried about the work. They are worried about the week it takes.
Search
There is no separate voice optimisation. There is answering questions clearly.
Industry Guides
They want to see your work and know what it costs. Both are usually missing.
Consulting
If the work comes because people know you, there may be nothing to sell.
Ecommerce
They are reading your returns policy before they buy, not after.
Email Marketing
They gave you their address in 2023 and have heard nothing since.
Reputation
You cannot delete it. You can make it the eleventh result instead of the second.
Security
They handed back the keys. Nobody thought about the mailbox.
Conversion
Three overlays before the content. Two of them were legally required.
Industry Guides
They are not worried about your equipment. They are worried about the room.
Web Design
Copyright 2019. They have already decided you might not exist.
Advertising
A twenty kilometre circle includes water, farmland, and a town you refuse to drive to.
Local Marketing
They need a plumber, an electrician, and a roofer, and they know nobody.
Technical
A quote from a free email address is read differently.
Branding
Your website, your quotes, and your van are three different businesses.
Social Media
Somebody in that group is asking for your trade this week.
Hosting
Putting your blog on a subdomain splits the thing you were trying to build.
Accessibility
For some visitors, your scrolling effect causes actual nausea.
Content
You already did the hard part. The rest is reformatting.
Search
They rank for 'furnace repair' and the page says 'heating system service'.
Performance
Twenty-eight plugins, four of them doing something you still use.
Industry Guides
Nobody books a table at a bakery. They want to know what time you open.
Web Design
Everything except your landing page is behind one tap most people never make.
Consulting
Any plan that needs a good week will not survive a bad one.
Ecommerce
Someone searched for it, found it, and it is unavailable. What happens next is up to the page.
Email Marketing
Your open rate went up because of a privacy feature, not your subject line.
Reputation
They are looking at your finished tile. They are also looking at the mess behind it.
Security
It stops the automated attempts. It does not stop you using a weak password.
Conversion
It only fires on people who already decided to go. That is the whole argument.
Industry Guides
Menu, hours, location, and how to book. Everything else is decoration.
Analytics
Your best enquiries arrive by phone and appear nowhere in your reporting.
Compliance
The requirements differ by province, and most businesses have never checked which apply.
Advertising
A click at three in the morning costs the same as one at ten.
Local Marketing
A local reporter needs a story this week. You have one and never mentioned it.
Content
Traffic that produces enquiries you decline is worse than no traffic.
Search
Forty listings with three different phone numbers is worse than ten that agree.
Industry Guides
Your client is comparing two numbers with no idea what is different behind them.
Web Design
Five options with overlapping features is a comparison nobody will finish.
Technical
With ten tabs open, the favicon is the only way anyone finds your page again.
Branding
Quality you can trust. So is everybody else's.
Social Media
Scheduled posts do not know what happened this morning.
Industry Guides
You will never beat the portal on listings. You can beat it on knowing the street.
Hosting
Two sites on one account share everything, including a compromise.
Accessibility
Some of your visitors have already set their text larger. Your site may be ignoring them.
Consulting
One of these needs a bigger van. The other needs a different one.
Ecommerce
Your category page is a landing page. It has no content on it.
Email Marketing
The best-performing email you send looks like an email, not a brochure.
Reputation
You wrote the testimonials page. Everyone reading it knows that.
Security
Your contact form sends email on behalf of anyone who fills it in.
Conversion
A review about punctuality belongs next to the booking form, not on a testimonials page.
Advertising
The same budget buys a bigger advertisement if you fill in the extra fields.
Local Marketing
The shop next door is asked for recommendations more often than you are.
Content
Your first paragraph is almost certainly deletable. Try it.
Search
You probably qualify for six links right now and have asked for none of them.
Web Design
A visitor scanning twenty equal items finds none of them.
Industry Guides
Everyone searches in March. The firms that win booked them in January.
Technical
Your pages can travel at a third of their size without changing a character.
Branding
Three seconds, at speed, from behind. Design for that.
Social Media
You are building an audience on land somebody else owns and can rezone.
Web Design
Almost nobody agrees on what an unlabelled icon means.
Industry Guides
Nobody looks for a lawyer on a good day.
Content
Length is an output of answering properly, not a target to hit.
Search
A report listing eighty errors is not an audit. It is a tool output with a logo.
Advertising
You cannot outbid them. You can be more relevant, which costs less.
Local Marketing
A rink board is not marketing. It becomes marketing when somebody links to you.
Analytics
One person visiting twice on two devices is two users and two sessions.
Compliance
You own the photograph. You do not automatically own the right to publish it.
Industry Guides
They are not choosing a clinic. They are choosing a practitioner.
Consulting
Without this number, every marketing decision is a matter of opinion.
Ecommerce
A payment link is a store with one item and no maintenance.
Email Marketing
You do not need behavioural scoring. You need to know who had what done.
Reputation
Almost nobody writes a bad review as their first move.
Security
The invoice is from a supplier you use, and the bank details have changed.
Conversion
If your page says nothing about price, the cheapest quote frames the comparison.
Web Design
A service page with the form at the bottom asks people to read everything first.
Performance
Every millisecond the server takes is a millisecond before the browser can begin.
Industry Guides
A meaningful share of your prospective patients are avoiding you out of anxiety.
Content
Nobody clicks to find out what your page is about. They click because they know.
Search
Three months is the honest answer to a question with six different answers.
Hosting
Most site owners use one section of a panel that has forty.
Accessibility
A table without headers is a list of numbers with no idea what they measure.
Technical
Analytics shows you the visitors who ran your script. The log shows you everyone.
Branding
A typeface nobody notices is a typeface doing its job.
Social Media
An embedded feed showing your last post from March is proof of the wrong thing.
Advertising
Somebody standing in a flooding basement is not going to read your service page.
Local Marketing
You can be findable in a week without a website. Not without a listing.
Web Design
The same five fields can feel like a conversation or like an application.
Industry Guides
Half your customers arrive expecting to be overcharged. Start there.
Consulting
The service you dread is on your website, so the enquiries keep arriving.
Ecommerce
Every extra checkout page is a place to change your mind.
Email Marketing
The highest open rate you will ever get is the message most businesses never send.
Reputation
Nothing is perfect for forty consecutive customers. Buyers know that.
Security
Your last web designer probably still has access. So does the employee who left.
Conversion
Free quote is not an offer. It is what everybody already does.
Industry Guides
Everything they own, in a truck, driven by people they met that morning.
Content
Nobody can photograph a correctly wired junction box behind drywall.
Search
Every internal link is a chance to say what a page is about. Most say click here.
Web Design
Two heading levels that look the same are one heading level.
Advertising
They clicked because of a specific sentence. Show them that sentence again.
Local Marketing
A stranger can answer a question about your business, and their answer stays.
Industry Guides
You are asking for a key to their home while they are at work.
Domains
Register a domain without privacy and your home address is publicly queryable.
Analytics
Your most engaged visitor is you, and you are never going to enquire.
Compliance
Found on the internet is not a licence. It is how the demand letter finds you.
Technical
The page looks fine and the console has been reporting an error for two years.
Branding
The colour on your screen and the colour on your van are two different colours.
Social Media
The response time on your page is visible. So is the message you never answered.
Web Design
An underlined word that is not a link is a small betrayal repeated on every page.
Content
A case study without a difficulty in it is a brochure with a customer's name on top.
Search
A heading used to make text bigger is a heading telling engines something untrue.
Industry Guides
You are asking for someone's house for four months. Photographs are not enough.
Consulting
If you win almost every quote, your prices are too low.
Ecommerce
A shipping cost revealed at the last step is the most common reason carts are abandoned.
Email Marketing
An unsubscribe tells you something. Silence tells you the same thing later.
Reputation
A review process that depends on remembering is a review process that stops.
Security
The two ways to handle updates badly are never and immediately.
Conversion
Nobody is reassured by a guarantee that does not say what it covers.
Hosting
The cloud is a building with very good air conditioning and two power feeds.
Accessibility
Most people watching your video have the sound off, whether or not they can hear.
Industry Guides
Nobody buys flooring from a photograph. Plenty of people rule you out from one.
Advertising
Every campaign is paying for searches nobody has looked at.
Local Marketing
The services section is free space to describe your work in the customer's words.
Web Design
The footer is on every page of your site and was designed on none of them.
Content
You have given this answer forty times. Writing it down once is the whole job.
Search
One page, one main term. Two pages chasing the same words means neither wins.
Industry Guides
The customer judges the paint. The job is decided by preparation they never see.
Technical
FTP is a moving van for your files. Plain FTP sends the keys in the open.
Branding
A beautiful logo you only have as a JPEG is a logo you cannot use.
Social Media
The before photograph is the one nobody takes, and the one that sells the work.
Consulting
Stop marketing when you are busy and you will be quiet in three months.
Ecommerce
If your description is the manufacturer's, so is everyone else's.
Email Marketing
The subject line has one job, and being interesting is not it.
Reputation
Most inaccurate reviews stay. The public reply is what everyone reads afterwards.
Security
Cleaning the damage without finding the way in means doing it again next week.
Conversion
A countdown timer that resets when you reload is a claim your customer can check.
Web Design
If the page works with the image removed, the image was decoration.
Performance
A speed test on default settings measures a visitor you may not have.
Industry Guides
Your best photographs and your quietest months arrive at opposite ends of the year.
Advertising
You are not buying keywords. You are buying the platform's interpretation of them.
Local Marketing
A customer who drives to a closed business leaves a review about it.
Content
Your reader is scanning for the answer. Put it first.
Search
A page that is not indexed is not ranking badly. It is not competing at all.
Industry Guides
In January the lead is no heat. In July it is no cooling. Most sites lead with neither.
Analytics
Your first month is an inspection, not a scorecard.
Compliance
A site with no name behind it reads as a business that might not exist next month.
Web Design
Adding a third message to the top of the page usually removes the first two.
Hosting
Nobody runs out of disk space. Plenty of sites hit the limits nobody advertises.
Accessibility
Read your links aloud without the sentences around them. That is what some people hear.
Industry Guides
One caller has water coming in. The other is planning for next spring.
Technical
A website is a folder of files. Knowing which folder solves half the mysteries.
Branding
If you have to spell it every time you say it, it will cost you enquiries forever.
Social Media
You do not need something to announce. You need something to show.
Consulting
You bought the business. Establishing what you actually control comes first.
Ecommerce
The lighting matters more than the camera. A window beats a light you do not own.
Email Marketing
You probably already have a list. It is sitting in your invoicing system.
Reputation
An unclaimed listing is a page about your business that anyone can edit but you.
Security
The point of two-factor is that a leaked password stops being sufficient.
Conversion
Three equally weighted buttons means the page has no recommendation.
Advertising
A budget too small to produce a readable result is worse than not advertising.
Local Marketing
A complete profile in the wrong category is invisible for the searches that matter.
Content
A post every month for two years beats twelve posts in March.
Search
A page nothing links to is a page search engines have no route to.
Web Design
A homepage is not a brochure cover. It is a routing decision made in ten seconds.
Industry Guides
Nobody hires an unlicensed electrician on purpose. Prove it above the fold.
Ecommerce
Most service businesses do not need a store. Some are leaving money on the table.
Advertising
Advertising buys attention. It does not buy a site that converts the attention.
Social Media
Four abandoned profiles say more about your business than one active account.
Performance
Showing something in half a second beats showing everything in two.
Compliance
Most small sites need three legal pages. Most have none or the wrong ones.
Accessibility
An inaccessible site is not a moral failing. It is enquiries you never hear about.
Reputation
Someone was given your name. What they find next decides whether they call.
Email Marketing
Nobody is waiting for your newsletter. They might be waiting for a reminder.
Security
One reused password is one breach away from every account you own.
Local Marketing
For many local businesses the listing produces more calls than the website does.
Content
You already answer these questions every week. Writing them down is the blog.
Conversion
Doubling your traffic doubles a problem you have not fixed yet.
Domains
You do not buy a domain. You lease it, and the lease has to be renewed.
Analytics
Most small business analytics accounts count visitors and nothing else.
Branding
Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.
Web Design
A first website has one job: turn people who find you into people who contact you.
Hosting
Your domain is the address. Hosting is the building. Usually rented from different people.
Search
Most of what is sold as SEO for a local business is four or five ordinary jobs.
Domains
The name was perfect. Everything close to it was taken.
Advertising
You bid more than they did and appeared below them.
Consulting
You quoted before you knew about the stairs.
Industry Guides
It snowed overnight. Everybody wants to know when you are coming.
Accessibility
Put the mouse down and try to reach the contact form.
Security
A spreadsheet from 2019 on a laptop nobody uses.
Teardowns
They are interviewing three agents and cannot tell them apart.
Industry Guides
The hotel does not care about your machines. They care that Tuesday happens.
Compliance
Seven years of invoices and eleven years of customer phone numbers.
Industry Guides
They budgeted for the pool. Nobody mentioned what a season costs to run.
Analytics
Three tools, three numbers, one month.
Teardowns
They are comparing on price and cannot see what differs.
Industry Guides
They want to know what to serve six people and how much to buy.
Web Design
A homeowner and a facilities manager landed on the same page.
Performance
Two seconds on your desk. Eleven in a van with one bar.
Industry Guides
Tuition was the small part. Then came the costume fees.
Ecommerce
They reached the payment step and you did not take the card they had.
Content
Your best three projects are the ones you are not allowed to mention.
Conversion
Their finger is over the button. This is the second that decides it.
Industry Guides
They think going to their own bank is the safe option.
Teardowns
Every quote is a different number and they cannot tell why.
Local Marketing
You have been selected as a top business in your area. There is a fee.
Hosting
They keep the server running. They do not keep your site working.
Reputation
You fixed it twice. There is a third thing now.
Technical
You wanted to edit text. You got something that needs updating monthly.
Industry Guides
They are locked out and the first three results are call centres.
Consulting
The final payment is the one that goes missing.
Search
Guaranteed first page. That promise is the warning.
Industry Guides
They are booking in February for July, and want to know who will be there.
Security
The laptop was in the van. The van was broken into.
Email Marketing
Two thousand subscribers. Four hundred have opened anything in a year.
Industry Guides
They need to dig a trench. They do not know what to ask for.
Advertising
You turned it off in November. In March you started from nothing.
Teardowns
They wanted a birthday cake with three days notice. Your site said nothing.
Industry Guides
Their server is down and they are calling whoever answers.
Branding
Consistency is free. It is also the part most businesses skip.
Teardowns
They want a price for hair like theirs, and whether Thursday is free.
Industry Guides
They do not know where the tank is or when it was last pumped.
Web Design
Nine identical boxes. The visitor reads none of them.
Analytics
Impressions up forty percent. Enquiries unchanged. Both are in the report.
Compliance
The banner appeared, everything loaded anyway, and nothing was consented to.
Ecommerce
They got to shipping, saw the cost, and closed the tab.
Industry Guides
Three quotes, three different brands, and no way to compare any of it.
Content
They printed it and stuck it inside the cupboard door.
Conversion
Eleven minutes, four websites, one phone call.
Local Marketing
Four vans on one street beats one van in four suburbs.
Teardowns
They received a letter they do not understand and it has a deadline.
Industry Guides
They want to know the monthly cost and how long they are tied in.
Social Media
Forty people saw the complaint. Four hundred will see how you answered.
Domains
The .com is gone. That is less of a problem than it feels.
Consulting
You are not billing forty hours a week. Nobody is.
Reputation
They would have left one. Nobody asked.
Security
You stopped using it in 2019. It still has your customer list.
Technical
The form says thank you. Nobody receives anything.
Industry Guides
They have five days and no idea what a good inspection includes.
Hosting
The expensive certificate encrypts exactly as well as the free one.
Teardowns
They are on a waitlist somewhere else and hoping you have space.
Performance
That photograph is four megabytes. It displays at eight hundred pixels wide.
Industry Guides
Reupholstering the sofa costs more than a new sofa. Say so early.
Search
Somebody searched for a deck design. Your photograph was the result.
Email Marketing
They contacted four businesses. Two replied. You were second.
Industry Guides
What happens if it rains, and how hard is this actually.
Advertising
Four channels, none of them with enough money to work.
Accessibility
Alt text saying image1.jpg helps nobody.
Industry Guides
Do you have them in yet, and will they grow in my yard.
Teardowns
They are leaving their dog with a stranger for a week.
Industry Guides
The fridge stopped working. Is that a mechanic or a plumber.
Web Design
Nobody watched the two-minute introduction from the owner.
Ecommerce
Your shipping estimate was wrong. Everything else was too.
Content
People read captions who never read the paragraph above them.
Conversion
Three columns, and the middle one has more ticks.
Local Marketing
You paid the fee. You attended once. That is the whole story.
Industry Guides
They have three years of receipts in a box and they are ashamed of it.
Analytics
You are collecting data you have never looked at and are responsible for.
Teardowns
They are pricing twelve hundred square feet and cannot find a number.
Consulting
You are not obliged to keep a client forever.
Industry Guides
They want lunch. Where are you right now.
Security
If you were in hospital tomorrow, could anybody run the business.
Compliance
Vagueness is not a defence. Neither is being technically true.
Reputation
Your supplier failed. The review will name you.
Technical
It works in the simulator. The simulator is not a phone.
Industry Guides
They want a refill and to know if you deliver.
Teardowns
They are about to hand somebody a hundred thousand dollars and a key.
Industry Guides
Is the course open, what does it cost, and can I get on at four.
Hosting
The specifications are identical. The support is not.
Industry Guides
They have a folder of rooms they love and a budget they have not calculated.
Branding
You registered the name. That is not the same as owning it.
Search
Twelve pages, one paragraph each, the town name swapped.
Email Marketing
Tuesday at ten is not a strategy.
Teardowns
The water is off and they are looking at three sites on a phone.
Industry Guides
No candidates means no clients. The candidate side is the product.
Advertising
Managing it yourself is free until you count the hours.
Ecommerce
They are opening it. That is the only moment you get.
Content
You explain it perfectly on the phone. Then you write leveraging synergies.
Conversion
They did not ask because they did not want to look ignorant.
Industry Guides
They are comparing your quote to one that skipped the base preparation.
Web Design
A form and nothing else. No hours, no address, no idea who answers.
Local Marketing
The realtor is asked for a plumber four times a month.
Performance
Four weights, two families, and you use two of them.
Teardowns
There is a stain on the ceiling and it is getting bigger.
Domains
The moment they know you want it, the price changes.
Industry Guides
They want to know if the taproom is open and whether the seasonal is back.
Consulting
Free estimates attract people collecting free estimates.
Security
The site is a copy. The domain is the business.
Industry Guides
They need it delivered today. That is the entire question.
Analytics
Direct traffic is not people typing your address.
Reputation
They named the other company in your review. Do not name them back.
Teardowns
It is thirty-four degrees and the air conditioning stopped.
Technical
404. Page not found. That is the whole page.
Industry Guides
The city told them they need an engineer. That is all they know.
Social Media
They looked at your page before deciding whether to apply.
Industry Guides
Gold package. Platinum package. Nobody knows what either includes.
Compliance
You took the photo. That settles copyright, not permission.
Industry Guides
They need it across town in two hours. Can you or not.
Teardowns
An owner wants the fee. A tenant wants to report a leak. Same site.
Hosting
Unlimited bandwidth, subject to a number they will not tell you.
Ecommerce
Nothing has a five star average. Shoppers know that.
Content
They can write it well. They cannot know what you know.
Conversion
Three numbers, a nine hundred dollar spread, and no way to tell why.
Search
They typed a whole sentence. Your page is titled Services.
Industry Guides
They want it gone today. They have no idea what a half load is.
Email Marketing
Nobody wants a monthly update from their plumber.
Local Marketing
Somebody already created a listing for you. It has your old number.
Industry Guides
They want to know how many visits this is going to be.
Advertising
You pay when somebody contacts you, not when they click.
Web Design
The button is at the top. The thumb is at the bottom.
Teardowns
The report card came home. They are looking tonight.
Consulting
Whose customer is it, and whose fault was that.
Industry Guides
One house is a loss. Six on the same street is a good day.
Security
Same supplier, same amount, new account number.
Accessibility
Your body text is 13 pixels and grey. Nobody over forty is reading it.
Industry Guides
They hurt their back. They do not know if they need a doctor first.
Teardowns
They are moving on Saturday. They need a price and a size, now.
Reputation
We are sorry you feel that way is not an apology.
Analytics
It knows they left. It does not know they got a better quote elsewhere.
Technical
Twelve pages do not need a search box. They need a better menu.
Industry Guides
They were told to get something notarised. That is the whole brief they have.
Branding
You paid for the photographs. That does not mean you own them.
Performance
A score of 94 on a desktop test tells you very little.
Industry Guides
Forty people, a Saturday in September, and no idea what that costs.
Teardowns
They have not been in six years and they are embarrassed about it.
Industry Guides
They want a tent for eighty people. Will it fit in the garden or not.
Ecommerce
The filter sale is worth four dollars. The customer coming back is worth more.
Content
They are not paying for the part. They are paying for knowing which part.
Conversion
They sent the form. Now they are wondering whether it worked.
Local Marketing
They said the roof guy. That was the whole recommendation.
Industry Guides
A branch came down in the storm. They want somebody insured, today.
Hosting
The update broke the contact form. You found out from a customer.
Domains
Two domains means building the same standing twice.
Compliance
Ontario has thresholds. Human rights law has none.
Consulting
The argument is never about the work. It is about what the work was.
Teardowns
They are unwell, it is Sunday, and they cannot tell if you take new patients.
Search
The searches start eight weeks before the phone does.
Email Marketing
A message that looks like a newsletter gets treated like one.
Industry Guides
Water is running down the wall. They are not researching gutter systems.
Security
Losing it is bad. Somebody else posting from it is worse.
Web Design
Four different people just arrived. They want four different things.
Advertising
They searched for a burst pipe. Your ad says quality workmanship since 1998.
Industry Guides
They have a folder of kitchens they like. They have no idea what any cost.
Teardowns
A warning light came on. They are deciding between you and the dealership.
Industry Guides
They found you on a booking site. Now they are checking whether to book direct.
Reputation
Wait a day. Then write the reply for the people reading it later.
Technical
Their outage is now your outage. Their tracking is now your disclosure.
Industry Guides
They are comparing your quote to one that skipped the waterproofing.
Analytics
If it takes longer than four minutes, you will stop opening it.
Industry Guides
They want to know if their child will get hurt. Say something about it.
Teardowns
Three painters quoted. Two of them explained what preparation means.
Ecommerce
Suggest what they will need. Not what you want to shift.
Content
You answered the same question four times this month. That is a page.
Conversion
They filled in three fields and hit one they did not want to answer.
Industry Guides
They sent a logo from a website. It is 400 pixels wide and they want a banner.
Local Marketing
You added six town names to the site. Nothing happened.
Social Media
Take the before shot. You will not get another chance.
Consulting
You can do it. That is not the same as it being worth doing.
Industry Guides
They want to know what it costs before they are willing to ask.
Teardowns
One date, six suppliers. You are the one who did not say a price.
Security
The bigger risk is the person behind you, not the network.
Hosting
Your customers are in one province. Your server is on another continent.
Industry Guides
They have a twenty-eight foot cruiser. Can you haul it or not.
Web Design
A third of your visitors will never see anything below the first screen.
Performance
Two seconds of blank screen feels worse than four seconds of content arriving.
Search
They heard about you from a neighbour. Now they are checking.
Email Marketing
You send four hundred emails a month. Each one ends the same way.
Industry Guides
They want to know what it costs in total, not per hour.
Compliance
Why does a quote form ask for a date of birth.
Teardowns
Half the panel is dead and they are standing in the dark with a phone.
Advertising
Ninety thousand impressions and one enquiry. Both numbers are real.
Industry Guides
They want to know how you get paid. Most advisor sites never say.
Branding
If it does not work at the size of a van door, it does not work.
Accessibility
You cannot see where you are. Neither can anybody else.
Reputation
One customer photograph outweighs eleven of yours.
Technical
Forty files called image1 through image40, and one of them is your logo.
Industry Guides
They want the price, the day, and whether their child needs an instrument first.
Teardowns
Six people are deciding where to eat. Your menu is a PDF.
Ecommerce
They ordered it. You do not have it. Now what.
Content
A headline that overpromises gets the click and loses the reader.
Conversion
They booked a slot you cannot deliver. That is worse than the enquiry you avoided.
Industry Guides
They want to know if you have a turkey big enough. In October.
Local Marketing
Two thousand flyers and four calls. Whether that failed depends on the job value.
Analytics
Your conversion rate is the average of a good number and a terrible one.
Domains
Transferring the domain does not move your email. That surprises people.
Industry Guides
They do not want it shipped. They want to know if you have it now.
Consulting
While you are here, could you just.
Industry Guides
Their insurer asked for a certificate. They have no idea what that means.
Teardowns
They are nervous about walking in. Your site shows people who already look like that.
Security
Somebody who left in 2021 can still edit your business listing.
Industry Guides
They were told to use a preferred shop. They do not know they can choose.
Web Design
Three people took these photos. It shows.
Hosting
99.9% uptime allows your site to be down during your busiest morning.
Teardowns
The dog has been vomiting since midnight. They need to know if you are open.
Industry Guides
They drove ninety minutes for a bike that sold last Tuesday.
Search
A page from four years ago is telling customers something you stopped doing.
Email Marketing
Set it up in an afternoon. It books work for years.
Industry Guides
They want an eye exam, and they want to know what their plan covers.
Reputation
Your best review and your worst are describing the same fortnight.
Advertising
It worked for three months and then it did not. That is not always the advertisement.
Technical
Supporting everything costs money and slows the site for everybody else.
Industry Guides
They have a thirty-two foot trailer and a long weekend. Will it fit or not.
Ecommerce
They paid at 2am. The file has to arrive without you.
Teardowns
They have a budget and a yard. Your site has a photo of somebody else's garden.
Content
Ask for a blog post and you get nothing. Ask what went wrong today and you get four.
Conversion
Free consultation is what a site says when it will not say a price.
Compliance
Your terms mention a jurisdiction you have never operated in.
Industry Guides
They want a fence. They also want to know whose side the posts go on.
Performance
They did not judge your site as slow. They just left.
Local Marketing
You have been surprised by the same February for eleven years.
Industry Guides
It snowed. Two hundred people want an appointment this week.
Security
One password, five people, and no idea who used it.
Consulting
They are not stalling. They are stuck on something they have not told you.
Industry Guides
They need it certified for an application due Friday. That is the whole enquiry.
Analytics
Conversions fell forty percent. That means two people instead of three.
Teardowns
They loved the work. They still cannot tell whether they can afford you.
Industry Guides
They want to know what they take off and who will be in the room.
Web Design
Most people set dark mode on their phone. Far fewer arrive at your site asking for it.
Social Media
Twice a month for two years beats daily for six weeks.
Teardowns
They want a price for a three-bedroom house. You offer a free consultation.
Branding
You are sick of looking at it. Your customers see it four times a year.
Industry Guides
The fridge died last night. They are pricing a new one in another tab.
Hosting
You got mentioned on the radio. The site went down at nine.
Industry Guides
A contractor wants your rate. A homeowner wants the ceiling crack gone.
Ecommerce
A retail customer just found your trade price. Now what.
Content
Every job is different is true, and it is not an answer.
Conversion
They are not admiring your work. They are checking whether you will make a mess.
Search
A page nothing links to is a page nobody reaches.
Email Marketing
Twelve people left. That is information, not a verdict.
Teardowns
They are switching accountants in February. Your site is a stock handshake.
Reputation
Nobody can buy eleven years of people saying you turned up.
Technical
A page that already exists cannot be broken by a database that went down.
Local Marketing
They opened in March. Your quiet April was going to happen anyway.
Industry Guides
They found something in the kitchen last night. They are not browsing.
Consulting
Five days. Finish, do not start.
Consulting
Sort by whether you can undo it.
Web Design
Sometimes the answer is nothing.
Consulting
A list of fourteen improvements produces none of them, and a single change with a date and a named person produces one.
Consulting
One job type. Always the same one.
Consulting
You decided this last year too.
Consulting
Four years. Which decisions held?
Domains
A date without a lead time is no warning.
Hosting
Restore one. Time it. Write it down.
Security
Instead of listing your systems and asking who can reach them, list the people and ask what each one can still get into.
Consulting
Read a year of statements line by line and add up everything you did not deliberately decide to keep paying for.
Consulting
Who could stop you trading?
Content
The van in that picture was sold in 2021, the man on the left left in 2022, and the shop in the background is now a d.
Conversion
Never changed. Never checked.
Search
Four years, untouched, still working.
Content
Thirty published. Four worked.
Social Media
Your signature still says the old name.
Analytics
It is running. Is it correct?
Consulting
Did a number move? That is the test.
Consulting
Six events. One mattered.
Analytics
The peak magnifies the flaws.
Ecommerce
They all arrive in the same fortnight.
Local Marketing
Decided is not the same as published.
Conversion
Too late. Answer it well anyway.
Advertising
Same budget. Half the clicks.
Ecommerce
Twenty per cent off. Double the volume.
Conversion
Reuse paragraphs, not whole replies.
Reputation
They know what you told them Monday.
Compliance
A stated date is a term, not a slogan.
Ecommerce
Four phrases. Pick the honest one.
Ecommerce
You have decided the cutoff and written it on a shipping page, which is a page nobody visits before ordering.
Ecommerce
Six weeks. Here is the order.
Reputation
Say it once, plainly, early.
Branding
The quote covers the logo and the website, and the list of everything else runs to about thirty items nobody mentioned.
Branding
The invoice is the one they keep.
Branding
Write it the way you say it.
Branding
Thread, vinyl, and a stamp all break it.
Branding
Your category already has colours.
Branding
Ask. It takes one message.
Branding
Two audiences, one name, both confused.
Branding
What comes with you, and what does not.
Branding
They ask for you. That cuts both ways.
Teardowns
Nothing is wrong with it. That is the point.
Teardowns
Four directories above you.
Teardowns
Four questions. No answers.
Teardowns
One abandoned room in a tidy house.
Teardowns
Three quarters arrive on a phone.
Teardowns
Two clicks to the thing they came for.
Teardowns
Nobody has ever wanted this.
Teardowns
Three numbers. Which one works?
Teardowns
A password, for one appointment.
Teardowns
None of this is your work.
Teardowns
The menu is a file. It should be a page.
Industry Guides
The site is the demonstration.
Industry Guides
They are anxious. Answer that first.
Industry Guides
Can I visit, and can you ship?
Industry Guides
You are not a roofer. Say so first.
Industry Guides
Do you come here, and today?
Industry Guides
You work a route rather than a service area, most of your work comes from barns and vets, and the site's job is.
Industry Guides
Reach and capacity. Then everything else.
Industry Guides
They will find you. Can they book?
Industry Guides
The portfolio is the site.
Industry Guides
Your customers are roofers checking whether you have four squares of a specific shingle before they drive across town.
Domains
Ten minutes. Once a year.
Domains
It does not touch your site.
Technical
Mail moved. Records did not.
Technical
You left. The record did not.
Technical
You made the change an hour ago, it works on your phone and not on your computer, and nobody has done anything wrong.
Security
Covers what it names. Nothing else.
Domains
Decide it. Do not drift into it.
Domains
Most are worth nothing. Some are not.
Domains
Four minutes. Stop paying for nothing.
Domains
Almost nobody types it at all.
Domains
Alarming. Usually nothing.
Domains
Ask badly and the price triples.
Domains
It had a life before you.
Domains
Hides the address. Not the ownership.
Domains
The registrant field is the closest thing a domain has to a name on a title, and on a great many small business domai.
Domains
One setting. Free. Check yours.
Domains
Their name. Your domain. Fixable.
Domains
Three accounts. One reason: history.
Domains
One card. Eleven silent failures.
Domains
Name them all. Most people cannot.
Accessibility
Keep the log. It becomes the statement.
Accessibility
Blocked first. Cheap second.
Accessibility
One hour. One person. Everything.
Accessibility
Mouse away. Complete the journey.
Accessibility
Press control and plus. Twice.
Accessibility
Legible here. Invisible there.
Accessibility
Your brand colour fails. Three options.
Accessibility
The 10% it misses is the 10% that matters.
Accessibility
Twenty minutes away. Everything gone.
Accessibility
A red border round a field tells somebody that something is wrong and not what, which is where a good proportion of a.
Accessibility
Fourteen presses before the content.
Accessibility
One line. Whole site unusable.
Accessibility
Announced as a table. It is not one.
Accessibility
It should have been a page.
Accessibility
Back does nothing. Now what?
Accessibility
Read the headings alone. Do they work?
Accessibility
Your name is a picture. Fix it.
Accessibility
Say nothing. Deliberately.
Accessibility
Describe the job, not the picture.
Accessibility
160 images. One afternoon.
Accessibility
Turn the screen off. Then try.
Accessibility
They left. You never heard.
Local Marketing
Quiet season. Do not discount yet.
Social Media
Run the export before you need it.
Social Media
Two years. No evidence. Stop.
Social Media
Four posts. One afternoon.
Web Design
Find every one. There are more than you think.
Social Media
The logo changed this morning, the name went with it, and for a small business account almost nothing has actually ch.
Social Media
The material makes itself.
Social Media
Six enquiries. Now work out why.
Social Media
Four sentences that actually answer what somebody asked will do more for you than any advertisement, and most trades.
Social Media
The page has 40. The group has 4,000.
Social Media
800 followers. 40 saw it.
Analytics
No enquiries. Not the same as nothing.
Social Media
A customer cannot see your posting workflow, and they can see the six specific artefacts that reveal a post was writt.
Social Media
Capacity first. Then choose.
Social Media
Just stop. Leave a signpost.
Consulting
Six ways it goes wrong. None is closure.
Social Media
It worked twice. It failed often.
Social Media
Available here. Still probably not for you.
Analytics
Two series. One boundary.
Analytics
The date has passed. Here is what remains.
Branding
Ten minutes now. Expensive later.
Analytics
Two pages. For whoever comes next.
Analytics
Nine reports. Two get read.
Analytics
Not useless. Actively misleading.
Analytics
Four sources. No model will help.
Analytics
One year in your records is unusable.
Analytics
It was always going to be quiet.
Analytics
That average is not about you.
Analytics
What will you do if it moves?
Analytics
Be told, rather than checking.
Analytics
One number. Everything else optional.
Analytics
Ninety taps. Forty calls.
Hosting
Recorded all along. Never opened.
Analytics
Forty visits. No conclusions available.
Analytics
Say it in June, not in August.
Analytics
Four genuinely gone. The rest moved.
Analytics
Both running. Both different.
Analytics
Visits yes. Conversions no.
Analytics
It exists. Is it collecting?
Analytics
Thirty-six rows. Eight columns.
Analytics
You can save answers, not questions.
Analytics
Four years of figures are about to become a read-only archive with an expiry date on it, and the useful parts fit on.
Analytics
Thirty days. Four things to do.
Web Design
Build for the version you cannot predict.
Consulting
Eight things you can stop watching.
Consulting
Shorter horizons. Reversible bets.
Consulting
The decision is the same as it was.
Consulting
No announcement affects this one.
Email Marketing
Nobody can change the rules on this.
Search
One channel is one decision away.
Reputation
The one thing nobody can produce for you.
Content
Anyone can generate a kitchen now.
Content
Five shapes, not one instruction.
Conversion
Not ready to hire. Ready to ask.
Analytics
Split it now, not after it falls.
Consulting
Five announcements. Nothing to do.
Search
Real, uneven, smaller than feared.
Search
An answer above the results. Not here yet.
Content
One page trying to explain something and persuade somebody at the same time usually does neither, and the two jobs wa.
Local Marketing
You fixed it. It came back.
Reputation
Ask it about you. Read carefully.
Search
Anything assembling an answer about local suppliers has to decide which businesses to name, and it does that from wha.
Search
Nobody can answer this without you.
Search
One answer. No click needed.
Content
It has to work on its own.
Search
Monthly, quarterly, and twice a year.
Search
Your photos can be found separately.
Technical
Four apply. Two are visible.
Search
Being in the index means it is eligible to appear, which is a much lower bar than appearing, and the two get treated.
Search
Most of those are not errors.
Technical
Nine hundred pages. You wrote forty.
Search
Good traffic. Wrong customers.
Technical
Point it somewhere close, or lose it.
Search
Does it have readers, or just listings?
Search
Publish the thing people cite.
Search
Not penalised. Just ignored.
Search
Eleven pages. All of them good.
Search
First for your name. Found by nobody new.
Search
They asked a full question.
Search
Four thousand searches. No customers.
Search
You do not have a ranking for a local search, you have a map of rankings, and where you sit on it changes with every.
Search
Lost the visits. Kept the work.
Search
Check the boring causes first.
Search
The one that mattered got no coverage.
Consulting
You tried it on eleven things in February.
Consulting
The slowness was the thinking.
Consulting
Twice a month. Fifteen dollars a go.
Consulting
They are using it. Nobody said anything.
Search
Forty new pages. Nine worse ones.
Search
They published a position. Read it.
Consulting
It is all in your invoices already.
Content
Twenty ideas. Nineteen useless.
Consulting
Google's arrived. Not here yet.
Compliance
Fluent, and possibly wrong.
Consulting
The answer is on the page in front of you.
Consulting
Faster, and they can tell.
Conversion
It answered. You are bound by it.
Consulting
Better at nearly everything. Still makes things up.
Consulting
Nobody discloses which word processor they used, and a client who discovers you generated the whole deliverable after.
Compliance
You pasted their email. Where did it go?
Consulting
Test it where you can mark the answer.
Content
Grammar was fine. Voice was the problem.
Content
Everyone got the same tool.
Ecommerce
Two hundred products. Nobody was going to write them.
Compliance
Confident, fluent, and about another country.
Content
The invented detail is not the problem.
Content
Supply the substance. Ask for the shape.
Performance
Three numbers. Checked in two minutes.
Performance
Diagnose the site, not the person.
Performance
A percentage of forty is not much.
Performance
The score went from fifty-one to eighty-nine, the invoice was paid, and the enquiries stayed exactly where they were.
Performance
Not slow. Just far away, repeatedly.
Performance
Downloaded fast. Still not usable.
Performance
Edited quarterly. Rebuilt hourly.
Performance
Unchanged since 2021. Rebuilt every visit.
Hosting
One setting. Three quarters smaller.
Performance
Fast the second time. Nobody came twice.
Performance
Agreed it should go. Still there.
Performance
Six tags. Nobody approved six.
Performance
Ten files. One after another.
Performance
The text is there. You cannot see it.
Performance
A third smaller. Same picture.
Performance
Four hundred pixels shown. Two thousand sent.
Performance
You tested the one page that was fine.
Performance
Tested from a data centre. Used in a car park.
Performance
Nobody made the site slow.
Web Design
Three pictures. A hundred decisions.
Web Design
Everybody agrees. Nobody does it.
Web Design
Same theme. Same demo photos. Same site.
Web Design
You copied the layout. Not the reason.
Web Design
A search box on twelve pages.
Web Design
Nine pages. No trail needed.
Web Design
Fourteen items, all of them needed.
Web Design
Right with three. Wrong with thirty.
Web Design
They printed it. It came out wrong.
Web Design
Four button styles. Nobody chose four.
Web Design
Five words, a menu, and a button. One row.
Web Design
Same layout. A third more text.
Web Design
The page with no search results, the basket with nothing in it, and the listing with no reviews yet are all pages som.
Web Design
It fades in. They already scrolled past.
Web Design
Looks striking. Harder to read.
Web Design
Eleven fields. Decision made.
Web Design
Is that a button or a heading?
Web Design
Always visible. Always in the way.
Web Design
Big picture. Nothing else on screen.
Web Design
Three columns, one hundred pixels each.
Web Design
The layout demanded photos. Stock arrived.
Web Design
It looks old. It also works.
Consulting
Close it properly and go.
Analytics
Twelve numbers, none watched. Pick one.
Content
Decide the shots now. Take them all year.
Consulting
Nine tasks. Do the first three.
Consulting
The list only ever grows.
Consulting
Decide it now or quote it all year.
Consulting
This week, they want to clear it too.
Consulting
You reopen on the third. They do not.
Reputation
The rota is easy. The diversion is not.
Security
One hour. Once a year. Now.
Domains
One of these takes the site down.
Analytics
Your best channel is not in any report.
Content
Two worked. Fourteen did not.
Search
Far enough away to read it honestly.
Analytics
July is the deadline. December is the date that matters.
Consulting
Drafting yes. Deciding no.
Consulting
The good parts are all in your records.
Consulting
Every error arrives in the same register as every correct answer, which removes the signal people have always used to.
Content
It produces the average. That is the design.
Content
Thirty seconds. Competent. Unusable.
Consulting
Released Wednesday. Everywhere by Friday.
Technical
Three changes. One needs your attention.
Consulting
Decide it now. December will not let you.
Reputation
Thank you. Here is ten per cent off. Not the same thing.
Reputation
Nine complaints. Two hours. Sort them.
Reputation
Everybody else is closed. That is the opportunity.
Reputation
Thank you for your message, we will respond as soon as possible.
Reputation
Reduced is fine. Unannounced is not.
Compliance
Evidence, not argument. And a deadline.
Security
They wait until you are busy.
Ecommerce
Best week of the year. Money held until March.
Ecommerce
No order, no message, no record.
Compliance
They paid you. Then the courier asked for more.
Compliance
You took the money. Now the date matters.
Ecommerce
Your busiest page. Selling nothing.
Ecommerce
Different name on the parcel. Different everything.
Ecommerce
Bought in November. Opened in December.
Ecommerce
Higher uptake than you think. More work than you think.
Ecommerce
Not a discount with extra steps.
Ecommerce
They know when your sale is. They are waiting.
Ecommerce
One step breaks. Everything queues behind it.
Ecommerce
The order that arrives at midnight.
Ecommerce
What is in the room is what you are selling.
Analytics
It went up. That might be bad.
Conversion
Put it back. Nobody will mind.
Conversion
Before and after, honestly.
Conversion
Forty seconds, or a play button they ignore.
Conversion
Longer worked. Here is why.
Conversion
Fourteen adverts. One page. No match.
Conversion
Fewer exits. Also fewer ways to check you are real.
Conversion
Not every enquiry is worth a quote.
Conversion
First reasonable quote wins more than the best one.
Conversion
They did not decide against you. They forgot.
Conversion
Maximum attention. Minimum content.
Conversion
Fires as they leave. Catches almost nobody.
Conversion
They land, they read, they go somewhere. Where?
Conversion
They will not type it. They will take a call.
Conversion
It says we are online. You are on a roof.
Conversion
Nobody has ever checked a footer badge.
Conversion
Great service, highly recommended, would use again.
Conversion
Every job is different. Publish the range anyway.
Conversion
Explains everything. Asks for nothing.
Conversion
They started typing. Then they stopped.
Security
One page. Written on a quiet Tuesday.
Security
The fear is justified. Do it anyway, in order.
Security
The answer is on your own website.
Security
Faster today. Unfixable later.
Security
Nine hundred accounts. You made two of them.
Security
Every other account resets through this one.
Security
The back door you set up years ago.
Security
Generated once. Needed exactly when you cannot find them.
Security
They are not being difficult. Answer the objection.
Security
They told you. That is the good outcome.
Compliance
Nobody decided to keep them. They are there anyway.
Security
Probably not you. Check anyway.
Security
A red page where your site used to be.
Security
It looks fine to you. That is the design.
Security
Nothing tells you a plugin has been abandoned.
Security
Which copy, and what do you lose.
Security
Your backup is inside the thing you are backing up.
Security
One door. Four locks. An afternoon.
Security
Check who has been logging in as you.
Security
They already know the username.
Security
Nobody picked you. Software found you.
Content
It will never be perfect. Publish it.
Content
Built in January. Abandoned in March.
Search
Forty towns, one page, forty times.
Content
Who was this written for? It shows.
Search
Announced last week. Rolling out today.
Content
Three half-answers, competing with each other.
Content
One page, four questions, four half-answers.
Content
Best job you ever did. Cannot mention it.
Content
They will never hire you. Answer anyway.
Content
They picked you. Now what.
Content
Nobody has ever asked that.
Content
They are comparing anyway. Help them.
Content
Promised a guide. Delivered a pitch.
Content
Nothing changed. The date says otherwise.
Content
Anybody can assert it. Show how you know.
Content
Written by nobody, on behalf of everybody.
Search
Delete a third. The rest goes up.
Content
A page that has been improved for four years by adding paragraphs to it is not an improved page.
Content
First result. Wrong page.
Content
Four thin posts a month, or one good one.
Content
Four paragraphs of preamble. No answer.
Content
The details you cannot look up are the whole point.
Teardowns
Seven pages, no animation, one photograph per service, and it does everything the last five teardowns found missing.
Teardowns
The business is trading, busy, and doing well.
Teardowns
Ninety photos. Nobody reaches the tenth.
Teardowns
Four hundred words and nobody in them.
Teardowns
The words exist. They are inside pictures.
Teardowns
No phone number, no address, no names, and a form as the only way in.
Teardowns
Six screens. Most people leave at the third.
Teardowns
Eleven seconds on a phone, and none of it was the hosting.
Teardowns
Nine things to do. So people do none.
Teardowns
Forty pages, each about a different service, each assembled from the same paragraphs with a word swapped.
Industry Guides
What size, what can go in, and can it sit there.
Industry Guides
They are buying reliability, not cleaning.
Industry Guides
How fast, how long, and what if we overrun.
Industry Guides
They are confused. Most broker sites make it worse.
Industry Guides
Owners are buying. Tenants are stuck with you.
Industry Guides
A stump and a subdivision are not the same enquiry.
Industry Guides
They are about to send you thousands. Reassure them.
Industry Guides
You cannot win on catalogue. Do not try.
Industry Guides
Hours, turnaround, and can you do this.
Industry Guides
Months of research before anybody calls.
Branding
Found in a drawer, six months later.
Advertising
It is printed. The page has to outlive it.
Web Design
Somebody shared your link. It looked like nothing.
Web Design
Fifteen tabs. Yours is the blank one.
Branding
Built for one service. Now you offer four.
Branding
A one-page specification works while one person approves everything.
Branding
They booked a website. Somebody unmarked knocked.
Branding
Two seconds, three items. Everything else is decoration.
Branding
Memorability is a different property from clarity, and for a small business the line worth having is the one a custom.
Branding
They heard it. Now they have to type it.
Branding
Photocopy it. If it disappears, so does your brand.
Branding
Brand guidelines run to forty pages and go unread.
Content
The same handshake, on four competitors' sites.
Compliance
Buying a font is not buying a font.
Compliance
You paid for it. You may not own it.
Compliance
Similar name, same town. Now what.
Compliance
Registering a business name is not a trademark, and a single-location business already has rights it did not apply for.
Branding
Nobody is searching for your Platinum Care Plan.
Branding
Smart website, unbranded van, invoice from a template.
Branding
Nobody is seeing the colour you signed off.
Branding
A rebrand for an established local business risks the one asset it has, which is people recognising the name.
Branding
Spend the afternoon. Spend the money elsewhere.
Reputation
One review at four reviews is a crisis. At ninety it is nothing.
Compliance
Showing your best five is normal. Implying it is all of them is not.
Compliance
The easiest reviews to get are the ones that count against you.
Reputation
Not a customer. Now prove it to a platform.
Reputation
Reply to all of them, or reply properly. Not both.
Reputation
They meant the other business with your name.
Reputation
One complaint is a conversation. Forty is not.
Reputation
Something published has landed badly, and the three options are to delete it, apologise, or leave it alone.
Social Media
You are handing over your voice, not a task.
Social Media
Two thousand people, none of them buyers.
Social Media
The number goes up. The reach goes down.
Compliance
Skill-testing questions exist for a reason.
Compliance
Tagging does more than name somebody.
Compliance
Sharing is permitted. Reposting is not the same thing.
Social Media
The best content you get, and the riskiest.
Social Media
They messaged you. The app told them you reply quickly.
Social Media
Some comments get worse when you answer them.
Social Media
Every post is an offer. Nobody is reading any of them.
Social Media
One post, four platforms, three of them broken.
Social Media
Most advice about video assumes somebody willing to talk to a phone.
Social Media
Growing fastest is not the same as where your customers are.
Email Marketing
Exporting a list and importing it elsewhere takes ten minutes.
Email Marketing
Everybody opens it. Nobody at your business has read it.
Email Marketing
Open rates rose across almost every list last autumn without anybody sending better email.
Email Marketing
You have no news. Nobody wanted news.
Email Marketing
An automated message that references what somebody did, too precisely and too quickly, reads as surveillance.
Email Marketing
It is not a technical decision. It is an unwatched inbox.
Email Marketing
A tabbed inbox sorting your message into promotions is not a spam filter and not a failure.
Email Marketing
A steady trickle is healthy. Zero is not.
Email Marketing
Tuesday at ten is somebody else's average.
Email Marketing
A message asking for four things gets none of them done.
Email Marketing
Some readers see empty boxes where your message was.
Email Marketing
View this email in your browser. That is your second line.
Email Marketing
The subject line is the whole of the decision.
Email Marketing
The most-opened message you will ever send. If you send it.
Email Marketing
Segmentation is standard advice and it assumes a list large enough for the pieces to be worth having.
Email Marketing
An old list is not a dormant asset waiting to be woken.
Technical
Your neighbours' spam is your spam folder.
Technical
Three records sit in your domain settings and each stops a different thing.
Technical
It builds over months and it drops in a day.
Email Marketing
Most small businesses do not send spam deliberately.
Analytics
Rebuilds break tracking. Plan the handover.
Analytics
Every figure you track costs something to collect, read, and explain.
Analytics
What changed around then? Nobody remembers.
Analytics
Most dashboards are built to demonstrate that measurement is happening.
Analytics
A figure falls, somebody asks why, and the honest answer is that the measurement changed rather than the business.
Analytics
Everybody who declines becomes invisible to you.
Analytics
A new property arrives configured to collect more about people than a small business needs.
Analytics
Two tools on the same site will never report the same numbers, and the gap between them is not a fault in either.
Analytics
Traffic rises sharply, nothing was published, no campaign ran, and enquiries are unchanged.
Analytics
At fifty a day, a twenty percent change is weather.
Analytics
There is one date in the announcement and three deadlines in practice.
Analytics
The announcement today gives a firm date for the first time.
Analytics
A migration is the rare moment when carrying something forward requires a decision.
Analytics
They liked the old report. Change the tool, not the report.
Analytics
A default nobody chose is deleting your history.
Analytics
Analytics knows what people did after they arrived.
Analytics
You are the biggest visitor to your own website.
Analytics
Traffic without conversions is a headcount, not a measurement.
Analytics
The metric everybody quoted and few could define has been replaced by one that measures the opposite.
Analytics
The report you opened every month is not in the new interface under that name, and frequently not under any name.
Analytics
The old system let you declare that reaching a particular page counted as a success.
Analytics
The two analytics systems are separate products that do not share data.
Analytics
Plenty of businesses set the second property up a year ago and have never opened it.
Technical
No staging, no team. Still need a routine.
Performance
A good optimisation, applied to the wrong image.
Performance
A page can request fonts from a font service, from the theme, and from a plugin, all at once.
Performance
The same page tested twice gives two quite different results, and the gap is not a fault.
Search
It is rolling out to desktop now. Most sites will not notice.
Performance
Two visits, one visitor. Something is firing twice.
Technical
Page two of a listing is where content goes to be forgotten.
Technical
Six filters, thousands of addresses, forty products.
Technical
One slash, two addresses, one page.
Technical
Setting up a redirect prevents the problem.
Security
The renewal succeeded, the dashboard says valid, and visitors are seeing a security warning.
Security
A secure certificate covers the connection.
Technical
It works when you check. That is the whole problem.
Technical
Reports list dozens of missing pages, most from links on sites you do not control.
Technical
Structured data describes your business to a machine in a format it does not have to interpret.
Technical
A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is the real one.
Technical
One line, one file, and the whole site disappears.
Technical
A sitemap is a list of the pages you want found.
Technical
One address sends you to a second, which sends you to a third, which finally serves the page.
Domains
The domain is yours, the business is trading, and nobody can get into the account that holds it.
Domains
A lapsed domain does not simply stop working.
Domains
Securing the domain early is sensible.
Domains
It looks fine written down. Now say it to somebody.
Domains
The promotion ended eighteen months ago and the domain is still renewing.
Domains
Two domains, one site. Redirect, do not duplicate.
Hosting
Managed hosting means the server is looked after.
Hosting
Recurring revenue, and somebody else's outage is now yours.
Hosting
The same problem described two ways produces a fix in an hour or a week of back and forth.
Hosting
An email arrives saying your hosting company has joined a larger group, and that nothing will change.
Hosting
The outage is avoidable. Change one setting a week early.
Hosting
Scheduled tasks run on your server every day, doing things nobody currently at the business chose.
Hosting
A page returns a forbidden error, nothing has changed, and the file is plainly there.
Hosting
Your pages are not files. That explains most of the odd behaviour.
Hosting
Two copies solves one problem and creates another.
Hosting
The distance costs milliseconds. Something else costs more.
Hosting
Finding out from a customer that your site is down is both embarrassing and slow.
Hosting
An outage happened, the host says it is resolved, and the explanation is four words long.
Hosting
A bandwidth limit is rarely reached by visitors.
Hosting
A warning arrives saying the account is nearly full, and nobody has added anything for months.
Hosting
Most business owners log into their hosting twice a year and find a screen of icons they do not recognise.
Technical
An hour of small things, and the site stops looking neglected.
Web Design
You cannot see your own site, because you know what every page means before you read it.
Search
They passed you. Find out what changed before assuming a budget.
Consulting
You will be wrong. Build a budget that survives being wrong.
Consulting
A list of fifteen improvements produces none of them.
Consulting
Not everything worth wanting has a number attached.
Consulting
An honest retrospective is uncomfortable and short.
Hosting
Nobody is watching for two weeks. Check the four things that fail.
Reputation
A briefing gets somebody through a busy fortnight.
Consulting
It is obvious to you. That is why nobody has written it down.
Content
You cannot photograph a summer job in February.
Hosting
Knowing a backup exists is not the same as knowing how long recovery takes or who could do it.
Domains
Everything expires in Q1 and January is when nobody is looking.
Security
Access is granted whenever somebody needs something and removed almost never.
Consulting
The hard part is not reviewing the list.
Consulting
You already know which one. The question is what it costs to stay.
Consulting
Costs have moved considerably over two years and most small business prices have not.
Consulting
Every business has a few, and most treat them as bad luck.
Consulting
A year of declined enquiries is a description of how the market sees you, written by people with no reason to flatter.
Content
An annual review is not the same as finding dead pages.
Analytics
Monthly reporting produces noise and anxiety.
Search
A search update is announced, the coverage is dramatic, and most small businesses see nothing.
Technical
Three real shifts this year, and two renames that changed nothing.
Consulting
December has about fifteen working days in it and roughly the usual amount of work.
Advertising
You cannot outbid them. You can go where they are not.
Ecommerce
Twenty percent off can be half your profit. Work it out first.
Ecommerce
It all comes back in January. Decide the rules in November.
Reputation
In a busy season the phone gets answered by whoever is nearest, and that person has never been told what to say.
Conversion
A seasonal surge is not a hiring problem for most small businesses.
Ecommerce
Your cutoff date rests on a courier's published guidance, which is guidance rather than a guarantee.
Ecommerce
Gift cards are the December product with no stock, no shipping, and no deadline, which makes them unusually attractive.
Ecommerce
Working out the dates is the easy half.
Ecommerce
Publish the cutoff dates now. Everything else follows from them.
Local Marketing
Two months shut. Neither option is clean.
Local Marketing
You changed the door sign. The listing still says half past five.
Local Marketing
Ignore the view count. Two other numbers are worth ten minutes.
Local Marketing
Book from the search result. Only if the calendar is real.
Local Marketing
Switch it on only if somebody will answer it.
Local Marketing
Two separate sections that display differently and do different jobs, and most businesses have filled in neither.
Local Marketing
Twenty checkboxes, ten minutes, and most businesses have set none.
Local Marketing
Somebody changed your hours. It was not anybody who works for you.
Local Marketing
Making the change is the easy part.
Local Marketing
The settings have not disappeared, they have moved to where the listing appears.
Local Marketing
Google My Business is becoming Google Business Profile, and the more consequential part is not the name.
Advertising
The mechanics are learnable. The weekly attention is the real cost.
Social Media
The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp announced today that it is renaming itself Meta.
Analytics
A monthly report arrives full of numbers that are going up, and the business cannot tell whether anything is working.
Analytics
Enquiries do not fall to zero, which surprises people, and they do not stay level either.
Advertising
Full diary, obvious economy, and three better options first.
Advertising
Advertising started when a season begins arrives after the decisions have been made.
Advertising
One van, one job a day. That should shape the whole campaign.
Advertising
Some businesses solve a problem people do not know they have, or do not know can be solved.
Advertising
Businesses spend months testing formats, placements and audiences while the thing being proposed stays the same.
Advertising
The phone in your pocket is the right camera for this.
Advertising
Too small to optimise. Big enough to find out if anybody cares.
Conversion
Sending advertising traffic to a homepage asks somebody to find what they were promised.
Advertising
The audience that used to be four thousand is now eight hundred.
Advertising
When the system can no longer find exactly the right person, the advert has to do the sorting.
Advertising
Six months on, here is what actually changed for small advertisers.
Advertising
The boost button is the same auction with almost every control removed, which makes it convenient and expensive.
Social Media
Posts that used to reach a few thousand people now reach two hundred, and no amount of posting more brings it back.
Social Media
A business account disappears overnight, the appeal is a form, and there is nobody to telephone.
Email Marketing
Followers are borrowed. A list is yours.
Consulting
It works until the rules change. Keep a way to reach people.
Content
Almost nobody visits it, and the few who do are deciding whether to trust you with something.
Security
The useful part of a cyber policy for a four-person firm is usually not the payout.
Compliance
They will judge the letter, not the incident.
Security
The instinct is to work out what happened and who is to blame.
Security
One email, one payment, and the money does not come back.
Compliance
Federal law, three provincial ones, and one question everybody asks.
Compliance
Assented this week. Phased to 2024, and it does not stop at the provincial border.
Security
Somebody can put your business name and address on an email without touching your systems.
Security
Everyone agrees it is a good idea. Week three is where it dies.
Security
Shared folders accumulate permissions the way a garage accumulates boxes.
Security
One setting. It is already on your machine.
Security
Somebody exported the list in 2019. It is still in Downloads.
Compliance
Almost every small business does this without deciding to, because the services they use run on servers elsewhere.
Compliance
A service you use has been compromised and your customer information was in it.
Compliance
You cannot delete everything, and pretending otherwise is the mistake.
Compliance
These requests are rare, arrive without warning, and are almost always straightforward once the panic passes.
Compliance
The default for a small business is to keep everything forever, because nothing forces a decision.
Compliance
Two sentences by the button beats a link nobody opens.
Compliance
A generated policy describes a business that does not exist.
Compliance
Believing somebody agreed is not the same as being able to show it.
Compliance
It is not just the database. Start with the phone in your pocket.
Consulting
The budget ends at launch. The costs do not.
Consulting
Asking somebody independent to look at a proposal you are minded to accept is sensible and easy to do unfairly.
Compliance
Asking a small supplier for evidence of insurance feels awkward and is entirely ordinary.
Consulting
It cost a lot and it has produced nothing. That first fact is irrelevant.
Analytics
Most website return figures are produced by counting revenue the business would have received anyway.
Advertising
Advertising multiplies whatever the site already does, in both directions.
Consulting
Doubling the budget does not double the site.
Consulting
Somebody has stopped replying and is holding work you have paid for.
Consulting
The problem is rarely the hours themselves.
Consulting
The comparison is usually presented as cost against reliability, which is not quite right.
Consulting
Ending an arrangement partway through is sometimes correct and always expensive.
Consulting
Most small website projects that run late are waiting on the client, and the client is usually the last to realise it.
Consulting
Somebody asks for something reasonable that was not quoted.
Compliance
A small project does not warrant a twenty-page agreement, and it does warrant more than an emailed quote.
Compliance
A project ends and the client has a working website and none of the things that would let somebody else work on it.
Consulting
Tie payments to deliverables, not to weeks. That is the whole trick.
Consulting
The lowest quote is usually honest about what it covers and silent about what it does not.
Consulting
Three quotes, five times apart. They are not for the same thing.
Consulting
A retainer described in adjectives is unmeasurable and becomes a subscription nobody can evaluate.
Consulting
Ask what you keep if you stop paying. The answer defines the arrangement.
Consulting
The range is enormous and mostly explicable.
Local Marketing
Shared premises are fine. Identical-looking listings are not.
Local Marketing
Do not create a new listing. Edit the one with the reviews.
Local Marketing
Somebody is nearby, on a phone, deciding now. That search is decided differently.
Local Marketing
Set the holiday hours in advance. It is a field, and it takes two minutes.
Conversion
The phone is where the enquiries are. The number is at the bottom in grey.
Local Marketing
The day demand spikes is the day you cannot change anything.
Local Marketing
Publish it before the season, not during it. Everything takes time to rank.
Search
An afternoon and no subscription tells you most of what a competitor is doing.
Search
Three area pages is a strategy. Forty is a problem.
Local Marketing
Three cities, three pages. The question is what goes in them.
Local Marketing
You do not have to publish your home address to be found locally.
Local Marketing
Paid directory listings were once a reasonable spend and mostly are not now.
Search
Six links from your own town beat a hundred from nowhere in particular.
Local Marketing
Your listing vanished. Here is what to do, and what not to.
Local Marketing
There are two of you on the map. One has the old address.
Local Marketing
Somebody else is answering questions about your business, publicly.
Local Marketing
A free slot in your own search result, and almost nobody uses it.
Local Marketing
Your listing photos are from 2018. Somebody is choosing between you and a competitor on them.
Local Marketing
Reviews affect where you appear and whether anybody chooses you, and the second effect is larger.
Local Marketing
Three slots, most of the calls. Different rules from ordinary results.
Local Marketing
A service area business can tell Google where it works, and that declaration does far less than most owners expect.
Accessibility
The supplier built it, you publish it, and a plugin author wrote part of it.
Accessibility
What you can fix in an hour, a day, and a week. In that order.
Accessibility
Arguing for accessibility on moral grounds alone tends to produce agreement and no budget.
Accessibility
Some people get motion sick from your homepage. They have already told their phone.
Accessibility
A form is where an accessibility failure stops being an inconvenience and becomes a lost enquiry.
Accessibility
One number, checked in a browser, settles the argument.
Accessibility
A scanned document uploaded as a PDF is a photograph of text.
Accessibility
Captions take twenty minutes per video and most people watching are using them.
Compliance
Most small businesses are not directly covered by the new provincial framework.
Compliance
Legislation received royal assent this month establishing a framework for accessibility in the province.
Search
The honest answer for a typical local business is not very much, and saying so is more useful than the alternative.
Search
The change announced last year has begun rolling out, gradually, on mobile search.
Accessibility
Turn it on and listen to your homepage. It is uncomfortable and it works.
Accessibility
One line of code, fully accessible. The users say otherwise.
Accessibility
Accessible is not a requirement. Name the standard and who tests it.
Accessibility
Five problems, one afternoon, most of the failures on an ordinary site.
Accessibility
Say where you actually are, not where you would like to be.
Hosting
A content network is sold as a universal speed improvement.
Hosting
Most slow sites are slow because of what they send, not where they are sent from.
Performance
Site-wide speed figures are averages, and averages hide the one page that takes eleven seconds.
Performance
The advert loads and the page jumps. That one is genuinely hard.
Performance
You do not need a developer for most of this. You need three settings and smaller images.
Ecommerce
A discount is a short-term sale and a long-term lesson.
Ecommerce
Every catalogue carries lines that have not sold in a year.
Ecommerce
Product reviews accumulate on their own at high volume and never at low volume.
Content
Two hundred shops, one description. None of them ranks.
Content
Fifty products in a day is a setup problem, not a photography problem.
Ecommerce
Comparing a marketplace commission with your own payment processing is comparing two different things.
Ecommerce
A marketplace brings buyers you could not reach and keeps the relationship with them.
Ecommerce
A lost parcel is a customer problem, a carrier problem and a money problem, and they need handling in that order.
Ecommerce
Published rates are the least useful basis for choosing a carrier.
Ecommerce
Ten orders a day does not need a warehouse. It needs a routine.
Ecommerce
A damaged parcel costs the sale, the shipping, and the review.
Ecommerce
Showing prices in a customer's currency removes a real barrier and introduces several new ones.
Compliance
An order to another province may not carry the tax you are used to charging.
Ecommerce
Making people register before they pay costs sales. There is a way to have both.
Ecommerce
Most people who add something to a basket do not buy it, and that is normal rather than a fault.
Ecommerce
Once a catalogue outgrows its menu, internal search becomes the main way people find things.
Ecommerce
The page between your menu and your products is doing more work than either.
Ecommerce
One product with six options, or six products? The answer changes everything.
Ecommerce
Ten products and two hundred are different businesses, not different sizes.
Ecommerce
Selling online is an operational commitment rather than a website feature.
Conversion
Ten people, one task each. You will find more than analytics ever showed you.
Analytics
A heatmap is a persuasive picture that answers a narrower question than it appears to.
Conversion
Every project has the meeting about whether the button should be orange.
Conversion
Most small sites do not have enough visitors to detect the differences they are trying to measure.
Conversion
Three changes, one result, no idea which caused it.
Analytics
Record where you started. In six months nobody will agree what it was.
Analytics
Most monthly marketing reports are long because length signals effort.
Analytics
Numbers rarely lie outright.
Analytics
Attribution models were built for companies running many channels at scale.
Consulting
Four words, asked at the right moment, produce better marketing information than most analytics accounts.
Analytics
Your best marketing produces phone calls, which your analytics cannot see at all.
Analytics
You already have the numbers. They are not in your analytics.
Analytics
Consent requirements and browser restrictions have made cookie-based measurement steadily less complete.
Compliance
Somebody has asked what you do with their information.
Compliance
Most cookie banners are decorative: everything loads before anybody clicks, and declining changes nothing.
Compliance
It is still collecting. You stopped advertising two years ago.
Email Marketing
Sign up for our newsletter offers nothing and collects almost nobody.
Analytics
Every business already holds more useful information about its customers than any advertising platform can supply.
Advertising
Narrow targeting and tight optimisation depended on signals that are becoming scarce.
Advertising
Your platform reports forty conversions, your analytics says twenty-six, and you took thirty-one orders.
Advertising
A permission prompt is arriving on iPhones within weeks, and much of its effect has already landed.
Performance
Resizing an image and compressing it are two different jobs.
Hosting
Caching is why your site is fast and why the change you just made is not showing.
Technical
If the scripts fail, does your phone number still appear?
Performance
Your site loads code from servers you have never heard of. Count them.
Performance
A visitor judges your site on what appears in the top of the window within the first couple of seconds.
Performance
You go to tap a link, the page shifts, and you tap something else.
Performance
Google has settled on three specific measurements taken from real visitors rather than from a test.
Performance
The browser has your page and is showing a blank screen. Here is why.
Performance
Speed tests run from a data centre on a fast connection.
Web Design
Trade customers use your site standing up, one-handed, in poor light, with dirty hands and gloves on.
Accessibility
It looks elegant on your monitor. It is unreadable at arm's length.
Performance
A background video on your homepage is spending your visitor's money before they have decided whether to stay.
Web Design
An embedded map covering the width of a phone screen catches the swipe meant for the page.
Conversion
Making the number tappable is the easy half.
Conversion
Every field you add is typed with one thumb by somebody who is moving.
Conversion
An overlay that covers a quarter of a desktop screen covers all of a phone.
Web Design
Price lists, specifications, and comparison charts were designed for paper and desktop screens.
Web Design
Phones grew and the controls stayed where they were.
Web Design
Light grey text on white looks refined on a monitor in an office.
Web Design
A link sized for a mouse pointer is a link most people will miss with a thumb.
Web Design
Narrowing a desktop browser window shows you the layout and hides everything else.
Web Design
Yesterday's question was what a search engine can no longer see.
Search
From this month the mobile version of your site is the one being indexed and ranked.
Content
Same article, three places. Which one gets the credit?
Compliance
Using a passage, a statistic, or an image from someone else is normal and usually fine.
Content
Readers rarely think a page was ghostwritten.
Content
Most outsourced content disappoints because of the brief rather than the writer.
Content
Your reader knows the subject. Simplifying is the wrong instinct.
Content
A page can be your most visited and produce nothing, which is not a failure of the page.
Search
Internal links are the one part of search you control completely, cost nothing, and can add while writing.
Search
Your own pages are competing with each other, and the wrong one is winning.
Content
An existing page has history a new one has to earn from nothing.
Content
Publishing beyond what you actually know is how businesses lose credibility with the people best placed to hire them.
Content
The headline earns the click and the first sentence earns everything after it.
Content
A headline has one job: tell somebody accurately whether the page is for them.
Content
Almost every first draft contains about twice as many words as the finished piece needs.
Content
The January commitment to publish every week is the most reliably broken promise in small business marketing.
Content
Word count is the wrong unit.
Content
Your best evidence is the work you have already done, and most of it cannot be published as it stands.
Content
There is one question you have answered several hundred times.
Content
Running out of ideas is the usual reason publishing stops.
Content
Most small business blogs are abandoned within four months, having produced nothing.
Technical
The old site gets deleted a few weeks after launch, usually to stop paying for the hosting.
Analytics
The fortnight after a launch produces a great deal of data and very little meaning.
Technical
The faults that appear in the first hour of a new site are remarkably consistent between projects.
Reputation
Most rebuilds need no announcement at all.
Search
A small dip after a rebuild is normal and recovers.
Technical
A development copy of your site, left open, becomes a second version of your business competing with the real one.
Search
Most search losses after a rebuild trace to one document that was never written properly.
Web Design
A rebuild is the one moment you can drop content without anybody objecting.
Technical
The page addresses on your current site are an asset somebody else built for you over years.
Web Design
Most sites that get rebuilt should have been repaired, and a few that get patched for years should have been replaced.
Content
Not whether the words are accurate, but whether a stranger reading them arrives at the right answer.
Local Marketing
Your phone number and address appear in more places than you remember, and they stopped matching some time ago.
Content
Your website describes the company you were when it was written.
Technical
Add-ons get the blame for most website trouble, but the theme sits underneath all of them.
Performance
The single most common reason a small business site is slow is photographs uploaded exactly as they came off the phone.
Conversion
A broken form is the only website fault that costs you money while looking perfect.
Technical
Broken links do not announce themselves. One afternoon finds all of them.
Technical
There is one add-on on your site that you leave alone because the last update broke something.
Content
Most sites carry pages that have not been read since they were published.
Web Design
You have taken over a website somebody else built.
Compliance
A page copied from another business, naming tools you do not use and a company that is not yours.
Compliance
No shop, no accounts, no payments, and a template full of clauses about refunds and shipping.
Compliance
The job looks excellent and the photograph is somebody's home.
Compliance
Your words, their site, your town's name swapped out.
Security
Expired at 2am Sunday. Every visitor sees a warning.
Domains
A second extension costs a few dollars a year and prevents somebody else from trading under your name.
Domains
Two separate registrations, in two separate systems, neither of which knows about the other.
Branding
Quality you can trust. So does everybody else.
Branding
You call it a comprehensive drainage assessment.
Content
Still on the website, still ranking, still producing enquiries you have to decline.
Local Marketing
Two places, one website, and a decision nobody makes deliberately.
Consulting
Two weeks with no site work and nobody to quote for.
Consulting
Closed for two weeks. The form kept taking enquiries.
Consulting
Three things to do, in order, with dates.
Consulting
The supplier who let you down, the quote that was too low, the job that went well for a reason.
Content
Four hundred photographs. Three stock images on the site.
Content
A service you stopped offering, an event from 2018, and three pages nobody has visited in two years.
Consulting
Twelve months in. What did it actually bring in?
Consulting
Six charges in January. None of them decided this decade.
Technical
A form that stopped sending, a certificate that expired on a Sunday, and a plugin update that removed the phone number.
Technical
Built by somebody who has moved on, in a system nobody supports, with a login nobody has.
Technical
Adobe's support ends at the end of this month, and for most of your visitors it stopped working over a year ago.
Social Media
A legitimate conclusion, reached deliberately, rather than a failure to keep up.
Social Media
Scheduling makes posting sustainable and makes it possible to publish something tone-deaf during a local emergency.
Social Media
Platforms would rather people stayed, and every post asking somebody to leave is working against that.
Social Media
A square crop, shot close, that looks excellent in a feed and useless on a website.
Social Media
Eleven hundred followers, most of them in another country, acquired through a competition.
Social Media
A comment on your page, visible to everybody, and the reply is being read by people who will never comment.
Social Media
It works fine until you want to sell the business.
Social Media
A quiet fortnight, no finished jobs worth photographing, and posting day arrives anyway.
Social Media
Every abandoned business page has the same shape: three posts in one week, then nothing.
Social Media
Five profiles, three of them last updated in 2018, and none of them doing anything.
Advertising
The report shows clicks. The business gets phone calls.
Advertising
Twenty dollars to boost a post, four thousand people reached, eleven likes and no enquiries.
Advertising
Somebody hears the advertisement, remembers half of it, and searches for whatever they retained.
Advertising
Campaigns run for years because stopping requires a decision and continuing does not.
Advertising
Advertising works, enquiries arrive, and you are already booked for eleven weeks.
Advertising
Clicks from the wrong towns, the wrong searches, and people looking for a job rather than a service.
Advertising
Paying for clicks from people searching for you, who would have found you anyway.
Advertising
Same words, same auction, different price. The page decides.
Advertising
Two hundred a month, spread across four campaigns, producing eleven clicks a week.
Advertising
Paid advertising sends people to a site that is already working, faster.
Analytics
Enquiries went from six to nine.
Analytics
Set the number before the change rather than after.
Analytics
Fourteen charts, updated live, sent monthly, and last viewed in March.
Analytics
Five extra characters and the source is no longer a mystery.
Analytics
The website produced four. The business got eleven.
Analytics
Inherited from an agency, configured by somebody who left, and reporting numbers nobody has verified.
Analytics
It starts collecting the day you turn it on. Not before.
Analytics
A pageview counts that somebody arrived.
Analytics
Two tags on the same pages, collecting into two properties, reporting different numbers.
Analytics
A new version, announced last week. The old one still works.
Web Design
The brochure took months and cost real money, so it goes on the site as a PDF.
Web Design
People scroll to the bottom on purpose. Put something there.
Web Design
One page structure, filled nine times, without producing nine near-identical pages that say nothing.
Web Design
Approved with placeholder text, built, and then the real words arrive and do not fit.
Web Design
Three horizontal lines, a floppy disk, a magnifying glass and a shape that means nothing to anybody.
Branding
Chosen on a screen, printed on vinyl, and it is a different colour.
Branding
One for headings, one for text, and no more.
Web Design
Every gap fills with something because empty looks like an opportunity.
Web Design
Designed with a four-letter placeholder and filled with a twenty-eight-character trading name.
Web Design
Fourteen items across the top, four of which nobody has clicked since 2018.
Web Design
Everything important above the fold, on a page with no fold, viewed on screens ranging from a phone to a monitor.
Accessibility
Not a small group of other people.
Accessibility
Not an audit, not a report, and not a consultant.
Accessibility
Somebody navigating by link hears: read more, read more, read more, click here, read more.
Accessibility
Watched with the sound off by most people who watch it at all, and unavailable entirely to anybody who cannot hear it.
Accessibility
A heading tag chosen because the text needed to be bigger.
Accessibility
Eight empty boxes and no idea what they wanted.
Accessibility
A twelve-pixel close icon in the corner of a popup, tapped by a thumb that covers forty pixels.
Accessibility
Red for unavailable, green for in stock, and nothing else to distinguish them.
Accessibility
Put the mouse down and press tab.
Accessibility
Grey on white, at eleven pixels, in a light weight.
Reputation
A customer demands you remove a review you did not write and cannot remove, or a supplier asks you to take yours down.
Reputation
Four point seven from twelve, and four point seven from three hundred, are not the same claim.
Reputation
Somebody unhappy has written to you rather than posting publicly.
Reputation
Twelve years trading, hundreds of satisfied customers, and an empty listing.
Reputation
Quoted accurately, attributed properly, and linked to the source.
Reputation
Nobody visits the review page. They read four lines in the results.
Reputation
A one-star review from somebody who was never a customer.
Compliance
For some professions, a five-star review is a compliance problem.
Reputation
Thank you for your kind words, forty times, identically.
Reputation
One star, partly unfair, and visible to everybody.
Reputation
Most businesses never ask, and most who do ask at the wrong moment.
Analytics
Somebody saw the van in a driveway, searched the name three weeks later, and phoned.
Analytics
Not a dashboard with fourteen charts.
Analytics
August was down eighteen percent on July.
Analytics
Crawlers, monitoring services, scrapers and your own visits.
Analytics
Traffic is the number analytics gives you for free.
Analytics
Every visit ends somewhere, so a high exit rate is not a fault by itself.
Analytics
Direct, organic, referral and social.
Analytics
Four hundred users, six hundred sessions, and nine hundred page views.
Analytics
Analytics reports hundreds of figures and four of them matter to a small business.
Analytics
Measure what you need. Say that you are doing it. Keep it proportionate.
Search
Listing changes in days, new pages in months, and a competitive position in a year.
Search
They are not better at your trade.
Search
Free, takes fifteen minutes, and reports what actually happened in search rather than what you assume.
Search
A services page listing nine things cannot rank for any of them.
Search
Customers do not search using your trade's vocabulary.
Search
You appear first every time, on your own computer, in your own town.
Search
It looks fine in a browser and does not exist as far as search is concerned.
Search
Sitemaps, internal links and a submission tool.
Search
Yours says Home. The one below it says what it does.
Search
Find the page, fetch it, read it, decide it is worth keeping, and then rank it.
Teardowns
Five pages, no animation, built by somebody who is not a designer.
Teardowns
Four years old, technically fine, and invisible in search.
Teardowns
It submits, it says thank you, and nothing arrives.
Teardowns
Twelve years of work, and a single stock image of a house nobody built.
Teardowns
The price list is a picture.
Teardowns
Strategic solutions, transformational outcomes, and a partnership approach.
Teardowns
Contact us for pricing, on every product, on a site selling things anybody could compare elsewhere.
Teardowns
Serving the Lower Mainland and surrounding areas, which could mean four towns or forty.
Teardowns
Phone during office hours, which are the hours the patient is also at work.
Teardowns
The menu is a PDF, the hours are in an image, and the address is in the footer.
Teardowns
A composite of sites I have looked at, walked through as somebody would actually experience it.
Industry Guides
Square footage, dock doors, clear height, certifications. In that order.
Industry Guides
Portfolios by artist, honest pricing, and an answer to the questions people are too embarrassed to ask.
Industry Guides
Shippers wondering whether you are legitimate, and carriers checking whether you pay.
Industry Guides
Shippers want lanes and authority. Drivers want pay and home time.
Industry Guides
Buyers are checking whether you can do a specific process on a specific material to a specific standard.
Industry Guides
Somebody is looking at this at two in the morning, having lost a parent yesterday, and needs to know what to do next.
Industry Guides
Somebody deciding whether to contact a therapist is doing something difficult.
Industry Guides
Servicing, repairs, sales and the question of whether you have one in stock.
Industry Guides
Customers are choosing a material they cannot feel, a price they cannot estimate, and an installer they cannot judge.
Industry Guides
Boarding up tonight, or a quote for six windows in March.
Industry Guides
No heat in February, and a heat pump decision in June. Same site.
Compliance
A breach, a mistaken email, a lost file.
Compliance
You hold more personal information than you think, in more places.
Security
The diary, the quotes, the customer numbers, the email and the codes that unlock everything else.
Security
Customers on the same network as your till, your computer and your files.
Security
That the connection is encrypted.
Security
Not dramatic, not targeted, and not noticed for three weeks.
Security
Updates fix security holes and occasionally break the site.
Security
An employee left in 2018 and can still read the shared inbox.
Security
An invoice from a company you deal with, with updated bank details.
Security
It adds five seconds to a login and removes almost every way somebody gets into your account with a stolen password.
Security
The same password on eleven accounts, written on a card by the till, and shared by everybody.
Email Marketing
Open rates are unreliable, click rates measure curiosity, and neither tells you whether any of it produced work.
Email Marketing
Six hundred addresses collected over four years and nothing sent since 2018.
Email Marketing
There is no correct interval.
Email Marketing
Four messages, written once, sent automatically at the right moment.
Technical
Printed on the van. Owned by somebody else.
Email Marketing
Hiding it does not keep anybody.
Email Marketing
A reply is worth more than an open and more than a click.
Email Marketing
Sent monthly, opened by fourteen percent, read by fewer.
Compliance
Canada's anti-spam law applies to a two-person trade sending forty emails, not only to bulk senders.
Email Marketing
A list of a hundred people who chose to hear from you is worth more than a thousand who did not.
Technical
Your quotes are landing in junk folders and nobody is telling you.
Compliance
Found on a search, saved from a supplier, sent by a customer, or taken by an employee.
Technical
On the website, on a phone, in a messaging app, on a memory card, and in one place somebody set up in 2016.
Content
A photograph of a screen, cropped from a phone, scaled up to fit.
Accessibility
Alt text is not a caption, not a keyword field, and not optional.
Technical
IMG_4471.jpg tells nobody anything, including you.
Branding
It looks excellent on the sign and on the letterhead.
Content
Empty rooms and finished work show competence.
Content
The customer will not let you photograph their house, their office, or their premises.
Content
The pair is the most persuasive thing a trade can show.
Content
You do not need a camera or a lesson.
Performance
Same total time. One feels fast, one feels broken.
Web Design
Something started playing in an open office and the visitor left before finding the mute control.
Web Design
Five rotating panels at the top of the homepage.
Performance
Three tools give three answers and none of them is wrong.
Performance
This week Google published three metrics for measuring how a page feels to use.
Performance
Each one solved a problem once.
Performance
Six weights downloaded, two on the page.
Performance
One page, and the browser fetches sixty separate files from eleven different companies.
Performance
Straight off a phone, uploaded as it came, displayed at a fifth of its size.
Performance
It loads instantly on your office computer.
Consulting
Quotes, invoices, job sheets and certificates all work perfectly well as files.
Consulting
A missed call from a new customer is usually a lost job.
Consulting
Everything about the job is in your head or in a notebook only you can decode.
Consulting
Two people, one diary, and a double booking every fortnight.
Technical
The drawing is on the office computer, you are forty minutes away, and the customer is waiting.
Technical
Quotes written in a lay-by, invoices sent from a driveway, and a phone that is the entire back office.
Compliance
Writing card numbers on a job sheet is common, understandable, and one of the riskier things a small business does.
Compliance
An emailed agreement with a typed name at the bottom is usually binding.
Consulting
Six blurry pictures and a question about price.
Consulting
A video call can replace a first visit for a lot of work.
Technical
The number is on six vans. It belongs to the phone company.
Consulting
You cannot know which supplier will fail or when.
Consulting
Signature requirements, delivery windows, surcharges and service suspensions all change without much notice.
Consulting
A site advertising same-week service while you are booked into July is generating enquiries you will disappoint.
Consulting
Forty names in a notebook, half of them from four months ago, and no idea which are still live.
Consulting
A deposit secures a commitment.
Consulting
A quote given on Monday is honoured in June at Monday's materials price.
Consulting
What they ordered is unavailable and something similar is not.
Consulting
A page saying two to three weeks was right when it was written.
Consulting
The delay is not usually what makes somebody angry.
Consulting
They asked when. Your supplier does not know either.
Email Marketing
It has the highest open rate of anything you send and it was written by the platform.
Ecommerce
Selling in a shop and online from the same shelf means the numbers are always slightly wrong.
Ecommerce
Gift cards, deposits, bookings for later, and services delivered at a distance.
Ecommerce
Most returns policies are written to limit liability and read as a warning.
Ecommerce
Card numbers should never touch your website.
Ecommerce
The most common customer email is one a page could answer.
Ecommerce
Three to five days sounds harmless.
Ecommerce
An unexpected postage figure at the last step is the most common reason a basket is abandoned.
Ecommerce
The manufacturer's text is on every other site selling the same thing.
Ecommerce
Online, the photograph is the product.
Ecommerce
Selling one thing properly teaches you more than launching a catalogue of forty.
Technical
Five minutes, from outside the business, on a phone.
Conversion
No number, no address, no name.
Conversion
They contacted three of you. One replied that afternoon.
Conversion
For some trades, letting somebody pick a slot removes three days of back and forth.
Conversion
Somebody wants a price and has given you three words.
Conversion
It is on the form because forms have it.
Technical
Four systems between the button and your inbox.
Conversion
The thank you message is the last thing a customer sees and the least designed thing on most sites.
Conversion
On a phone, a number that is not a link has to be memorised, retyped and dialled.
Conversion
Every field is a small request.
Conversion
It said thank you. It sent nothing. For four months.
Content
It still reads well and it describes a business you no longer are.
Content
Price, wait times, and what you refuse to do.
Content
You call it a mini-split.
Content
Most visitors are standing somewhere, holding a phone, half paying attention.
Content
Nobody reads long pages, except the people who are about to spend money, who read all of it.
Content
A bulleted list of what is included tells the reader what you do.
Content
It gets a fraction of the traffic and a disproportionate share of the decisions.
Content
The line under your logo is read by everybody and written by nobody.
Content
Most visitors do not arrive at your homepage.
Local Marketing
Relevance, distance, prominence. Only two of them are yours.
Local Marketing
Somebody drove twenty minutes on a Monday because your listing said you were open.
Local Marketing
Somebody verified it in 2016. It was not you.
Local Marketing
There are hundreds of them and most are worthless.
Local Marketing
You serve four towns and appear in one.
Local Marketing
People look at the pictures before they read anything.
Local Marketing
Unit 4 on the listing, Suite 4 on the website, and no unit number at all on the invoice.
Local Marketing
One setting decides whether your address is published and how far your listing reaches.
Local Marketing
One dropdown decides which searches you can appear in at all.
Local Marketing
It is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a lot of local trades it produces more enquiries than the website does.
Technical
Whether the shop lives at shop.yourname or yourname/shop looks like a technical detail.
Domains
They warned you four times. Nobody read any of them.
Domains
Somebody helpful set it up years ago.
Consulting
Five or six accounts control whether your business is online.
Hosting
The website migration goes fine.
Hosting
Ninety-nine point nine percent sounds like a guarantee.
Hosting
Almost every business has backups.
Hosting
Most small businesses take the mailboxes that come free with hosting.
Hosting
The first year was the offer.
Hosting
Your site sits on a machine with dozens of others you cannot see.
Hosting
Every plan lists disk space and bandwidth.
Domains
You will say it over the phone, write it on a van, and spell it out to somebody in a noisy room.
Consulting
Launch is treated as the finish line.
Search
The version you never look at is the one being judged.
Technical
Adobe stops supporting it in December.
Content
Every website quote assumes somebody produces the words.
Consulting
Quoted at three weeks, delivered in three months, and the gap is almost never the building.
Hosting
Two separate things, bought together, from different companies, renewing on different dates.
Consulting
Projects do not stall on design.
Web Design
The builders are genuinely good now.
Web Design
A business page is free, quick, and already where your customers are.
Web Design
Some businesses genuinely do not need one yet.
Web Design
At midnight every typed copyright year goes out of date again.
Technical
The dates are already set. An hour in January covers most.
Analytics
In January the advice was to put 2018 on one page.
Ecommerce
Boxing Day shoppers start on their phones, often before the doors open.
Content
The days between Christmas and New Year are the quietest of the year.
Social Media
A snowflake graphic saying Season's Greetings disappears in a December feed.
Technical
Microsoft stops releasing security updates for Windows 7 on January 14.
Consulting
A long year of announcements. A short list of jobs.
Accessibility
Fine on the printer. Silent to a screen reader.
Branding
A new look that changes the colour, the mark and the lettering all at once throws away years of recognition.
Web Design
A placeholder put up when the domain was registered is still there years later.
Email Marketing
One short email tells customers the day you close, the day you reopen and who to call in an emergency.
Compliance
California's Consumer Privacy Act takes effect on January 1.
Security
Chrome 79, out yesterday, warns when a username and password you sign in with appear in a known breach.
Search
Now in French too. Your French pages should be.
Technical
From Chrome 80 in February, cookies without a SameSite setting will be treated as first-party only.
Teardowns
A notary office's site looks current and its contact form says thank you.
Industry Guides
Will my skis be ready by Saturday? Say so.
Analytics
On a small site, the owner and staff opening pages every day can be a large share of the visits.
Local Marketing
Your listing can now match words it never uses.
Ecommerce
Today your customers are buying presents online, and a shop that sells only over the counter misses them.
Ecommerce
The sale is planned and the emails are scheduled.
Hosting
PHP 7.4 was released today, and PHP 7.1 loses security fixes on Sunday.
Ecommerce
Most online stores are set up for people buying for themselves.
Analytics
Last Saturday's date was Black Friday a year ago.
Reputation
A one-star review saying the repair still is not fixed and nobody calls back is also a request for help.
Social Media
Facebook and Instagram messages arrive at all hours in December, many about orders.
Technical
Black Friday is eight days away.
Content
A gift guide that is a grid of products with no reasons, published in mid-December, helps few people.
Advertising
Remarketing ads follow everyone who looked at your products, including the people who bought them.
Ecommerce
Carriers have published their holiday deadlines.
Local Marketing
In December, people who need something today search for the thing and add near me.
Conversion
Built at midnight. Three offers, no end date, eleven fields.
Performance
Chrome says it may one day label sites that usually load slowly.
Technical
The camera says 6,000 pixels. WordPress now serves 2,560.
Security
Copycat stores use real product photographs and impossible prices to take payment for goods that never ship.
Industry Guides
Families choose a Christmas tree farm on a phone, often from the car.
Email Marketing
Most holiday marketing email lands in Gmail's Promotions tab, and that is normal.
Performance
Fast, moderate or slow. Measured on your visitors' own phones.
Domains
DNS records quietly hold your website, email delivery and service verifications together.
Ecommerce
US Thanksgiving falls on November 28 this year, leaving six fewer days from Black Friday to Christmas than last year.
Industry Guides
Towing websites are mostly read at the roadside, on a phone, in the cold.
Hosting
A promotion, a mention on the news or the holiday rush can push a shared hosting plan past its limits.
Web Design
The snow is still falling in February.
Search
Nothing to optimise. Write the way customers ask.
Conversion
Sold at the counter. Searched for at midnight.
Advertising
A campaign switched on the week before Black Friday spends its first days in review and learning.
Technical
The computer that updates the website runs Windows 7, an old browser and an FTP program with the hosting password saved.
Consulting
A website budgeted as a one-off project ages badly.
Consulting
One job. The one that has waited longest.
Reputation
A complaint posted on your business page is read by everyone who visits after it.
Ecommerce
Black Friday is November 29, six weeks away.
Performance
The map loads on the privacy policy too.
Teardowns
A yarn shop's website lists three hundred yarns and never says which are on the shelf.
Social Media
Small Business Week, Halloween, Remembrance Day, holiday hours, gift season and year-end thanks.
Local Marketing
Thanksgiving is on Monday.
Content
Homeowners and property managers buy the same service for different reasons and ask different questions.
Accessibility
A US ruling stands. The yardstick is the same one here.
Analytics
Analytics counts the form submission and stops at the thank-you page.
Security
Chrome will gradually block insecure files on secure pages, starting in December and reaching images early next year.
Industry Guides
Most visitors check a pumpkin patch or U-pick farm on a phone the same day they go.
Compliance
The EU's top court ruled yesterday that a pre-ticked box is not consent to cookies.
Security
October is Cyber Security Awareness Month.
Advertising
Google Ads removes average position this week.
Domains
A domain bought for a campaign, a misspelling, the old business name.
Email Marketing
Every newsletter loses a few subscribers, and the report shows them in red.
Web Design
The iPad now says it is a Mac. Your site believes it.
Search
Google says a broad core update begins today, its third this year after March and June.
Industry Guides
A garage door that will not open is an emergency for whoever is standing in front of it.
Hosting
Two copies of your site in Google. One of them is the test.
Web Design
Dark phones tonight. A white website, and a logo that vanishes.
Conversion
A chat bubble says the team is online and replies in minutes.
Analytics
Visits fell to nothing on the 9th. The business did not.
Reputation
Your own reviews, your own stars. Not any more.
Ecommerce
From tomorrow, European rules require an extra check on many online card payments.
Content
A competitor advertises the same job for less, and your page answers with the word quality.
Search
Google has added two new labels for links, sponsored and ugc, beside nofollow, and now treats all three as hints.
Security
Chrome 77, released today, stops showing the company name from an Extended Validation certificate beside the address.
Social Media
Fifty-two events a year. One schedule page would do.
Web Design
Menus that open on hover, details that appear only under a mouse pointer, and links too small for a finger.
Industry Guides
Fall term. Two audiences. One registration page that works.
Consulting
September is when decisions get made again.
Analytics
Firefox 69, out today, blocks known third-party tracking cookies for everyone.
Local Marketing
The listing sends the visits. Analytics files them as search.
Security
site-backup.zip. Two years old. Still downloadable.
Ecommerce
The manufacturer's description appears word for word on hundreds of stores, so none of them stands out.
Advertising
A search ad that promises one thing and opens a home page about everything pays for the click, then loses the visitor.
Technical
Three websites. One old link. Four hops to arrive.
Conversion
Quotes signed J.S., or a happy customer, read as invented even when they are real.
Social Media
When one business buys from another, people buy from people.
Industry Guides
A reel that loads, and a price range in writing.
Email Marketing
A box in the footer that says only Subscribe gets almost nothing.
Accessibility
A magnifying glass, three lines, a speech bubble, a row of social logos.
Hosting
On shared hosting, a website sits on one server with hundreds of others.
Teardowns
A renovation company's best work sits in a Flash gallery that Chrome now blocks and phones cannot show.
Search
An estimate published this week says just over half of the Google searches it measured in June ended without a click.
Analytics
Found for things you do not do. Worth knowing why.
Content
Case studies built on percentages are hard to prove and easy to doubt.
Search
Many sites leave page titles to the theme, so results read Home, About Us or the same name on every page.
Ecommerce
Back-to-school bestsellers sell out, and their pages turn into dead ends or disappear.
Industry Guides
Land surveyors serve homeowners with fence questions as well as builders and lawyers.
Branding
They searched your name. They found a church and a school.
Consulting
Fewer people looking. The best time to change things.
Performance
Photographs uploaded straight from a camera are several times wider than any phone screen.
Web Design
A video behind the headline looks impressive on the office monitor.
Technical
Chrome 76, released today, blocks Flash unless visitors switch it back on.
Performance
Delay what is further down. Never the top of the page.
Domains
Your address. Somebody else's name on it.
Advertising
The shop is closed. The ads are still paying for calls.
Consulting
A website project started in September tends to run into Christmas, when nobody has time for it.
Web Design
Visitors from search land on an inner page, not the home page.
Security
A hacked site can look normal to its owner while serving spam pages about pills or counterfeit goods to search engines.
Reputation
Facebook replaced star ratings on business pages with yes-or-no recommendations last year.
Conversion
Ten digits to remember, on the phone they are holding.
Local Marketing
Google My Business posts drop out of view after about a week unless they are events or offers with dates.
Email Marketing
Your offer was in the picture. The picture did not load.
Ecommerce
Amazon's Prime Day runs for 48 hours from today.
Analytics
A high bounce rate on a contact page can mean the visitor found the number and called.
Social Media
No new products this week does not mean nothing to show.
Content
A page that every partner and manager has edited ends up saying only what nobody objected to.
Accessibility
A heading 4 chosen because heading 2 looked too big, bold paragraphs standing in for headings, levels skipped.
Publishing
From tomorrow, Chrome will filter ads on sites anywhere in the world that keep failing the Better Ads Standards.
Industry Guides
Rental customers check the website on a phone, often from the beach, to decide whether to come today.
Ecommerce
A Victoria Day banner in July, a code that no longer works, a free shipping threshold that changed in spring.
Technical
Google says it will stop following noindex lines in robots.txt from September 1.
Search
Since yesterday, Google indexes every website it has not seen before from its phone version by default.
Hosting
Priced per account now. Expect a letter at renewal.
Email Marketing
Away until the 22nd. And then what?
Content
Whoever answers your phone hears the same few questions every day.
Performance
On a slow phone connection, a page using custom fonts can show its layout and photographs but no words for seconds.
Accessibility
The Accessible Canada Act became law on Friday.
Security
A large Canadian financial institution says an employee leaked data on millions of members.
Local Marketing
In trades like locksmiths, towing and garage doors, the map results fill with listings for businesses that do not exist.
Industry Guides
Travellers find a hotel on a booking site, then check its own website before deciding.
Ecommerce
Criminals have been slipping a few lines of code into online checkout pages to copy card details as customers type.
Analytics
Analytics was installed when the site was built, and it counts visits faithfully.
Teardowns
A plumbing company's site has forty near-identical town pages, each with the town name swapped in.
Teardowns
A yoga studio's website says to check its Facebook page for classes.
Teardowns
An independent used car dealer whose website still lists vehicles sold weeks ago.
Teardowns
One second in. Asked for an email before seeing a thing.
Teardowns
Not secure, says the browser. Visitors take its word.
Search
Google now usually shows no more than two results from one site for a search.
Web Design
Menus built from product line names, department names and clever labels make visitors guess.
Conversion
Submit, Send and Click here describe what the button does to the form, not what the visitor gets.
Hosting
A Google Cloud networking problem on Sunday disrupted YouTube, Gmail and G Suite for hours.
Search
For the first time, Google said a day ahead that a broad core update was coming.
Consulting
Most stalled website projects are waiting for the client's text and photographs.
Branding
Google's new mobile results show each site's name and favicon at the top of the listing.
Search
Google said yesterday that from July 1 it will index every new site it discovers from its mobile version.
Web Design
Mobile-first is a way of deciding what matters, not a line in a stylesheet.
Teardowns
Three small dead details. One conclusion: closed.
Compliance
Twelve months on. Less drama, more record-keeping.
Security
Guessing all night. Usually starting with admin.
Compliance
Cookie notices built on a desktop screen cover half a phone, hide the close button or block the page entirely.
Local Marketing
Google My Business recently added short names, letting a verified listing claim a short link.
Advertising
Google announced gallery ads and Discovery campaigns this week.
Ecommerce
A shopper with a full cart is asked to create an account and invent a password before paying.
Accessibility
Put the mouse away and press Tab.
Advertising
Targeting your town. Paying for clicks from Ontario.
Search
Google now shows FAQ markup as expandable questions under some listings.
Email Marketing
Sunday is Mother's Day. Monday's email is for next year.
Industry Guides
Parents check levels, session dates and openings on a phone, usually in a spare minute.
Search
Google said yesterday that its crawler now renders pages with a current version of Chrome and will keep it current.
Technical
WordPress 5.2 arrived today with a Site Health screen and an email that goes out when a plugin crashes the site.
Conversion
A pricing page that only says contact us for a quote sends visitors to whoever publishes a number.
Social Media
Instagram began testing hidden like counts in Canada this week.
Content
Most about pages are company history and a founder's biography.
Hosting
One full mailbox. The website went down with it.
Branding
A full name on the card, a shorter one on the sign, an old logo on the website and a cell number on the listing.
Advertising
Bing Ads becomes Microsoft Advertising today.
Ecommerce
The largest online retailer is moving towards one-day delivery in the US.
Analytics
Seven days last month. One day for ad clicks next.
Accessibility
Parallax backgrounds, sliding sections and autoplaying carousels can make some visitors genuinely unwell.
Local Marketing
Their photo of your building. Taken from a moving car.
Web Design
The home page fits. The price list needs pinching.
Accessibility
A screen reader user who pulls up the list of links on your page hears read more, read more, click here.
Performance
Eight megabytes to show the hours and the address.
Email Marketing
The van says the business name. The email address does not.
Reputation
A free coffee for a review, a feedback text that sends only happy customers to Google, staff reviewing a new listing.
Consulting
Three website quotes arrive, and the highest is several times the lowest.
Technical
Every website keeps a record of what fails: scripts that crash, images that are missing, pages that moved.
Industry Guides
Homeowners re-siding a house compare materials, look for houses like theirs and want to know what is guaranteed.
Search
Google confirmed at the weekend that a bug had dropped some pages from its index.
Analytics
Three campaigns in one week. Analytics called them all direct.
Ecommerce
A phone camera is good enough for most small online stores.
Conversion
A homeowner sends the same quote request to three companies on Monday night.
Web Design
Most business sites carry pages nobody opened last year: dropped services, old promotions, near-identical copies.
Social Media
Google+ for consumers closes today.
Social Media
A fake closure, price rise or product from a business account is read as an announcement, often days later.
Security
Chrome has labelled every plain HTTP page Not secure since last July.
Accessibility
Elegant on the big screen. Unreadable in the sun.
Security
Spam bots now get past many of the checkboxes meant to stop them.
Email Marketing
Spring is here, it says. So is everyone else.
Industry Guides
Spring is when driveways turn green and the calls start.
Advertising
The searches you paid for. Some of them were never yours.
Content
A news or blog page whose newest entry is three years old makes visitors wonder whether the business is still open.
Technical
Most small business sites are backed up every night, and few of those backups have ever been restored.
Hosting
A social site has admitted that about twelve years of uploaded music and photos were lost in a server move.
Reputation
A public review criticises, or praises, a member of staff by name.
Hosting
Most owners learn their site is down from a customer, often days later.
Social Media
For most of a day, Facebook and Instagram would not load or post properly.
Search
Google has confirmed a broad core update this week.
Consulting
Thirty years after the proposal that became the web, plain pages, links and owned addresses have lasted.
Web Design
On a phone, the three-line icon hides every page, and often the phone number with them.
Analytics
Direct traffic is not only people typing your address.
Publishing
Google has announced that Ad Manager will move to a single first-price auction later this year.
Local Marketing
A pin placed from your address can sit on the back lane, at the far end of the mall or on the neighbour's lot.
Publishing
A site that carries advertising needs a short public file naming who may sell its ad space.
Search
Search Console's new domain properties combine http, https, www and every subdomain in one view, verified through DNS.
Domains
The .dev domain ending opened to everyone this week and, like .app, only works over HTTPS.
Branding
Logos drawn on white fail on dark headers, photographs, social profile pictures and embroidered shirts.
Advertising
Google Ads will retire average position in September.
Web Design
Home page sliders show most visitors a single slide, slow the page down, and move while people read.
Email Marketing
Offers to sell lists of local email addresses arrive every week.
Analytics
Apple has announced that Safari will cap cookies set by scripts at seven days.
Technical
WordPress 5.1, released today, shows administrators a notice when the site runs an outdated version of PHP.
Analytics
Fake referrals and ghost sessions inflate visit counts and distort every trend in Analytics.
Hosting
Hosting rents space on a server and keeps the server running.
Search
The new Search Console is taking over from the old reports this year.
Industry Guides
Valentine's Day is the test. Real work, real prices.
Content
Written for a search engine that no longer exists.
Advertising
Responsive search ads let Google assemble each ad from up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions.
Accessibility
Phone numbers, hours, menus and offers set as pictures cannot be read aloud, tapped, searched or enlarged cleanly.
Reputation
Reviews meant for another business, spam, and complaints from people who never bought.
Ecommerce
An order placed on the 12th with standard shipping will not arrive by Thursday the 14th.
Social Media
Consumer Google+ ends on April 2, and its photographs and posts go with it.
Security
A sticky note on the monitor, a spreadsheet called passwords, one website login used by five people.
Local Marketing
When snow closes the business, customers check the listing, the website, Facebook and the phone before setting out.
Technical
Chrome on most desktops, Safari on every iPhone, Internet Explorer 11 on old office machines, and Edge changing engines.
Social Media
Google has set April 2 as the end of consumer Google+.
Performance
Firefox now shows WebP images, joining Chrome and Edge.
Reputation
Reviews left in the busy weeks before Christmas often sit unanswered into January.
Compliance
Most small business privacy policies came from a template and describe somebody else's website.
Domains
Letters styled like invoices arrive offering to renew your domain.
Social Media
A Facebook page is controlled through personal profiles.
Compliance
France's regulator fined Google 50 million euros over how it explained data use and sought consent for personalised ads.
Email Marketing
A list built over years carries consent that has expired, addresses that bounce and people who never open anything.
Security
A leaked password is far less dangerous when the account also asks for a code from a phone.
Security
A compilation of old breaches made public this week holds about 773 million email addresses and 21 million passwords.
Security
Many form plugins save every submission in the website's database as well as emailing it.
Conversion
Street address, budget, how did you hear about us, a phone number marked required.
Compliance
Every breach, however small. Kept for two years.
Content
One idea per block. Headings that are headings.
Analytics
One page. Twelve months. Written before anything changes.
Security
Last updated 2016. Still running on your site.
Consulting
A website depends on a registrar, DNS, hosting, email and several Google and social accounts.
Technical
Selecting every waiting update and pressing one button at four on a Friday is how working sites break over a weekend.
Hosting
PHP 5.6 stopped getting security fixes on December 31, and PHP 7.0 follows on Thursday.
Local Marketing
Closed on Google. Open on Facebook. Neither was right.
Technical
WordPress 5.0 replaced the editing screen with blocks in December.
Web Design
A copyright line from last year, a news page that stops in 2016, an offer that ended before Christmas.
Consulting
The year began with finding what the website was built to do.
Domains
Card expires 12/18. Domain renews January 4.
Security
Over a year, staff, students, contractors and agencies come and go, and many keep their logins.
Email Marketing
Every inbox this week is full of Boxing Day sales.
Social Media
On Christmas Eve, most business pages post a last-minute offer or a stock greeting.
Content
Most about pages either leave out how the business started or tell all of it.
Ecommerce
Too late to ship. Not too late to sell.
Consulting
This year brought a long run of announcements.
Conversion
Forms and emails sent between Christmas and New Year can wait a week unread while the sender assumes somebody has them.
Search
The thank-you page is in Google. So are forty tag archives.
Web Design
Change the look. Keep what was already earning its keep.
Analytics
On many small business sites a handful of pages lead to most enquiries.
Security
Fake delivery notices, payment warnings and supplier invoices arrive alongside the real ones in December.
Social Media
Google has moved the end of consumer Google+ from August to April.
Technical
Microsoft says Edge will be rebuilt on Chromium, the engine behind Chrome.
Hosting
PHP 7.3 came out yesterday, and PHP 5.6 stops getting security fixes on December 31.
Technical
WordPress 5.0, released today, replaces the editing screen with the block editor.
Email Marketing
The final pre-Christmas email carries last order dates, gift cards for latecomers, holiday hours and a thank-you.
Publishing
A review, a warning, thirty days. Then the ads go.
Industry Guides
The real cars, the real price, and the dates still free.
Reputation
A furious review tempts a reply written in the same mood.
Social Media
Instagram now generates descriptions of photos for screen reader users and lets accounts write their own.
Consulting
A website project meant to start in January needs its brief written in November.
Accessibility
A holiday code set inside a banner graphic cannot be heard by a screen reader, copied on a phone or found by search.
Ecommerce
No discount today. Still good reasons to order this week.
Web Design
Most visitors on a big sale day arrive looking for the offer, and many home pages bury it in a slider or a pop-up.
Hosting
Today is US Thanksgiving, and many hosting companies run reduced support through the busiest shopping weekend.
Ecommerce
Behind a Black Friday sale sit stock counts, staff schedules, service hours, a site under load and items that sell out.
Advertising
Google Ads now reports how often an ad appeared above the search results and how often it was the very first ad.
Local Marketing
Google Maps has started letting people follow businesses and see their posts.
Analytics
Next Friday's sale will produce the year's most useful sales data, but only if the tracking works.
Social Media
A post every morning. A question unanswered since Tuesday.
Domains
Is that a dash or a hyphen? Every single time.
Performance
PageSpeed Insights now runs on Lighthouse and scores pages from 0 to 100 using a measured, simulated phone load.
Email Marketing
Holiday shoppers want one fact from a December email: the last day to order for delivery by Christmas.
Technical
WordPress says the Classic Editor plugin will be supported until the end of 2021.
Publishing
Fake warnings and false close buttons. December.
Conversion
Call your own number at two in the morning.
Ecommerce
A small online store does not have to cut every price to take part in Black Friday.
Industry Guides
Furniture shoppers browse online before they visit.
Teardowns
A phone accessories shop shows a sale clock that starts again every time a page loads.
Compliance
From today, organisations covered by PIPEDA must record every breach of security safeguards and report the serious ones.
Social Media
Halloween photos of staff in costume show the people behind a business.
Security
Google released reCAPTCHA v3 yesterday.
Hosting
An owner with two or three businesses often runs every site from one hosting account.
Performance
The test ran from Virginia. Your customers are in Kelowna.
Local Marketing
Open now, said the listing. The door said otherwise.
Analytics
Firefox 63, out yesterday, lets people block third-party tracking cookies.
Email Marketing
A newsletter sent from a no-reply address, or from an inbox nobody opens, throws away the customers who write back.
Teardowns
Fully booked, says the calendar. Four empty rooms, says the house.
Advertising
Google Ads is testing a search ad written in parts, up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions that Google combines.
Accessibility
Links and buttons packed tightly together are fiddly for everyone on a phone and impossible for some.
Security
Chrome 70, out yesterday, turns the Not secure label red the moment a visitor types into a page on plain HTTP.
Hosting
Early 2020. Old servers first, and no new certificate required.
Consulting
It is Small Business Week, and a fair question is how many enquiries the website produced last month.
Ecommerce
Patterns, plans, guides and templates can be sold as downloads from a small site.
Content
A shop selling several lines often has one Products page with a paragraph on each.
Social Media
Google announced on Monday that consumer Google+ will close by the end of next August.
Technical
After a move to a new domain or to HTTPS, links typed into pages, images and menus still point at the old address.
Analytics
On a site with a few hundred visits a month, the conversion rate swings for no reason at all.
Industry Guides
Shoppers and consignors. Two sets of questions.
Web Design
A video halfway down the home page, a still frame and a play button, watched by almost nobody.
Compliance
A booking system holds names, phone numbers, visit history, staff notes and sometimes health details.
Security
October is Cyber Security Awareness Month.
Domains
A business changes its name and domain, and customers keep writing to the old address for years.
Reputation
A customer posts a review saying your price was too high, and the temptation is to post the numbers in reply.
Local Marketing
Some Google listings can show a booking button, through scheduling providers that work with Google.
Email Marketing
Designed at a desk. Read with one thumb.
Search
Your page title is about to appear under your photographs.
Teardowns
Three ways to book. Three different answers.
Social Media
The question under the ad. Unanswered, in front of everyone.
Hosting
Chrome 70, due in mid-October, stops trusting certificates from one older certificate authority family.
Security
Twenty characters, two hyphens, and a form that says no.
Analytics
Safari 12 arrives today on iPhones and Macs with a stricter Intelligent Tracking Prevention.
Web Design
On a phone, a gallery of forty small thumbnails becomes a wall of squares nobody can read.
Advertising
Since January, page posts reach fewer followers, and many businesses now pay to boost them.
Accessibility
Embedded booking calendars often cannot be used without a mouse or with a screen reader.
Ecommerce
Plain product shots let shoppers compare; photographs in use show scale and how things really look.
Content
Furnaces in fall, gutters before winter, decks in spring.
Conversion
A quote form that asks for everything on one screen loses people before they start.
Industry Guides
Owners look for a trainer when a problem appears: a biting puppy, a dog that pulls or lunges.
Search
The new Search Console is out of beta, with a Manual Actions report and a live page test added.
Security
Chrome 69, out today, no longer labels HTTPS pages Secure and shows a grey padlock instead.
Compliance
Ontario requires larger organisations to bring their websites up to WCAG 2.0 AA by January 1, 2021.
Performance
Before a page can show anything, the server has to build it and start sending.
Reputation
Customers who promise a review rarely leave one once they get home.
Consulting
When an owner retires or steps back, the website often still lives in their personal accounts and their memory.
Local Marketing
Sponsoring a team, an event or a charity usually earns a mention and a link on a local site.
Email Marketing
Customer email addresses sit in the till system, the newsletter tool and somebody's inbox, each with different consent.
Accessibility
The pin is not the address.
Advertising
Linking Google My Business to Google Ads adds your address, the distance and a directions link to ads.
Teardowns
A renovation contractor's gallery is an embedded Instagram feed: a kitchen, a dog, a burger, a half-finished bathroom.
Hosting
Faster pages. A form that fails by Tuesday.
Web Design
Footers stuffed with every page, every social icon and a newsletter box become a second site map nobody reads.
Ecommerce
Two hundred products. One search box that says no.
Analytics
Most visits do not start on the home page.
Social Media
Automated Messenger replies are being sold as the next big thing.
Security
A blog with comments switched on and nobody watching fills up with spam links.
Branding
The red on the brochure looks orange on one phone and brown on the office monitor.
Content
Pages about health, safety and money need more care than anything else a business publishes.
Conversion
A map pin brings customers to the right address and the wrong door: the back of a plaza, a lane, a unit upstairs.
Industry Guides
They plan the tasting trip on Thursday. The site sets the day.
Technical
WordPress 4.9.8 arrived yesterday with a large panel inviting administrators to install the new editor.
Search
No single fix. Start with what the clinic actually knows.
Technical
A court booked for six is confirmed for five, or a post scheduled for nine goes out in the middle of the night.
Reputation
Five years old. Still the second result for your name.
Ecommerce
A fraudulent order costs a small store the goods, the sale, a dispute fee and an afternoon.
Social Media
People plan kitchens, porches and gardens on Pinterest months before they hire anyone.
Hosting
Register a domain and the checkout offers a free website and hosting to go with it.
Advertising
Ads with a call button send calls straight to the business at lunch, after hours and on the busiest morning.
Security
From today, Chrome 68 puts Not secure beside the address of every page loaded without HTTPS.
Search
Who wrote it, and what do other people say about them?
Teardowns
Fourteen logos. Not one says what the firm does.
Email Marketing
Four logos, one disclaimer, and every email has attachments.
Accessibility
A screen reader reads a French page with English pronunciation if the page says it is in English.
Consulting
A buyer pays for the name, the phone number, the website and the reviews as much as for the vans.
Content
Location pages that swap only the town name read badly to customers and look like near-duplicates to Google.
Analytics
Phone visitors often look, leave and call; desktop visitors read and fill in forms.
Advertising
Google's Smart campaigns promise ads with almost no setup, starting in the United States.
Web Design
A photograph across the whole screen looks striking in the design meeting.
Performance
A photograph straight from a phone is many times larger than a web page needs.
Search
Google's Speed Update starts rolling out today for searches on phones.
Local Marketing
Most directories are worthless.
Industry Guides
Open tonight, where to park, and today's flavours. In that order.
Ecommerce
A deposit taken at booking turns a tentative yes into a commitment.
Security
Fine on the office computer. A prize scam on a customer's phone.
Publishing
Google is combining DoubleClick for Publishers and its ad exchange into one product, Google Ad Manager.
Advertising
Google announced yesterday that AdWords is becoming Google Ads, with Smart campaigns replacing AdWords Express.
Email Marketing
One reads like a letter. The other reads like a flyer.
Search
One page at a time, and what Google actually has on file.
Compliance
The federal Privacy Commissioner has set out what meaningful consent looks like and will apply it from January 1.
Technical
Brackets where the layout used to be.
Social Media
Instagram launched IGTV yesterday for vertical videos up to ten minutes long, or an hour for some larger accounts.
Conversion
A band of big numbers on the home page claims thousands of happy customers and complete satisfaction.
Reputation
Review replies signed by the team read like a form letter, and readers can tell nobody wrote them for this review.
Hosting
Three years paid before the site has loaded once.
Advertising
A display campaign reports thousands of clicks at a low price, and almost none come from people who meant to click.
Content
Quotes and service pages use words customers do not know, so two prices for different jobs look like the same job.
Ecommerce
A customer reaches the checkout on a phone and the browser offers nothing, so the address goes in by thumb.
Web Design
A visitor reads a service page to the bottom and finds the footer: an address, a copyright line, some social icons.
Industry Guides
A climbing gym's members already know the place.
Teardowns
A toy shop's site greets phone visitors with a cookie notice, a newsletter pop-up and a chat window at once.
Social Media
Apple says Safari will stop like and share buttons and comment widgets tracking people without permission.
Analytics
One password. Your email, your listing and your ads too.
Accessibility
The web accessibility guidelines have their first update in nearly ten years.
Search
Structured data gives search engines your name, address, hours and type of business in a form they read directly.
Consulting
Some website work only the business can do: the facts, the photographs, the answers.
Accessibility
Sliders, animated ads and blinking badges distract everybody, and flashing can trigger seizures in some people.
Branding
The van says one number. The website says another.
Local Marketing
Posts on a Google My Business listing appear in search and on Maps.
Ecommerce
Reviews on product pages answer the questions photographs cannot, and on your own store they belong to you.
Email Marketing
Each newsletter is written once and read once.
Compliance
GDPR applies from tomorrow.
Domains
From Friday, most public WHOIS records will stop showing domain owners' names, addresses, emails and phone numbers.
Publishing
From Friday, personalised ads shown to visitors in the European Union need their consent.
Security
Some security plugins scan constantly, log every visit and run on every page load.
Technical
Useful tools. They only see what WordPress holds.
Content
Slogans on home pages could belong to any business in any town.
Hosting
Many websites are backed up every night to a folder on the same server.
Email Marketing
Inboxes are filling with emails asking people to opt in again before May 25.
Performance
Someone else's code on every visit. And last year's posts.
Analytics
Google has told Analytics users that from May 25, detailed visitor data older than a chosen period will be deleted.
Local Marketing
Google has demonstrated software that phones a business and books an appointment in a natural voice.
Conversion
Many small businesses stand behind their work with a real promise and mention it on every call.
Compliance
Say it at the start. Say why. Delete them on schedule.
Social Media
Thirty hashtags under every post add clutter and little reach.
Industry Guides
Masonry is judged by eye.
Security
Forms that accept photos, resumes or drawings put files from strangers onto your server.
Web Design
A menu hidden behind a three-line icon made sense on phones.
Teardowns
Watercolour paper: no results. It is on the second shelf.
Reputation
Job seekers read what former staff say about you on employer review sites.
Email Marketing
Snoozed until Saturday. Write it so it still works then.
Advertising
A number from one to ten that changes what you pay.
Accessibility
The green button. Not green to everyone, not on the right on a phone.
Search
Google has confirmed a second broad core update, released April 16, six weeks after the first.
Domains
Some businesses buy a domain for each service and build a small site on each.
Compliance
November 1. Report the serious ones, record all of them.
Ecommerce
A business selling to the public and to restaurants, contractors or shops often runs two price lists on one store.
Performance
The Chrome update out today stops videos starting with sound until the visitor interacts with the site.
Content
Staff pages full of job titles and stock phrases tell visitors nothing.
Conversion
A form that promises a callback loses customers who would rather pick a time now.
Hosting
The mailbox is full. The customer knows. You do not.
Social Media
Switching an Instagram account to a business profile adds contact buttons, an address and insights.
Consulting
Not every tired website needs starting over.
Security
Hidden scripts on hacked sites now use visitors' computers to mine cryptocurrency.
Compliance
Like, tag two friends and share to win.
Web Design
Depth on the designer's screen. Judder on everyone's phone.
Industry Guides
Start-ups and blow-outs are booked weeks ahead.
Technical
Last week's iPhone update lets websites store pages offline and open from a home screen icon.
Analytics
March looks great. April will look worse. Neither is real.
Ecommerce
Good Friday and Easter Monday turn the weekend into four days when few parcels move.
Technical
A theme update replaces the theme's files, and any changes typed into them disappear with the old version.
Search
Google has started reading the phone version of websites first.
Advertising
You search for your own business and a competitor's ad sits above your listing.
Teardowns
The menu page and the downloadable menu disagree on dishes and prices, and the Google listing links to a third version.
Conversion
A seal from nobody vouches for nothing.
Local Marketing
Google My Business has brought back the business description.
Accessibility
Pricing, payment and cancellation pages are where readers most need clarity and where businesses write most densely.
Email Marketing
Double opt-in sends a confirmation email before adding someone to your list.
Hosting
Many Canadian business sites are hosted in the United States without anyone deciding it.
Social Media
Host the conversation. Do not sell in it.
Security
Free certificates, now including wildcards, mean scam and phishing sites have padlocks too.
Search
Google has confirmed a broad core update and says there is no specific fix if pages dropped.
Content
Google often lifts a short answer from a page into the box above the results.
Analytics
Every search typed into your site is a visitor naming something they could not find.
Industry Guides
Homeowners arrive worried about a crack or water in the basement.
Ecommerce
Five tiles, five pages, reviews in five places. One shirt.
Reputation
A competitor's listing fills with five-star reviews from accounts with no history.
Consulting
Website projects rarely stall on design or code.
Web Design
A third of the screen, on every scroll.
Security
From today, newly issued security certificates can be valid for no more than 825 days, about 27 months.
Accessibility
Select every storefront. If you can see them.
Branding
Sharp text, fuzzy logo. The original file fixes it.
Compliance
Not because a European visited. Because you sell to them.
Advertising
Spent by ten. Invisible when people decide.
Local Marketing
Every iPhone opens addresses in Apple Maps by default, and Siri answers questions about businesses from it.
Conversion
One wrong digit. Every field empty.
Email Marketing
Two hundred people in the BCC line. One shared reputation.
Hosting
Combining files, image sprites and extra domains for images were sensible fixes for the old web protocol.
Analytics
Analytics times a page by when the next page loads, so the last page of every visit counts for nothing.
Publishing
From today, Chrome removes all ads from sites in North America and Europe that keep failing the Better Ads Standards.
Social Media
Facebook has said live video tends to start conversations among viewers, the kind of post its new News Feed favours.
Content
Solutions, quality, passionate, best-in-class, one-stop shop.
Security
Google announced yesterday that from July, Chrome will label every page loaded without HTTPS as Not secure.
Industry Guides
Most calls come in a panic, often at night, with water still on the floor.
Technical
WordPress 4.9.3, released this week, contained a bug that stops sites updating themselves.
Ecommerce
A customer fills a cart, types an address, and only then sees the shipping charge.
Security
Whoever sits down is signed in as the owner.
Local Marketing
Recorded calls warn that your Google listing will be removed or slip down the results unless you act today.
Web Design
A row of three icons under the banner, each above one word: quality, service, value.
Advertising
Many AdWords accounts were opened by an employee or an agency under their own login.
Accessibility
The outline that shows which link or button has keyboard focus is often removed because it looks untidy.
Compliance
Data Privacy Day was yesterday.
Technical
A plugin added for a button, a font or a line of code stays for years, loses its author and becomes a weak point.
Reputation
Eleven reviews on a site you have never visited.
Industry Guides
Most plumbing calls are urgent and made from a phone.
Domains
Domains lapse when the card on file expires and the renewal warnings go to an address nobody reads.
Compliance
Europe's new privacy rules apply from May 25 and can reach a Canadian business that sells to or tracks people in the EU.
Performance
Advertisers pay for every click, then send people to a page that takes seconds to appear on a phone.
Search
Google says that from July, page speed will count in mobile search rankings.
Conversion
After a form is sent, most sites show one line or reload the page.
Email Marketing
An email list is the one audience a platform cannot shrink overnight.
Social Media
Facebook's News Feed change means fewer people will see business posts.
Social Media
Facebook has announced that the News Feed will favour posts from friends, family and groups over posts from businesses.
Content
January is quiet for many businesses, which makes it the month to write the website pages there is never time for.
Hosting
Many small business sites still run PHP 5.6, which gets security fixes only until the end of this year.
Technical
WordPress 4.9 now warns anyone opening the theme or plugin editor in the dashboard.
Search
Google has started opening the new Search Console to site owners.
Analytics
Many owners last opened Google Analytics when the site launched.
Security
Two processor flaws disclosed this week affect nearly every computer, phone and server.
Web Design
Owners and staff review the website on an office monitor.
Consulting
Built for one job. Doing six others now.
Consulting
One page today. A faster first week in January.
Advertising
Paused on the 22nd. Still paused in February.
Security
The old laptop still opens your email.
Ecommerce
They did not buy it. They still need to return it.
Branding
Charming at full size. A red blob as a profile picture.
Publishing
Google said on Tuesday that Chrome will start filtering ads on February 15 on sites that fail the Better Ads Standards.
Search
Google said on Monday it has begun indexing a small number of sites from their phone pages, not their desktop pages.
Social Media
Tag a friend who needs this. Facebook says no.
Web Design
Snow on every page. Including the order form.
Publishing
Content sites earn commissions when readers buy through their links.
Conversion
When December is fully booked, a closed form turns away people who would happily wait.
Analytics
A few figures, two short lists, three notes. Then stop.
Local Marketing
Craft fairs, holiday markets and pop-up shops put a business in front of people who look it up afterwards.
Email Marketing
A holiday email to customers can read as a real thank-you or as a sale in festive wrapping.
Teardowns
An accounting firm sends phone visitors to a cut-down m.
Ecommerce
Taking orders for stock that has not arrived can catch December sales or spoil Christmas morning.
Social Media
Stories that last. Spend them on questions, not old offers.
Search
Longer snippets, often lifted from your first paragraph.
Hosting
PHP 7.2 came out last week, and PHP 7.0 stopped receiving regular bug fixes on Sunday.
Industry Guides
Engineers read the equipment list before the about page.
Consulting
Renewed again. Nobody remembers what for.
Accessibility
Festive to most shoppers. A muddy blur to some.
Reputation
In December, late parcels bring reviews blaming the store, even when the delay happened in transit.
Email Marketing
Since Thursday many store lists have had a preview, a Black Friday email, two reminders and now Cyber Monday.
Ecommerce
Many stores build a new Black Friday page every year at a new address, and each starts from nothing.
Content
Photographs show what a product looks like.
Performance
Every holiday script loads on every page. Count them.
Security
Several card security requirements, recommended until now, become mandatory on February 1.
Ecommerce
Gift shoppers often do not know what goes with what.
Technical
Holiday changes, prepared now, live on the day.
Advertising
Since October every advertiser can use the redesigned AdWords.
Technical
Firefox 57, released yesterday as Firefox Quantum, is faster and drops older add-ons.
Conversion
Salons, cleaners, photographers and caterers fill December early.
Local Marketing
Downtown associations and shop-local campaigns send shoppers to member websites in November and December.
Publishing
Next page. Next page. Next page. Gone.
Hosting
One live site. Four forgotten ones. Same account.
Social Media
Twitter rolled out 280-character tweets to most accounts yesterday.
Analytics
Months later nobody remembers when the site changed, the ads paused or the newsletter went out.
Web Design
The iPhone X went on sale on Friday with rounded corners and a cut-out at the top of the screen.
Ecommerce
Only two left, sale ends tonight, someone just bought this: urgency messages push holiday shoppers to decide.
Compliance
A was price next to a sale price is a claim about what the product normally sells for.
Industry Guides
Mattress shoppers research for weeks and fear an expensive mistake.
Domains
A domain bought for a product, a campaign or a second business renews every year whether or not the idea happened.
Performance
Your visitor pays for every megabyte the home page sends.
Teardowns
A florist's home page opens on Valentine's roses and a February order-by date, eight months later.
Reputation
Review and directory sites call businesses to sell advertising, sometimes hinting that paying helps with reviews.
Accessibility
Neat edges, uneven gaps. And everything in capitals.
Search
Search your business name and Google often shows a panel of photos, hours, reviews and questions.
Email Marketing
Who sent it, where to write, how to stop it.
Social Media
Facebook Page Insights offers dozens of charts.
Security
On Monday researchers disclosed KRACK, a weakness in the WPA2 security almost every Wi-Fi network uses.
Security
Chrome 62 arrived yesterday.
Hosting
Many small business sites sit in a hosting account the designer opened, paid on their card and billed back once a year.
Consulting
It is Small Business Week.
Content
Written in 2013. Still ranking. Still quoting 2013 prices.
Ecommerce
Break it in October, while there is time to fix it.
Local Marketing
They found the building. Then asked the wrong desk.
Security
Microsoft ends support for Office 2007 today, so Word, Excel, Outlook and the rest get no more security fixes.
Analytics
Many customers find a business on a phone and send the enquiry hours later from a computer.
Advertising
Since yesterday, AdWords campaigns may spend up to twice their average daily budget on a busy day.
Web Design
Lorem ipsum on page four. Indexed since spring.
Industry Guides
Families looking for home care are usually worried and short of time.
Security
A caller or a sudden pop-up says a work computer is infected and offers to fix it remotely, for a fee.
Consulting
Website maintenance can mean weekly updates and tested backups, or very little at all.
Email Marketing
Email lists collect addresses that bounce, accounts nobody reads and typing mistakes.
Technical
Every image uploaded to WordPress is saved several times over, at sizes set by WordPress, the theme and the plugins.
Conversion
Forms that say Book now but only send a request leave customers believing they have a confirmed time.
Teardowns
Handsome houses. Not one of them built yet.
Reputation
Owners defending themselves in review replies sometimes reveal what a customer bought, owes or was treated for.
Local Marketing
Since this week's iOS 11 update, pointing an iPhone camera at a QR code opens its link with no app.
Analytics
iOS 11 arrived yesterday, and Safari now limits cookies that follow people from site to site.
Accessibility
Four seconds a slide. Nobody finishes reading.
Hosting
Sites made in a hosting company's own drag-and-drop builder often have no export, so changing host means rebuilding.
Advertising
No keywords. Your products, photos and prices.
Content
Businesses that hire every season often have no careers page, so applicants phone, walk in or give up.
Publishing
Ads that stay fixed to a phone screen while the reader scrolls are one of the formats Chrome will act on next year.
Ecommerce
A shopper presses pay and lands on a plain page carrying another company's name.
Security
Whoever controls the domain registrar account controls the website and the email.
Domains
From today every certificate authority must check a domain's CAA record before issuing.
Analytics
Analytics counts tablets apart from phones and computers, and tablet visitors behave like a mix of both.
Compliance
Not in force yet. Worth knowing what your site holds.
Industry Guides
The pattern is chosen. Now, do you have the yarn?
Web Design
Approved on a Mac. Read at work on Windows 7.
Consulting
Everything is in one partner's name. Sort it out in writing.
Search
Search for your business name and Google may show extra links under your result.
Hosting
New owner, new servers, new prices. Read the email twice.
Email Marketing
Some businesses email every week with nothing to say; others write once a year to a list that has forgotten them.
Teardowns
A marine repair shop's contact page is an embedded map with one pin.
Reputation
A complaint posted on your own Facebook page is read by everyone who visits after it.
Performance
Chrome's developer tools now include an audit that scores any page on speed, accessibility and good practice.
Local Marketing
Google listings now carry a questions and answers section.
Security
October. Every field on a plain HTTP page.
Conversion
Book now. Then a different website. Then nothing.
Domains
Letters and emails styled as domain renewal invoices arrive from companies the business has never dealt with.
Accessibility
A small red asterisk is the usual way to mark a required field.
Local Marketing
Before visiting somewhere new, people look at the photos to find the door and see what is inside.
Advertising
People searching on phones tend to call, while people at computers browse and fill in forms.
Security
A badly built contact form can send spam to thousands of strangers through your own server.
Content
Many customers read English as a second or third language.
Ecommerce
A store can email shoppers who left items in a cart, but CASL still applies and the tone matters.
Social Media
Facebook shows how quickly your page usually replies, and people write expecting a fast answer.
Hosting
Same price in US dollars. Not the same price to you.
Analytics
One page, five numbers, read on the first Monday.
Web Design
Thin outlined buttons with see-through centres look elegant in a theme demo.
Industry Guides
Parents, adult riders, boarders and visitors all read one stable website.
Performance
An embedded map loads a large amount of script before a phone can use the address beside it.
Email Marketing
A box that says subscribe to our newsletter gives nobody a reason to type an email address.
Compliance
One price on the product page and a bigger total at the last step.
Technical
Adobe announced yesterday that Flash will stop being updated and distributed at the end of 2020.
Search
Google promotes Accelerated Mobile Pages hard, and plugins offer them in one click.
Teardowns
A small hotel's home page rotates seven large slides before showing a rate or a booking button.
Reputation
Owners tend to reply to complaints and ignore praise, though future customers read both.
Conversion
Always one tap away. Sometimes in the way.
Technical
Automatic plugin updates keep security fixes flowing but can break a site overnight with nobody watching.
Advertising
Short video ads on YouTube can be shown to people in one area, and skipped ads cost nothing.
Accessibility
Gallery photographs usually have no descriptions, so screen reader users hear file names or nothing.
Social Media
Instagram allows one clickable link, in the bio, and many businesses point it at the home page or leave it empty.
Local Marketing
They checked in. Just not to your page.
Content
Pages full of we, our and company history make visitors dig for what is in it for them.
Domains
A domain chosen years ago may name one town, one service or a founder who has left.
Ecommerce
A free shipping threshold picked because it sounded right can lose money on small orders or sit too high to matter.
Security
Emails about a full mailbox or a shared document lead to fake email sign-in pages.
Analytics
Analytics shows most search visits as (not provided), so owners guess which searches bring them.
Web Design
Before-and-after pairs shot from different angles, distances and light prove little to a sceptical visitor.
Industry Guides
Drivers choose a car wash in minutes, often from a phone in the car.
Email Marketing
Saturday ended CASL's three-year allowance for emailing people you dealt with before July 2014.
Consulting
Halfway through the year is a good moment to ask whether the website has done its job.
Web Design
Google My Business now builds a free one-page site from your listing.
Compliance
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation applies from May 25 next year and can reach businesses outside Europe.
Search
Google Home went on sale in Canada yesterday.
Teardowns
Roof pitch, gutter length, budget. All required. So they phone someone else.
Local Marketing
Since Thursday evening every verified business can publish posts on its Google listing.
Conversion
A phone number with no hours beside it gets calls at ten at night and silence at eight in the morning.
Reputation
Five stars or one, in a language nobody at the shop reads.
Social Media
Snapchat sells custom photo overlays for a small area and a few hours.
Hosting
Shared hosting plans promise unlimited space and traffic but cap processing and simultaneous visitors.
Advertising
Kitchens, roofs and weddings are researched for months, and most visitors leave without getting in touch.
Accessibility
Video players whose controls respond only to a mouse shut out keyboard and screen reader users.
Security
Some hacks add spam pages that only search engines see, so the site looks normal to its owner.
Content
Most customers return before deciding, looking for a price, the process, a guarantee or the phone number.
Ecommerce
When the website's stock count is not the shelf's, customers pay for products you cannot ship.
Technical
New widgets. Old code in the sidebar. Test first.
Email Marketing
One clause is on hold. The rest of the law is not.
Analytics
Coming this fall to iPhones and Macs. Sound waits for a click.
Analytics
A bounce rate near zero is not good news. It is a duplicate.
Web Design
Welcome to our website paragraphs fill the most valuable space on the page with words that say nothing.
Publishing
Not all ads. Only the kinds readers hate most.
Industry Guides
Axe throwing venues book almost entirely by group: birthdays, staff outings, stag and stagette parties.
Consulting
Most small businesses learn their site is down from a customer, then find nobody who can fix it until Monday.
Local Marketing
Anyone can suggest new hours for your business. Some stick.
Performance
Five networks loading on every page. Nobody shares the quote form.
Email Marketing
Open rates depend on a tiny image loading, so they miss readers with images off and count people who never read a word.
Compliance
Camp and class registration forms collect children's names, ages, health notes and parents' details.
Teardowns
A notary office site offers a dropdown that machine-translates every page into forty languages.
Reputation
Customers talk about local businesses in community groups, forums, news comments and other people's reviews.
Advertising
The import takes minutes. The checking takes longer.
Accessibility
Print it, sign it, scan it. From a phone.
Conversion
Call for a quote on every service tells visitors nothing and sends price-sensitive people elsewhere.
Hosting
Many hosts now issue free certificates that renew automatically, so cost is no longer a reason to stay on plain HTTP.
Security
WannaCry spread worldwide on Friday through Windows computers missing a March security update.
Search
After a redesign, old page addresses linger in search results and send visitors to an error page.
Social Media
An address nobody can read out over the phone.
Technical
On many small business sites, everyone who ever touched WordPress has a full administrator account.
Local Marketing
Websites often name the municipality while customers search for the neighbourhood, the valley or the island.
Content
Owners worry that explaining how to do a job will lose them the job.
Ecommerce
Mother's Day is Sunday, May 14.
Email Marketing
A beautiful newsletter, arriving as empty boxes.
Analytics
For many local businesses the phone is the main enquiry, and Analytics cannot see it unless the call link is tracked.
Web Design
Desktop menus with dropdowns inside dropdowns become a maze on a phone.
Industry Guides
Parents and gift buyers check stock, ages and opening hours before driving over.
Security
The password is on the label. So is the problem.
Consulting
Built as a favour. Registered in their name.
Domains
Hundreds of new endings such as .shop and .online are on sale, and registrars push them at every checkout.
Reputation
Some unhappy customers offer to delete a bad review in exchange for a refund, and some threaten one to get it.
Hosting
Old backups, log files and years of email fill a hosting account until uploads fail, messages bounce or the site stops.
Accessibility
Interviews, podcasts and recorded talks on a website shut out deaf visitors and anyone who would rather read.
Advertising
Call-only ads in AdWords show a phone number instead of a link to your site, on phones only.
Social Media
A Twitter icon on the website that leads to a last tweet from 2014 tells visitors the business has gone quiet.
Technical
One phone number to change. One person who can change it.
Conversion
Five ways to reach you, and no hint which one works.
Local Marketing
Street View can go inside a business as well as along the street.
Content
They want to call. They want to know what happens next.
Security
Microsoft ends support for Windows Vista today.
Ecommerce
American orders reach Canadian online stores whether or not anyone planned for them.
Analytics
Flyers, van lettering and print ads send visitors who look like direct traffic.
Web Design
Three columns of ticks, and no way to tell them apart.
Email Marketing
A bowl of business cards from a trade show booth is not a newsletter list.
Search
Near me means near them. So say where you are.
Industry Guides
She has saved forty gowns. Does she know your sizes?
Branding
After a logo change, the old one survives in the tab icon, email signatures, social profiles, invoices and old PDFs.
Consulting
A budget chosen as a round number before anyone knows what the site must do ends in scope fights or wasted money.
Compliance
A maple leaf beside the price is a claim.
Performance
Owners judge their site on the office connection while customers wait on mobile data.
Hosting
Content delivery networks copy a site's files to servers around the world.
Teardowns
Twelve products on one page. Patio doors are screen nine.
Reputation
Written four years ago. Still the first thing people read.
Domains
The .ca registry accepts French accented letters, so a business named with an accent can register its name as written.
Advertising
Written for searchers. Shown inside phone games.
Accessibility
Header, footer, then the form. Wrong order.
Social Media
Facebook shows a business page's star rating near the top and keeps every review on its own tab.
Technical
A site that answers at www and at the bare domain, on both HTTP and HTTPS, looks like four sites to search engines.
Ecommerce
Smaller than it looked. Back it goes.
Conversion
Many customers would rather text than call, especially to send a photograph of the problem.
Content
An old service page can keep bringing enquiries for work the business stopped years ago.
Search
Many sites saw large ranking changes this week, and Google has said little beyond that search changes constantly.
Security
Free to download. Expensive to clean up.
Local Marketing
Three pins on the map. One restaurant.
Analytics
Added to block spam. Removed customers too.
Email Marketing
A shared address printed on the website and the van reaches several people, and each assumes someone else replied.
Web Design
Sites approved on a large monitor can look cramped or broken on a laptop, a tablet held sideways or a phone.
Hosting
Your hosting was fine. Your site was not.
Industry Guides
League night. Every lane taken. The site did not say.
Compliance
Lowest price guaranteed and we beat any quote are claims a business must honour and be able to support.
Advertising
Plenty of clicks. No idea which ones phoned.
Teardowns
A landscaping company's site opens on a full-screen photograph, a slow animation and an Enter site button.
Social Media
Since yesterday one Instagram post can hold up to ten photos or videos.
Technical
Set for seven. Published at noon. Or never.
Reputation
Customers sometimes review the wrong business, usually one with a similar name.
Search
When prices, hours or services change, Google can keep showing the old page for weeks.
Accessibility
They started typing. The label went with it.
Social Media
Facebook now lets business pages in Canada and the US post jobs and take applications through Messenger.
Hosting
Nine logins. Two of them nobody can explain.
Branding
One business. Three voices. Customers hear all of them.
Conversion
A required budget field asks visitors to name a price for work they cannot yet price.
Local Marketing
The search box on the office computer uses Bing.
Security
The fix shipped on January 26. Not every site took it.
Content
FAQ pages written in the week before launch answer questions nobody asks and miss the ones that arrive every day.
Email Marketing
Perfect on the phone. In pieces at the office.
Analytics
Menus, brochures and price lists posted as PDFs do not show up as downloads in standard Analytics reports.
Web Design
Wrong plates, wrong sockets, wrong trees.
Industry Guides
Escape rooms are booked by one organiser for a whole group, often late at night on a phone.
Advertising
From today AdWords will not accept new or edited standard text ads.
Performance
Pages, stylesheets and scripts can be compressed on the way to the browser, cutting what a phone downloads.
Compliance
Offering a discount, gift card or prize draw in return for a testimonial changes what it means.
Security
Chrome 56 labels plain HTTP pages with password or credit card fields Not secure, and Firefox 51 flags insecure logins.
Social Media
Many business Facebook pages have one admin, often someone who has left or is locked out of their account.
Domains
A .ca address can only be held by someone with a Canadian presence.
Accessibility
If it is not underlined, many visitors never find it.
Reputation
Reviews written in the busy weeks before Christmas often sit unanswered well into January.
Hosting
As of today PHP 5.6, which still runs a great many small business sites, receives security fixes only.
Ecommerce
Clothes, boots and gloves bought online come back in January because they do not fit.
Conversion
Callers want the price before anything else.
Advertising
No Instagram account needed. A good photograph is.
Local Marketing
Many Google listings now show a graph of when the business is usually busy, drawn from phone location data.
Technical
WordPress 4.7.1, released yesterday, fixes eight security problems.
Email Marketing
Plenty of people reply 'please remove me' instead of clicking unsubscribe, and the reply sits in an inbox.
Search
Announced in August. In effect from today.
Hosting
Security certificates range from free to several hundred dollars a year.
Content
Most businesses answer the same question on the phone every day.
Analytics
In Analytics, direct traffic is supposed to mean people who typed your address.
Security
When a website launches, the logins usually arrive in one plain email.
Web Design
January now. The banner still says order by December 15.
Consulting
Website work tends to land in the busiest month, when nobody has time for it.
Consulting
Most owners end the year meaning to do something about the website.
Web Design
December is over on the website too. Or it should be.
Advertising
Ad text with dates, prices and offers keeps running after the promotion ends when nobody pauses it.
Consulting
Owners who start a related business often add it to the existing website, and both sets of customers end up confused.
Ecommerce
Real end date. Real was prices. Sold-out items gone.
Consulting
A tired website does not always need a redesign.
Performance
The phone is quiet. Test the site now, fix it in January.
Compliance
Online menus often leave out ingredients and allergens or contradict the printed menu, and holiday menus make it worse.
Branding
Suppliers, associations, sponsors and venues show your logo on their websites, often an old version or a blurry copy.
Reputation
Former staff sometimes review the business on its own listing, about how they were treated rather than the service.
Industry Guides
People bring a computer to a repair shop worried about cost, time and above all their files.
Security
The boss never asks for gift card codes by email.
Domains
Your name, their domain. Start with a letter.
Consulting
In December, managers with money left in this year's budget need suppliers who can quote, invoice and deliver quickly.
Local Marketing
Businesses that deliver lose orders when customers cannot tell whether they are inside the area.
Ecommerce
Three days to the city. Two weeks to the north.
Analytics
They left because they had what they came for.
Technical
WordPress 4.7, released yesterday, adds an Additional CSS box to the Customizer.
Email Marketing
A birthday offer needs a birthday, yet many sign-up forms ask for a full date of birth that is never used.
Web Design
Sites launched with a few photographs show the same picture on page after page, and visitors notice.
Hosting
PHP 7.1 arrived yesterday, while many small business sites still run versions that lost support this year or earlier.
Domains
Change the owner email, and the domain stays put for 60 days.
Teardowns
Check back soon. Since 2013.
Domains
A business with a French or Chinese name beside its English one wonders whether to register both.
Security
Last month's attack on a DNS provider ran on hacked cameras and video recorders still using factory passwords.
Analytics
The email went at eight. By ten past, you should know.
Social Media
Customers complain to businesses on Twitter in public, and an account nobody watches leaves every complaint hanging.
Technical
Holiday codes combine with sale prices, with each other and with automatic discounts, and keep working after the sale.
Content
In December many shoppers buy for someone else and know little about the product.
Advertising
AdWords Express runs ads after a few minutes of setup.
Reputation
A customer of many years posts a poor review, and it stings more than a stranger's.
Industry Guides
Community theatres sell tickets, find actors and volunteers and thank sponsors on small budgets.
Performance
A big holiday email, or a mention in the news, can send more visitors in an hour than a basic hosting plan can serve.
Accessibility
Many customers turn up the text size on their phones, older customers especially.
Conversion
Massage clinics, detailers, restaurants and instructors sell most gift certificates in December, often only in person.
Email Marketing
Your customer knows them. Do you?
Technical
A website set to a fixed offset such as UTC-8 instead of a city keeps the wrong time for half the year.
Ecommerce
Black Friday is now a Canadian shopping day, and small shops often join in the night before.
Search
Google announced on Friday that it is experimenting with ranking pages by their mobile versions.
Analytics
Analytics records the language each visitor's browser is set to.
Security
Fake notices of a suspended hosting account, an expiring domain or a full mailbox lead to pages that steal logins.
Web Design
The owner loves it. Customers cannot read it.
Publishing
Bloggers and small publishers are paid to write about products, and readers expect to know.
Teardowns
Last post: March. Visitors assume the worst.
Social Media
Twitter announced yesterday that the Vine app will be discontinued.
Performance
WordPress databases swell with saved revisions, spam comments, tables left by old plugins and expired temporary data.
Search
Fourteen pages. One title. Google picks one.
Advertising
AdWords can place ads at the top of the Promotions tab in Gmail, where they open like an email.
Hosting
Last Friday an attack on a DNS provider made many well-known websites unreachable for hours.
Compliance
Next July, recipients can sue. The paperwork starts now.
Reputation
A delivery arrives late or a part fails, the supplier caused it, and the review names your business.
Content
Adult children often research care, equipment and home services for a parent from another city.
Email Marketing
Open houses, workshops and seasonal evenings often get an invitation that hides the date inside a poster image.
Consulting
Owners are often asked whether their website pays for itself, and most cannot say.
Conversion
Trades businesses bury licences, insurance and memberships on the About page.
Accessibility
Distorted letters and picture puzzles that stop spam also stop people with poor eyesight, dyslexia or older phones.
Technical
The company is leaving phones. Its users are not, yet.
Hosting
When a working relationship ends, the site may still sit on a server only the old developer can reach.
Industry Guides
Small roasters sell online, wholesale to cafes and over the counter.
Ecommerce
Shops order holiday stock in the fall and put it online in December, after shoppers have searched.
Local Marketing
Many Lower Mainland customers search in Chinese, Punjabi or Korean, and English-only sites rarely appear for them.
Analytics
Long service pages are written top to bottom, but Analytics alone cannot show how far down visitors read.
Security
Sixteen digits and an expiry date, in a shared inbox.
Teardowns
Exempt from Google's pop-up rule. Not from visitors.
Email Marketing
Gmail used to strip out the styles that let a newsletter rearrange itself on a phone.
Performance
Three copies of the page. None of them current.
Local Marketing
Many small business listings still show the owner's personal cell number.
Search
No more waiting for a refresh. No more announcements.
Domains
Every email address at your business depends on one domain renewal.
Reputation
Written three years ago. Read as if today.
Advertising
Sitelink extensions are set up once and forgotten.
Social Media
Since yesterday, photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quoted tweets no longer use up any of a tweet's 140 characters.
Content
Warranty pages pasted from manufacturers' documents or contracts go unread until a claim, when the surprises arrive.
Industry Guides
Day spa clients book treatments for themselves and buy gifts for others.
Conversion
A business that quotes big projects one by one can still publish prices for its small, common jobs.
Accessibility
iOS 10, released yesterday, lets muted video start by itself inside web pages on iPhones.
Ecommerce
Twelve seats. Fifteen names in the notebook.
Email Marketing
A short survey after a job can catch problems early.
Security
January for login pages. Later for everything else.
Web Design
The address is there. A dozen screens down.
Analytics
Analytics records the hour and weekday of every visit and every form sent.
Local Marketing
Not gone. Filtered. Check before changing anything.
Consulting
When the person who updated the website leaves, the updates stop and the passwords go with them.
Hosting
The customer wrote to you. Your server sent it back.
Local Marketing
Across the street from your customers. Filed under the other city.
Ecommerce
Same price to the next town and to Newfoundland.
Advertising
Keyword Planner now shows many small AdWords accounts a range such as 1K to 10K instead of a monthly figure.
Social Media
Since June, Facebook turns panoramas into 360-degree photos people explore by dragging or tilting a phone.
Content
Some questions arrive only at one time of year: the first frost, tax time, the start of school.
Search
The label goes now. The pop-ups have until January.
Advertising
AdWords price extensions, new this summer, list several services and their prices under an ad on phones.
Accessibility
White on the brand colour. Lovely at the desk, lost in the sun.
Teardowns
Weeks in your home. A website on borrowed space.
Security
Switching a WordPress plugin off does not remove its files.
Web Design
It was on the home page yesterday. Now it is gone.
Hosting
The host runs the machine. Nobody runs what is on it.
Email Marketing
When newsletters and receipts leave from the same list, one unsubscribe can stop confirmations too.
Conversion
A free estimate button that opens the same form as the contact page asks for a message and nothing else.
Web Design
Tap a photo. Look for the X. There is no X.
Ecommerce
A minimum order amount protects margins, but customers who discover it at checkout feel misled and leave.
Security
Quotes, contracts and customer files shared through online storage links often open for anyone who has the link.
Local Marketing
Google My Business counts how many people asked for directions to your business and shows roughly where they started.
Industry Guides
Families choosing a retirement residence read every page and visit only a few.
Analytics
They booked. Analytics says they left.
Social Media
Instagram launched Stories yesterday: photos and videos shown in a row at the top of the app that disappear after a day.
Compliance
Resumes arriving through a careers page carry addresses, phone numbers, work histories and references.
Technical
New default browser. Old website. Worth an afternoon.
Consulting
Website changes requested in long email threads get missed, done twice or done two different ways.
Search
Google sends its warnings about hacks, errors and penalties to whoever is verified in Search Console.
Advertising
Two headlines, one description, and until October to settle them.
Domains
Customers type a business name the way it sounds, and some misspellings lead to parked pages or other businesses.
Publishing
When a partner site republishes your article, its copy can appear in search instead of yours.
Hosting
From today PHP 5.5 gets no more security fixes, joining 5.4 and 5.3 on many shared hosting accounts.
Accessibility
Forms laid out in two or three columns get filled in a jumbled order by keyboard users, screen readers and phones.
Local Marketing
Pokemon Go arrived in Canada on Sunday, and players are gathering at parks, murals and some shopfronts.
Reputation
The reply described the policy. The review described the night.
Conversion
Right time. Wrong park. No racquet.
Technical
Security plugins often move a site's login page to a private address.
Content
Calls about work a business never does cost time on both ends.
Teardowns
Visitor number 48,213. Spaces available: unknown.
Security
They left in March. Their inbox did not.
Industry Guides
Charter guests book months ahead from far away.
Analytics
Zero visits for seven weeks. Nobody noticed.
Email Marketing
Customers who use the address that came with their internet service lose it when they switch providers.
Branding
An ampersand on the van, the word and on the invoice, Ltd.
Social Media
Friends first. Your page further down.
Advertising
From today AdWords will not accept new Flash display ads, and existing ones stop running on January 2.
Search
Name a business Summit, Pacific or Elite and a search for the name returns everything else that shares it.
Compliance
A popular song behind a business video can get it muted, blocked or claimed by the rights holder.
Hosting
A weekly backup suits a site that rarely changes.
Reputation
Reviews often complain about parking, a hidden entrance or the area, things the business cannot change.
Advertising
Facebook can aim ads at people who live near your shop or were recently nearby.
Accessibility
Accordions and tabs fold content away on phones, often behind vague labels and headings a keyboard cannot open.
Search
Google has started showing recipes as swipeable cards with photographs on phones.
Content
Before-and-after photos show the result and hide the work.
Teardowns
Three logos. Which clinic is this?
Conversion
A starting-at price sets the expectation, and a higher quote then feels like a bait and switch.
Ecommerce
Phone orders written on a pad split stock counts, customer histories and sales reports away from the website.
Security
Criminals buy ad space on trusted websites to deliver malware and fake virus warnings.
Consulting
Website projects stall at almost finished because nobody agreed what finished means.
Web Design
Elegant in the studio. Invisible in the sun.
Analytics
A visitor who clicks your email address opens their own mail program, and Analytics records nothing.
Email Marketing
Sent by your website, signed with the customer's address.
Performance
Animated GIFs on home pages and in blog posts can weigh several megabytes, more than the rest of the page together.
Local Marketing
Tourists and people moving to the area look up local businesses from far away, weeks before they arrive.
Hosting
Pages are small. Video is not.
Domains
Some business names turn into other words once the spaces are removed for a domain.
Social Media
A giveaway can bring a rush of page likes from people who wanted the prize and will never buy.
Industry Guides
Music stores sell instruments, rentals, lessons and repairs, often to parents who do not play.
Reputation
Franchise locations often share reviews with other branches, or work under head office rules about replying.
Accessibility
People who use wheelchairs, walkers or canes, or who avoid stairs, check a business's premises before they visit.
Publishing
Written for readers, or written around a link.
Advertising
Google announced two-headline text ads and separate bid adjustments for each device on Tuesday.
Technical
Three years of updates. Not all in one click.
Compliance
Camps, daycares and clubs want to show children having fun, and parents' consent and children's safety come first.
Email Marketing
Clipboards by the till and fishbowl draws collect addresses with no record of what people agreed to.
Content
New page every summer. New start in search every summer.
Conversion
A small photo and a name beside the contact form tell visitors who will read their message.
Security
Nothing looks wrong. Copies are leaving anyway.
Search
Search for your main service and Google shows an old blog post or the home page instead of the service page.
Branding
Instagram replaced its familiar camera icon this week, and plenty of people missed the old one.
Local Marketing
A market stall meets customers a few hours a week and loses them the rest of it.
Analytics
A radio spot sends listeners to search for the business or type its address within minutes of airing.
Security
A phone left in a cab carries the business inbox, customer contacts and saved passwords.
Hosting
A site moving hosts can be checked on the new server before the domain switches.
Teardowns
Accused of theft before saying hello.
Compliance
The photo was paid for. Just not by you.
Advertising
The click came from a phone. The page never noticed.
Web Design
Wide boxes, tall photos, missing foreheads.
Content
Instructions handed over after a job, from watering new sod to preparing herbal remedies, get lost on paper.
Ecommerce
PCI DSS 3.2, the new version of the card security standard, was published today.
Email Marketing
Scheduled for ten. Delivered at three.
Local Marketing
A call tracking number on a Google listing measures calls, and it also spreads to directories and customers' phones.
Security
Windows XP has had no security fixes since April 2014, and Chrome stopped updating on it this month.
Analytics
Analytics records the devices, screen sizes and browsers your visitors actually use.
Accessibility
Many forms show mistakes only by turning a field red, which people with colour blindness or screen readers miss.
Reputation
Commercial suppliers and business services rarely get public reviews, and the few they have carry weight.
Social Media
Renovators, designers and builders are found on Houzz, where homeowners collect ideas.
Publishing
Facebook has opened Instant Articles to every publisher.
Industry Guides
Trampoline parks sell timed jump sessions to parents on phones.
Technical
WordPress 4.5 came out this week, and major versions wait for someone to click update.
Hosting
Let's Encrypt has left beta, and free certificates that renew themselves are now a normal option.
Performance
Visual page builders often load the code for every slider, animation and map on every page, whether it uses them or not.
Conversion
Homeowners want proof you work near them before they call.
Search
New sign, new logo. Google still uses the old name.
Social Media
Snapchat is where many younger customers spend their day, in stories that vanish after a day.
Consulting
Ask three companies for a website price and you often get three different projects.
Ecommerce
Pink, 175 grams, premium plastic. Does it exist?
Email Marketing
One file, one computer, no record of who said yes.
Web Design
Apple's iPhone SE went on sale yesterday with a four-inch screen.
Technical
When a plugin is closed in the WordPress directory, sites already running it get no warning and no more updates.
Teardowns
A dental practice home page plays a full-screen video of smiling people behind white text.
Analytics
The prices page is often among the most visited pages on a site and the most common exits.
Hosting
HTTP/2 lets a browser fetch all of a page's files over one connection at once, and current browsers support it.
Security
Some attacks now encrypt a website's own files and leave a ransom note where the home page was.
Ecommerce
Canadians measure some things in inches and others in centimetres.
Advertising
AdWords search campaigns also show ads on Google's search partner sites unless someone unticks a box.
Accessibility
Drop-down menus that open only when a mouse hovers fail keyboard users, many touch screens and people with tremors.
Reputation
Some reviews arrive months after the work, usually because something has gone wrong since.
Web Design
Google said yesterday it will strengthen the ranking boost for mobile-friendly pages from May.
Social Media
Instagram announced yesterday that its feed will soon be ordered by what it thinks each person wants to see.
Content
People search by brand name once they have chosen the product, and a row of logos tells them nothing.
Compliance
Glowing reviews. Possibly not allowed.
Industry Guides
Used car buyers research for days before they visit.
Conversion
Typed it the way they always do. Rejected.
Local Marketing
Found the plaza. Walked past the shop twice.
Search
Google has confirmed it is removing PageRank from its toolbar.
Email Marketing
Two hundred customers. Every address on show.
Web Design
Fine on the phone. Fine on the monitor. Not on the iPad.
Analytics
The report says Vancouver. Your invoices say Langley.
Security
The website was fine. The mail server in the cupboard was not.
Hosting
Shared hosts cap processor time, memory and simultaneous processes.
Social Media
Facebook posts can now be answered with Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry as well as Like.
Publishing
Google now shows Accelerated Mobile Pages in the Top stories carousel on phones.
Technical
Drupal 6 stopped receiving security updates yesterday, and many small business and association sites still run on it.
Local Marketing
Google's Local Guides earn points for reviews, photos and edits, and some have reviewed dozens of local businesses.
Advertising
Google has stopped showing ads down the right of its desktop search results.
Ecommerce
They are holding the box. And reading your website.
Teardowns
The hours are on the website. Many visitors never see them.
Accessibility
Rotating banners change before slower readers finish and distract people with attention difficulties.
Reputation
A defensive or sarcastic reply to a bad review gets screenshotted and shared far more than the review itself.
Content
The answers that win jobs usually live in one experienced person's head.
Security
Fake invoices, parcel notices and scanned documents are carrying ransomware into office inboxes.
Social Media
On Wednesday Twitter announced an optional timeline that puts the tweets people will care about most at the top.
Conversion
An instant automatic reply tells people the form worked.
Email Marketing
Since yesterday Gmail shows a question mark in place of the sender's picture when it cannot verify a message.
Analytics
A sudden jump in visits usually traces back to one source: a forum thread, a news mention, a newsletter or a bot.
Ecommerce
Many Canadian customers would rather pay by Interac e-Transfer than type a card number into a website.
Industry Guides
Pottery studios sell classes, open studio time, memberships, firing and parties.
Local Marketing
Google My Business verifies most listings by mailing a postcard with a code.
Hosting
The form is encrypted. It is just not on your address.
Web Design
Visitors expect a click on the logo to take them back to the home page.
Domains
Many small businesses still use the email address that came with their internet service.
Compliance
Today is Data Privacy Day.
Performance
Eight photographs downloaded. One of them seen.
Security
The admin and recovery emails for a website, domain and hosting often go to someone's personal Gmail.
Search
Developers block search engines while a new site is built, and the setting often survives the launch.
Industry Guides
In mid-winter a curling club is filling leagues, renting ice and trying to turn curious beginners into members.
Accessibility
It looks like a phone number. It is a picture of one.
Reputation
Some reviews describe a price, a date or an event that did not happen the way the reviewer says.
Social Media
Many business videos sit on a YouTube channel tied to the owner's personal Google account.
Conversion
For many jobs a few photos say more than any description, and customers can take them in seconds on a phone.
Content
Finished jobs make the most persuasive pages a service business can publish, but they get written months later, if ever.
Ecommerce
Please enter a valid ZIP code.
Analytics
Analytics can exclude visits from known bots and spiders, but the setting stays off until someone ticks it.
Security
Internet Explorer 11, or no more fixes.
Email Marketing
Under CASL, a purchase gives implied consent to send commercial email for two years.
Local Marketing
Since August, Google shows three businesses in the map results for most local searches, down from seven.
Technical
WordPress 4.4 now offers phones smaller copies of images inserted through the editor.
Hosting
A three-year certificate from 2014 will not last three years.
Web Design
Copyright 2013. New for 2014. Still trading?
Consulting
Calls that rang out, a full voicemail box, a form that stopped sending, quotes nobody chased.
Consulting
One list. Every renewal, every card, every reminder.
Security
Your logo. Your photos. Not your page.
Ecommerce
Checkout forms that squeeze the address into one line, or hide the second line, leave unit numbers out of orders.
Local Marketing
No hours looks closed. Office hours bring walk-ins.
Email Marketing
Firms that sell to other businesses often copy addresses from prospects' websites.
Hosting
Down at the office. Fine everywhere else.
Analytics
Sent at nine at night. Counted tomorrow.
Social Media
A business with two or three locations can run one Facebook page or one for each.
Search
Google said yesterday it will index the HTTPS copy of a page by default, but only when the secure copy works properly.
Advertising
New businesses often start AdWords before the site is built, sending clicks to a page with a logo and an email address.
Web Design
Many themes draw icons from a special font.
Industry Guides
Open on Boxing Day? The website should say.
Reputation
Callers offer bundles of five-star reviews from people who never used your business.
Conversion
Quote forms for floors, roofs, fences and blinds often demand square footage or roof pitch.
Technical
Older sites read the name a browser reports and change the page to suit.
Search
A few hundred products. Tens of thousands of addresses.
Content
Customers arrive believing a furnace needs servicing only when it breaks, or that a small leak can wait.
Teardowns
A narrow column, wide margins, and a phone that shrinks it all.
Consulting
In a small market, the company running your ads and listings may also work for the business down the street.
Accessibility
Online shops show colour choices as small squares, often with no name.
Compliance
Symptoms, medications, birth date. Sent as plain text.
Performance
Every image waits while the server reads the list.
Domains
Agencies often build campaign pages on domains they register themselves, with tracked phone numbers.
Security
Spammers put your domain in the From line, and rejections of mail you never sent pour into your inbox.
Ecommerce
Rope, chain, lumber, meat, bulk foods and fabric sell by length or weight, while most carts count whole items.
Local Marketing
A new business line can come with a number another business used for years.
Teardowns
Stretched, fuzzy, boxed in white. And this is the roofer.
Content
Google has published the full guidelines its search quality raters follow.
Email Marketing
People who send a question through your website often end up on the mailing list for good.
Hosting
A folder of client email deleted by mistake, or a mailbox closed too soon, often cannot be restored.
Ecommerce
Apple Pay started working in Canada yesterday, for American Express cards only.
Analytics
Sites with a separate phone version, often on an m.
Industry Guides
The November question: will it be ready by Christmas?
Social Media
IMG_0412, no description, and a thumbnail of a knee.
Advertising
Shopping ads run from a product feed, and Google compares its prices and stock with your product pages.
Web Design
It looked perfect as a picture. Then the real words arrived.
Reputation
A photo of a kind gesture or an unusual product spreads across the city overnight and the phone does not stop.
Conversion
Free first class. Find it, phone for it, fill in four pages.
Technical
Photo.JPG and photo.jpg: one file on Windows, two online.
Search
An empty category or a product page saying no longer available can look gone to visitors and fine to Google.
Content
The crew arrived at eight. The sofa was still there.
Security
The old price is still in there. So is the comment.
Publishing
Articles signed with a first name, or with nothing, leave readers guessing who is speaking.
Consulting
A new website is usually quoted at a fixed price, and small changes afterwards are billed by the hour.
Accessibility
A form asks a question in plain text beside a row of yes and no options.
Search
Google is getting better at long questions. Answer them.
Local Marketing
Contact pages tend to assume everyone drives.
Teardowns
No headings, no prices. The phone number is the last line.
Email Marketing
Not an unsubscribe. A complaint, and it is counted.
Industry Guides
In stock, delivered Thursday, and open at seven?
Hosting
The filter on your hosting account holds suspected spam in a quarantine or a separate folder.
Analytics
Analytics stops at the edge of the website.
Social Media
Three versions of your business. One grey square.
Advertising
Renewed again. Still no idea what it brings.
Web Design
Your contact page. Someone else's logo.
Security
A contest app from 2012 can still post as you.
Compliance
Rentals, gyms, studios and tour operators move waivers online so customers sign before arriving.
Advertising
Facebook's lead ads, announced yesterday, open a form already filled with a person's name and email.
Ecommerce
In November businesses order gifts for clients and staff: dozens of identical items for different addresses.
Reputation
Long jobs give customers weeks to form an opinion, and some review at the worst point: kitchen torn out, yard dug up.
Conversion
Customers deciding whether to book want to know how they can pay and whether a deposit is needed.
Industry Guides
Quartz or granite, how long, and what happens on install day.
Technical
A booking form that takes dates typed as 11/12/2015 leaves the business guessing between November and December.
Search
Google dropped author photos from its results last year, then authorship altogether.
Advertising
Your customer list as an AdWords audience. With conditions.
Content
Shops and suppliers can order far more than they stock, but the website shows only the shelves.
Ecommerce
Furniture, hot tubs, machinery and garden pieces travel by freight, priced by address, access and service at the door.
Local Marketing
On the map before the doors open. Or not yet.
Email Marketing
One click on the wrong button and an unfinished newsletter, placeholder price and all, reaches every customer.
Hosting
Email set up years ago to download to one office computer and delete from the server exists nowhere else.
Analytics
Owners picture visitors going from the home page to a service page to the contact form.
Teardowns
New sign on the door. Old name in the search results.
Advertising
iOS 9 came out yesterday, and Safari on iPhones and iPads can now use content blockers.
Performance
One file per connection. Phones pay for every one.
Domains
Law, accounting and design firms often build their domain from the partners' surnames.
Security
Two dollars, forty names, one hour. Then the chargebacks.
Consulting
The board changes every year. The logins never do.
Accessibility
Two minutes of music, if you cannot see the screen.
Social Media
Vine plays six-second videos on a loop.
Advertising
Thousands reached. Hardly any of them nearby.
Hosting
PHP 5.4 had its final release this week, so security flaws found from now on will not be fixed.
Search
Get our app. From November, that costs the label.
Web Design
Since Tuesday, Chrome pauses Flash it treats as not central to the page.
Security
Older booking systems, members areas and client portals sometimes keep passwords readable.
Web Design
A new front door, and the old house behind it.
Social Media
Since Thursday, Instagram photos and videos can be portrait or landscape.
Ecommerce
Takeout restaurants take phone orders at the busiest hour, with busy signals and misheard dishes.
Email Marketing
Addresses typed on phones arrive with a letter missing or a misspelled domain, and the person never hears back.
Hosting
Many sites began as a WordPress or Joomla install made in one click from the hosting control panel.
Analytics
Analytics can give each goal a value, so a quote request counts for more than a newsletter signup.
Technical
New design. Old tag gone. Google's warnings unread.
Conversion
Booked three weeks out? Say so before the call.
Technical
No password in the email. A link instead.
Reputation
A homeowner posts your quote in a forum or a Facebook group and asks whether it is a rip-off.
Industry Guides
The real cost, the real hours, and a first flight.
Content
When a business moves, customers check the website: has it moved yet, where to, from when?
Compliance
Green, natural and eco-friendly appear on product pages with nothing behind them.
Social Media
Twitter usernames stop at fifteen characters, so long business names get shortened, often differently on every network.
Advertising
AdWords fixes an account currency when it is opened.
Web Design
A long passage poured into two or three columns looks like a newspaper.
Local Marketing
New to the area. Searching on a phone. Open now?
Consulting
Half an hour on launch day. Then nothing changes.
Accessibility
Please enter a valid name. They did.
Security
Checked every few minutes. Sent in readable form.
Technical
Windows 10 arrived on Wednesday as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.1, with a new browser, Edge.
Publishing
Community sites and niche publishers that sell their own ads often have no page saying what is for sale.
Ecommerce
Coffee, pet food, filters and printer ink are bought on a cycle, yet customers start from your home page every time.
Social Media
YouTube says a Google+ profile will no longer be needed to comment or run a channel.
Local Marketing
The lower Canadian dollar makes BC businesses good value for visitors from Washington State, who plan from home.
Email Marketing
They tapped the offer. They got the home page.
Search
Months, not days. Fix the pages, not the timing.
Analytics
A daily deal fills the calendar with first-time customers, but the real question is whether any return at full price.
Teardowns
Every word in capitals. Parents read it as shouting.
Hosting
A security certificate works only with the private key made on the server that requested it.
Performance
Three copies of jQuery. One would work better.
Industry Guides
The art, shown well. The hours, shown plainly.
Domains
Mail for any name at all. Mostly spam, and one enquiry.
Hosting
Nothing breaks tonight. The fixes just stop arriving.
Reputation
A customer posts photos of your mistake on their own Facebook timeline and tags the business.
Conversion
Many Vancouver customers would rather explain a problem in Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi or French.
Technical
Fine on the office computer. Calibri nowhere else.
Content
Media mentions listed with links to the original articles go dead as newspapers move, remove or lock away their stories.
Social Media
Plenty of shops run Instagram from the owner's personal account, with new stock between the family photos.
Advertising
Owners who search their own keywords every day add impressions without clicks, and may stop seeing the ad at all.
Web Design
On the laptop, a groomed dog. On the phone, a van door.
Security
Set to 777 to fix an upload. Never set back.
Branding
The Facebook page shows an old logo, Twitter a photo of the owner, Google+ the shopfront and LinkedIn a grey square.
Advertising
Every AdWords account has until Wednesday, July 1 to move its ads and keywords to upgraded URLs.
Ecommerce
A part number and a photo do not tell shoppers whether a filter, blade or gasket fits the model they own.
Local Marketing
The brand sends customers your way. To your old address.
Email Marketing
View this email in your browser. Then nothing.
Hosting
Hosts run malware scanners that quarantine or delete suspicious files.
Analytics
Based on a share of sessions. Read the small print.
Compliance
The Digital Privacy Act became law yesterday and amends PIPEDA.
Teardowns
A physiotherapy clinic's intake, consent and referral forms are PDFs to print, fill in by hand and fax or bring along.
Consulting
A pond for a website. Nobody wrote down which pond.
Accessibility
Some people with low vision switch Windows to high contrast mode, which removes background images.
Compliance
A portion. Of what, until when, and to whom?
Security
No update to install. The flaw is in the code itself.
Social Media
Instagram's location tags come from Facebook's places.
Advertising
Callout extensions put short phrases under an AdWords ad at no extra cost.
Web Design
Tall, wide, square. The work looks unfinished.
Reputation
Fixed the problem. Asked once. Left it there.
Industry Guides
Will we fit, is it free, what is included. Then hold it.
Conversion
On a phone, a visitor taps send at the bottom of a form, and the thank-you message appears somewhere out of sight.
Technical
Two items in the cart. None at checkout.
Content
Auto body shops, restoration companies and dental offices deal with insurers daily.
Ecommerce
The shop stays open. The packing table does not.
Local Marketing
Enter your postal code to find us. Search engines never do.
Email Marketing
Ticked in advance. Not consent. Two years at most.
Hosting
A new plugin or a product import ends in a blank page or a message that allowed memory is exhausted.
Analytics
Analytics from the developer, AdWords code from a consultant, a Facebook pixel from a staff member.
Security
A fake bank login, on your website. Reply by tomorrow.
Performance
A photograph saved as PNG can weigh several times as much as the same picture saved as JPEG, with no visible difference.
Search
Google renamed Webmaster Tools to Search Console yesterday, and Search Analytics has replaced Search Queries.
Domains
Agents, brokers, advisers and franchisees often run their website on an address the company supplies.
Teardowns
A scrapbooking store's online shop loads every product photo from its distributor's website.
Accessibility
Sign-up forms on shops and client portals often hide their password rules until someone breaks one, then empty the form.
Social Media
Since December, Facebook pages can show a button such as Book Now or Shop Now beside the Like button.
Advertising
Facebook will not approve an ad whose picture is more than twenty percent text, measured with a grid.
Web Design
When owners make every important line bold, red, underlined or larger, nothing stands out and the page shouts.
Ecommerce
The product is gone. The searches for it are not.
Email Marketing
CASL and the mailing services ask for a mailing address in every newsletter.
Industry Guides
Repair or replace? Covered? Can you come to me?
Hosting
Business internet packages often came with web space and email, set up years ago by the phone company.
Security
A certificate warning every morning on webmail or the hosting control panel teaches staff to click past it.
Consulting
Hired in May. Back at school in September, with the password.
Local Marketing
On cruise ship days, passengers walk off with a few hours and a phone.
Analytics
Facebook visits arrive in Analytics under several addresses, and some from the phone app are counted as direct.
Reputation
An old price, a dead number and a partner who left.
Security
WordPress released a security fix on April 21, version 4.2 on April 23 and another security fix yesterday.
Conversion
A phone menu makes a small office sound bigger, but callers from the website have already decided.
Technical
After a move or a database export, apostrophes, quotes and accents turn into strings of odd symbols.
Content
Teams, schools and charities ask local businesses for prizes and sponsorship every week.
Compliance
A visitor who asks for a quote can be called back.
Search
Google's mobile ranking change starts rolling out today.
Publishing
Magazines and newsletters moving online often post each issue as a page-turning flipbook or one large PDF.
Advertising
You chose one search. AdWords added its relatives.
Ecommerce
PCI DSS 3.1, published yesterday, says SSL and early TLS no longer protect card data well enough.
Technical
Chrome 42, out yesterday, no longer runs Java, Silverlight and other old plugins by default.
Web Design
Pages built from nested columns and layout codes look perfect until the owner changes a sentence.
Security
A contact form script put in cgi-bin around 2003 may still be on the server years after the site moved on.
Ecommerce
Many small online shops still run a cart installed years ago and never updated, because every customisation would break.
Email Marketing
Hi FNAME, and Dear ABC PLUMBING LTD.
Hosting
Every address ends in .asp. Nobody remembers why.
Social Media
YouTube's new cards can point viewers to your website, but only to a site linked to the channel and verified.
Industry Guides
Registration, fields, and the rainy Saturday question.
Analytics
AdWords shows clicks and costs; Analytics shows what visitors did next.
Local Marketing
Months of road work can make a business look closed: fences, detours and nowhere to park.
Social Media
Periscope, launched last Thursday, and Meerkat let anyone stream live video from a phone.
Consulting
Website quotes often include a single line called SEO setup without saying what it covers.
Accessibility
One wrong digit, sent before anyone could see it.
Reputation
Consumer reporters follow up complaints and call the business for comment, usually with a deadline that day.
Conversion
Trucks, yard signs and flyers carry a web address read in passing and typed later from memory, often on a phone.
Technical
After a PHP upgrade, older hand-built sites print a Deprecated: mysql_connect warning above the header.
Teardowns
A painting contractor's site sets pale grey text on white and white headlines over bright photos of fresh paint.
Performance
The post loaded. The eighty little faces kept coming.
Domains
Some sellers claim a ten-year domain registration helps search rankings.
Security
An office lets the bookkeeper reach a work computer from home, and the router leaves remote desktop open to anyone.
Search
Twenty-four suburbs. Twenty-four copies of one page.
Web Design
Closed for the holidays. In December 2012.
Compliance
Restaurants, salons and shops invite local bloggers to try things free in exchange for a post.
Ecommerce
Click. Nothing happens. Click again. Two charges.
Email Marketing
A small picture in a subject line looks cheerful on an iPhone.
Hosting
Hosts often leave long-standing customers on servers built years ago, with old PHP and old encryption.
Analytics
Analytics is installed and the reports show visits, but no orders and no revenue.
Email Marketing
The CRTC announced its first CASL penalty this week: emails sent without consent and an unsubscribe that did not work.
Industry Guides
Students and parents compare language schools from abroad, months ahead and across time zones.
Security
FREAK, disclosed yesterday, lets an attacker force some secure connections down to weak old export encryption.
Content
Who decides, by when, and what happens next.
Local Marketing
Five tables in the sun. Not one word online.
Search
April 21. Phone searches only. Page by page.
Branding
Logo in one typeface. Quote in Calibri.
Consulting
New company. Domain still in the owner's name.
Accessibility
On a wide monitor, text that stretches across the whole window makes lines too long to follow.
Security
Joomla 1.5 has had no security fixes since 2012, and neither have many extensions built for it.
Reputation
Last tweet: 2012. Two questions, no answers.
Content
Anything bought in US dollars costs more with the lower Canadian dollar.
Web Design
It passes the test. It just is not your business any more.
Ecommerce
Antiques, art, consignment pieces and handmade work exist once.
Teardowns
A real estate agent's domain forwards with masking to a page on a franchise system.
Local Marketing
She left two years ago. Her listing still rings your phone.
Hosting
Fine from the office. Coming soon for everyone else.
Analytics
Who visits your site, roughly. After the privacy page.
Publishing
Every publisher gets a name, a date or a price wrong eventually.
Security
A Word attachment opens as gibberish with a note asking you to enable content.
Conversion
Home show visitors collect brochures from a dozen contractors and look a few up a week later.
Performance
Responsive themes often hide big desktop images on small screens, but the phone downloads them anyway.
Email Marketing
Most clients skim the spring reminder from their bookkeeper or accountant.
Industry Guides
Families decide the night before or that morning, on a phone.
Domains
Brand name plus city looks like a smart domain for a dealer.
Accessibility
Press the down arrow once. Now you are on another page.
Web Design
YouTube said yesterday that it now plays HTML5 video by default.
Reputation
A reviewer praises your crew for three paragraphs and still gives two stars because of one thing.
Conversion
A contact page with only a P.O.
Content
Pinch, zoom, scroll sideways, give up.
Local Marketing
A 1-800 number looks established, but on a neighbourhood business it suggests a call centre.
Email Marketing
An animated GIF in a newsletter cycles through a photo, the offer and the date.
Analytics
Moving to Universal Analytics is mostly a code swap.
Branding
Logos drawn around 2007 often carry gradients, glossy highlights, reflections and drop shadows.
Publishing
A screenshot of a tweet cannot be checked and may copy someone's photograph.
Compliance
Apps, add-ons, remote tools. Consent first, from today.
Social Media
A price and a link is an advert. Facebook noticed.
Performance
Without caching instructions, browsers fetch the same logo, stylesheet and scripts on page after page.
Domains
Five working days to object. To nothing.
Accessibility
Some older sites use one large picture with clickable regions as the menu or as a map of service areas.
Reputation
A reviewer says the business is a scam, unlicensed or stealing.
Local Marketing
Street View can show the previous tenant's sign, scaffolding or an empty unit, so customers look for the wrong door.
Conversion
They plan in January. Your site still says August.
Analytics
Furnace, roofing and plumbing sites jump with the first frost or a windstorm, then fall back.
Consulting
In many small firms the owner, the office manager and a relative each change bits of the website, or nobody does.
Search
Yahoo's web directory closes today, and some businesses paid every year for a listing there.
Web Design
On a site built in frames, the address bar never changes, so no page can be bookmarked or shared.
Email Marketing
A kayak outfitter or fishing lodge goes quiet in winter, and so does its newsletter.
Ecommerce
A customer moved in April, and the checkout quietly used the address saved in their account.
Hosting
Email moved to the hosting plan's mailboxes reaches every phone, but the shared calendars stay behind.
Local Marketing
Google's local search update from July has now reached Canada.
Content
Homeowners compare vinyl and wood, asphalt and metal, before they call a contractor.
Social Media
Instagram removed spam accounts this week, and some businesses lost followers overnight.
Reputation
A happy customer promises a Google review, then stops when Google asks for a public Google+ profile first.
Analytics
A blog tracked in its own Analytics account hands its readers to the main site as strangers.
Security
SoakSoak malware has been infecting WordPress sites since the weekend through a slider bundled with many themes.
Advertising
Several AdWords charges in one month, each for an odd amount, puzzle many bookkeepers.
Accessibility
Opening hours typed in shorthand suit regulars and trip up screen readers and newcomers.
Conversion
Product pages that end with call for pricing leave buyers phoning item by item.
Compliance
Many societies and clubs assume Canada's anti-spam law is only for businesses.
Teardowns
A bridal shop site filled with gown photos copied from designers and other shops invites removal demands.
Technical
Photos and label art supplied for print can break or look wrong on a website.
Consulting
Advisers, agents and brokers often need head office to approve a website before it goes live.
Content
A cancellation fee posted only at the front desk reaches phone and online customers as a surprise charge.
Web Design
A site sold as responsive can still show phones a tiny copy of the desktop page.
Hosting
Staff at your biggest client see a blocked page instead of your website.
Domains
A domain built from keywords and a city once seemed to help a site in search.
Performance
A site that turns slow at the same time most afternoons is often running its own backup.
Industry Guides
Appliance buyers want to know whether it fits, whether it is in stock and when it can arrive.
Ecommerce
More Canadian shops are running Black Friday sales this Friday, and shoppers compare prices across the border.
Analytics
The goals report shows a busy month for enquiries, but nobody felt it.
Email Marketing
Gifts to a registered charity by December 31 are receipted for this tax year.
Security
WordPress 4.0.1, a critical security release, came out yesterday and reached most sites on its own.
Social Media
Twitter search now reaches every public tweet back to 2006.
Search
Google has started marking pages that pass its phone checks with a Mobile-friendly label in phone results.
Local Marketing
Most receipts end with the store name, a total and a returns line.
Reputation
A parent writes a review unhappy with how their child was placed or treated.
Publishing
A community paper's readers' choice vote gains hundreds of votes for one nominee overnight, from a handful of addresses.
Web Design
On a computer, the booking button sits in a sidebar beside the rooms.
Accessibility
A Boxing Day page ticks down the seconds to the end of the sale.
Advertising
A charity approved for free AdWords advertising finds it spends a small part of its monthly allowance.
Hosting
An online shop unhappy with its host plans to move just before the holiday orders peak.
Content
A stamp card or points program that the website never mentions helps nobody choose the store.
Compliance
A holiday banner promises up to half off, and at the counter most items are reduced by far less.
Analytics
Visit numbers look healthy, but many of those visits are existing clients heading for the login area.
Conversion
Buyers choosing flooring, fabric, tile or countertops want to hold a sample before they commit.
Security
Drupal 7 sites not updated within hours of the October 15 fix should be treated as compromised.
Ecommerce
A new shop's confirmation emails show order number 14, and a customer notices.
Technical
Google said on Monday that blocking CSS and JavaScript in robots.txt harms how it renders pages.
Branding
A customer shares your page and Facebook shows a payment badge, or no picture at all.
Consulting
When sales staff quote from their own free email accounts, the customer history leaves with them.
Email Marketing
Google's new Inbox app, open by invitation since Wednesday, groups newsletters into bundles.
Industry Guides
In October a costume shop's phone rings all day with the same few questions.
Search
Google began rolling out a new Penguin update last Friday, aimed at manipulative links.
Teardowns
Testimonials signed with initials or Satisfied Customer cannot be checked, so visitors discount all of them.
Local Marketing
A guest Wi-Fi login that asks for an email address builds a list, but not one you can send a newsletter to.
Hosting
The summer staff have gone, but their email accounts and website logins are still open.
Security
A flaw disclosed this week means servers and browsers are switching off SSL 3.0.
Ecommerce
The payment account shows money from a customer, but the shop has no order, or shows it unpaid.
Reputation
A client quoted by name for years asks you to take the quote down.
Web Design
On an iPhone, part numbers and ranges of years turn blue and offer to dial.
Social Media
Pins of your products show a picture and a link, but no price or stock.
Domains
A short name under a new ending like .photography can be marked premium at a price that looks like a one-time cost.
Technical
A guest house's booking form stops at December, and its deposit page rejects cards expiring after this year.
Accessibility
A survey grid of ten statements and five rating columns loses screen reader users and runs off a phone's screen.
Advertising
Search ads for a business service can fill up with consumers.
Performance
A product in eight colours can make a phone download every colour's photos before showing the first.
Analytics
A one-page site's reports show one page, a high bounce rate and visits lasting no time.
Security
Google asks your staff to type a code before every search, and some emails bounce with a blacklist notice.
Content
Team pages list designations after every name, and most clients cannot tell what they mean.
Hosting
A flaw in bash, a program on most Linux servers, was disclosed this week.
Local Marketing
A manufacturer sells seconds and small orders at the plant, but its listing shows only the office.
Conversion
Enquiries for three branches all land at head office and wait to be forwarded.
Email Marketing
A newsletter goes out with the wrong date or a broken link.
Reputation
A review says your booking form never answered or your site failed on a phone.
Web Design
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus go on sale today with the largest iPhone screens yet.
Industry Guides
People choose a tailor by asking how long, how much and whether it will be ready for the wedding.
Consulting
Buying a competitor brings a second website, domain, phone number and set of listings.
Ecommerce
Team orders arrive as spreadsheets that staff retype, one jersey at a time.
Search
A release sent to hundreds of news sites for its links rarely helps and can harm.
Advertising
An AdWords account built in an afternoon puts every keyword in one ad group behind a single ad.
Teardowns
A small hotel's home page starts playing music the moment it opens.
Security
Chrome will soon flag secure pages whose certificate uses SHA-1 and expires in 2016 or later.
Technical
An embedded booking calendar sends iPhone users back to the start after they pick a time.
Social Media
Every new follower gets the same direct message within seconds, with a link.
Hosting
WordPress 4.0 came out yesterday, and on most sites it waits for someone to install it.
Compliance
Two neighbouring shops agree to promote each other by trading customer lists.
Domains
Customers used to typing .com send orders, quotes and personal details to the .com version of your .ca address.
Local Marketing
Office managers start choosing December party venues in September, comparing capacity, menus, prices and dates.
Publishing
Google said yesterday that it has stopped showing authorship in its results and no longer uses the markup.
Analytics
Since yesterday every Twitter account can see how often each tweet was seen and what people did with it.
Accessibility
On a print shop's hand-built site, the browser tabs read Untitled Document and a screen reader announces exactly that.
Email Marketing
A dance studio or music school emails families about fall registration, and the questions come back by reply.
Conversion
Many small business sites open with a row of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ icons.
Security
A search for a small law office turns up a page titled Index of /uploads, listing client letters.
Web Design
On a phone, a photo set beside a paragraph keeps its width and squeezes the words into a strip two words wide.
Ecommerce
A supplier sells the same item cheaper from ten units and again from fifty, but the cart holds one price per product.
Content
An estimate is approved, more work turns up once the job is open, and the final bill feels like a trick.
Reputation
A shop or salon puts a tablet on the counter so customers can post a review before they leave.
Hosting
PHP 5.3, the version still under many small business sites, had its final release yesterday.
Advertising
A moving company writes two ads to see which works better, and one ends up with nearly every impression.
Consulting
An online shop's redesign slips, and launch day now falls in the week of Black Friday.
Industry Guides
Parents choosing a gymnastics class need levels, times, registration dates, coaches and a trial class.
Performance
A swim club opens registration at nine on a Saturday, and the site stops responding within minutes.
Social Media
From November 5, Facebook will not let Pages require a like to enter a contest or claim an offer.
Security
Google said yesterday that a secure HTTPS connection now counts as a light ranking signal.
Search
A restaurant closing for two weeks replaces its whole site with a closed notice.
Technical
A new site looks right everywhere but on customers' office computers, where menus overlap.
Teardowns
A car rental site's pickup and return dates use a calendar that never opens on a phone.
Analytics
Google Analytics added a setting yesterday that excludes hits from known bots and spiders.
Local Marketing
A kayak tour meets at a beach, but the listing and the website show the office address.
Email Marketing
Type a first name, accept the suggestion, and a client's document goes to someone else.
Domains
The site moved to a new host, the old account was cancelled, and the next morning the site and email stopped.
Branding
A customer disputes a charge because the card statement shows a numbered company nobody recognises.
Accessibility
Consent checkboxes added for the anti-spam law often sit apart from their sentence in the code.
Conversion
The person filling in your quote form often has to take the answer to an owner, a spouse or a board.
Advertising
An ad written like the flyer, with capitals, an exclamation mark and the phone number, comes back disapproved.
Hosting
The site goes down while the owner is away, and the host will not discuss the account with anyone else.
Web Design
Log in, Entries RSS, Recent Comments and a monthly archive sit under the quote button on many service pages.
Ecommerce
A plain engraving box lets customers type more than fits, misspell names and bury instructions.
Security
A charity's donate button can send every gift to another account while the page looks unchanged.
Reputation
Reviews on a Google listing can vanish within days of appearing.
Industry Guides
People check a laundromat's site with a full basket waiting by the door.
Social Media
A summer photo contest on a hashtag collects spam, borrowed photos and entries nobody can see.
Local Marketing
Reviews from happy customers vanish behind a link marked not currently recommended.
Content
A workshop that makes its own products often shows only finished goods and prices online.
Consulting
Chair renters, shared suites and shared studios often run one website for everyone.
Technical
A WordPress site shows every visitor one line: briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.
Search
An older site carries a meta keywords tag stuffed with dozens of phrases on every page.
Analytics
A shop that sends buyers to a separate payment page sees its sales credited to the payment company in Analytics.
Email Marketing
The anti-spam law took effect yesterday.
Compliance
Canada's anti-spam law comes into force tomorrow, July 1.
Conversion
Contact pages show the email address as an image, or as info at business dot com, to keep spammers away.
Security
A bed and breakfast's site starts showing pop-ups to some visitors, though nobody has changed it in a year.
Ecommerce
Chocolate, candles, lip balm and some cosmetics can arrive soft or ruined in summer.
Teardowns
A tour company's prices carry a dollar sign and no currency, for visitors from Canada and the United States.
Advertising
A florist lets AdWords set bids to get as many clicks as the budget allows.
Publishing
A magazine opens comments, and within a month one thread fills with insults and a doubtful claim about a local shop.
Web Design
A landscaping company's new theme drops a screen-wide panel of links, icons and a photo from one menu item.
Hosting
A deck builder's new project photos will not upload: an error in the media library, or the upload just stops.
Performance
A golf course's pages fetch the weather from an outside service on every view, so when it slows, the site waits.
Social Media
When a video embedded on your site finishes, YouTube fills the frame with suggested videos, some from competitors.
Accessibility
A menu link that quietly downloads a 12 MB PDF catches out screen reader users, phone visitors and office staff.
Local Marketing
Google has replaced Google Places and the Google+ dashboard with Google My Business.
Industry Guides
Paintball is booked by parents, party planners and office managers, many of whom have never played.
Reputation
Loyal customers who rush to defend you from a bad review keep the complaint in front of everyone.
Analytics
In-Page Analytics shows the same figure on the menu link and the big button to the quote page.
Email Marketing
A newsletter attached as a PDF trips filters, opens awkwardly on phones and shows nothing about who read it.
Consulting
A rival launches a site with full-screen video and parallax panels, and the urge is to match it before the busy season.
Ecommerce
Google Analytics can now follow a shopper from product view to cart to purchase.
Content
Tour pages describe the sights but rarely the distance, the hills or the standing.
Security
A hotel lobby computer can record every key typed and keep files for the next guest.
Conversion
Enquiries from Europe and Asia arrive overnight, and each reply lands while the visitor sleeps.
Technical
Webmaster Tools can now show a page as Googlebot renders it, with styles and scripts.
Domains
When a club's treasurer steps down, the bank's notices and the supplier history leave in a personal inbox.
Compliance
Canada's anti-spam law starts on July 1, and a sender has to be able to show consent.
Advertising
A small Facebook budget spent on page likes brings fans from far away who will never visit.
Local Marketing
A guest started your TripAdvisor page, with a misspelled name and an old phone number.
Hosting
A WordPress site showing only an error establishing a database connection cannot reach the place its pages are kept.
Search
Google confirmed Panda 4.0 yesterday, aimed at thin and low-quality pages.
Social Media
A Hangout On Air broadcasts a video chat publicly and saves it to YouTube.
Accessibility
A visitor finishes a long quote request, presses the wrong one of two identical buttons, and every field goes blank.
Industry Guides
Parents choosing a summer week and adults learning to sail want the same answers.
Teardowns
At checkout, a gift shop's site jumps to a plain payment page at another address with no logo and no way back.
Analytics
AdWords shows a hundred clicks and Analytics far fewer paid visits.
Web Design
Summer visitors on roaming or campground Wi-Fi may never see a home page heavy with sliders and video.
Email Marketing
Staff on the newsletter list never see it, so the office assumes it was not sent.
Technical
WordPress 3.9 rebuilt its editing box, and some buttons added by themes and plugins stopped working.
Security
Job ads with an email address draw dozens of attachments a day, some of them zip files or programs posing as resumes.
Reputation
Typing the business name into Google now suggests complaints or scam after it.
Content
A butcher, cheese shop or spice merchant lists products without saying what to do with them.
Consulting
A franchisee wants local customers to find the store, but head office gives it one page with an address and a map.
Conversion
Visitors to a law, accounting or advisory office type their whole situation into the contact form.
Local Marketing
A new shop opens where a cafe ran for ten years, and the map still shows the cafe, open, with its reviews.
Analytics
Analytics reports a month's revenue above the bank deposits.
Publishing
A magazine's new design loads more articles as readers scroll.
Performance
Staff wait every time they open the WordPress dashboard, while the public site seems quick.
Ecommerce
A cart quotes $3 to ship a cast iron pan and $40 for a pair of socks.
Social Media
Twitter's new profiles bring a wide header, a larger photo and a pinned tweet.
Advertising
A lodge or tour company needs its ads seen in Calgary and Seattle months before the trip.
Hosting
A customer emails a change at nine and it reaches the office at half past.
Search
A translated site can still send French-speaking visitors to English pages from Google.
Compliance
A Clients page full of customer logos can suggest endorsements nobody gave.
Industry Guides
Golfers decide on short notice, often on a phone.
Social Media
LinkedIn removes the Products and Services tab from company pages today, and the recommendations on it go too.
Email Marketing
Yahoo now asks mail servers to reject messages that show a yahoo.com sender but did not come through Yahoo.
Accessibility
A home page heading typed with a space after every letter and stars on each side looks decorative.
Security
A serious flaw in OpenSSL, the encryption software on many web servers, was disclosed this week.
Web Design
Windows XP gets its last security updates today, and the newest Internet Explorer it can run is version 8.
Domains
Events that register a new domain each year leave last year's address to lapse.
Technical
Every enquiry from the contact form arrives with the same subject and piles into one long conversation.
Analytics
Google took Universal Analytics out of beta yesterday, and new features will go to it rather than the classic code.
Reputation
Clients search the owner's name and find a personal Facebook profile with old jokes and holiday photos.
Local Marketing
Locals call a business by the owner's first name or its old name, years after the sign changed.
Content
A waterpark, farm or studio says school groups are welcome, and stops there.
Conversion
Families comparing cabins for a summer week act on the sites that show free dates tonight.
Consulting
An email says your site cannot be found on Google and offers to fix it this month.
Email Marketing
A business imports its old address book into a mailing service and wakes to a suspended account.
Teardowns
An accounting office's website was built for Internet Explorer.
Security
A host warns that a small WordPress site is sending thousands of requests to an unknown website.
Ecommerce
Returning customers find their passwords rejected and their orders gone after a shop moves to new software.
Advertising
Google's ads no longer sit on a shaded block; each now carries a small yellow Ad label and looks much like a result.
Performance
A webcam page that reloads itself every minute makes each open tab download the whole page again and again.
Branding
A logo saved from the website is a small pixel image, so a banner printed from it comes out jagged and off-colour.
Search
Google's redesigned results show titles in a larger font, so fewer words fit before the cut.
Hosting
When a host moves your account to a new server, the IP address changes.
Industry Guides
People decide on fish for dinner from a phone, often on the way home.
Compliance
A weekend special sells out on Saturday morning while the website, newsletter and Facebook post keep advertising it.
Technical
On a hand-built site, every page carries its own copy of the menu, header and footer, and the copies drift apart.
Analytics
A new site built at a test address usually carries the live tracking code, so every review counts as a visit.
Web Design
Script typefaces drawn for a logo blur at paragraph size, so visitors squint at descriptions and misread prices.
Local Marketing
A news story sends viewers searching for the business that evening, all at once.
Social Media
Since December, many Facebook pages have seen each post reach fewer of the people who liked them.
Advertising
Many lead services sell one homeowner's request to several contractors, so the fee buys a race.
Content
Regular customers often learn about a sale from a stranger at the counter or a new name on an invoice.
Accessibility
On a wide product list, the name sits at the far left and the price at the far right.
Email Marketing
Gmail has started showing an Unsubscribe link beside the sender's address on some newsletters.
Reputation
Planners booking summer trips in winter judge seasonal businesses on last August's reviews.
Security
Clients phone to ask whether you are stuck overseas and need money, because an email from your own address said so.
Ecommerce
An empty Promo code box at checkout tells every shopper that somebody else is paying less.
Teardowns
A bakery's home page plays a Flash animation behind a Skip intro link.
Publishing
LinkedIn has started letting members publish full articles under their own names.
Industry Guides
Parents booking spring and summer hockey camps want ages, dates, ice times and coaches before they pay.
Conversion
On a computer, every page shows a quote form in the sidebar.
Search
Webmaster Tools shows 4.2 beside your main service, and it looks like a steady fourth place.
Analytics
A day camp's online registration runs over four pages, and parents start and stop.
Consulting
A son or daughter joins the family business wanting a new website and ads, while the parents built it on referrals.
Local Marketing
A pub serves food until nine and stays open until midnight, but its listing shows one set of hours.
Hosting
In tax season clients email scanned slips to their bookkeeper, and the large ones bounce back unseen.
Advertising
Clicks rise, enquiries do not, and a carpet cleaner suspects a rival of clicking its ads.
Domains
Addresses ending in .guru, .plumbing and .bike went on sale this week, and older forms reject them.
Web Design
A butcher shop's weekly specials box still lists last month's cuts, because only the designer can change it.
Email Marketing
Password resets and order notices from a WordPress site often arrive from a sender called WordPress.
Compliance
A happy customer passes on a friend's email address, and you want to write.
Social Media
A boosted post is turned down because the poster in its image is mostly writing.
Security
A dealer area asks for a password, yet the PDF price list opens for anyone with its address, and Google has found it.
Ecommerce
Shoppers who once paid a brokerage fee at the door now check where a shop ships from.
Performance
Six embedded video players load their scripts and images before anyone presses play, and on a phone the page stalls.
Technical
Order numbers turn into scientific notation, product codes lose their zeros and accented names become symbols.
Content
A grid of forty sponsor logos, some outdated and some linking nowhere, thanks nobody in particular.
Reputation
A winter restaurant festival fills the room with first-time diners eating a set menu on a busy night.
Industry Guides
People choosing a coworking space want to know what is free now, what it costs, what comes with it and how to see it.
Analytics
Most Google search keywords in Analytics now read not provided, since Google moved its searches to secure connections.
Accessibility
A sale posted as a designed graphic tells a screen reader user only that there is a photo.
Search
Hundreds of listings on the website, and Google shows the home page and a handful of others.
Conversion
Couples engaged over the holidays start writing to venues in January.
Teardowns
A whale watching company takes bookings through a Java applet.
Hosting
Messages leave the office without trouble but sit in the outbox at a hotel or a trade show.
Web Design
In January a calendar view can show an empty month while the next event is six weeks away.
Advertising
An AdWords credit arrives in the mail or with a new hosting account.
Security
A message styled as Facebook's security team says your Page will be removed unless you confirm your login.
Email Marketing
Since December, Gmail shows images automatically by fetching them through Google's own servers.
Local Marketing
People looking for volunteer work in their town want the role, the time it takes and how to start.
Social Media
An accountant's profile shows forty endorsements for public speaking and none for tax planning.
Ecommerce
Version 3.0 of the card security standard took effect on January 1.
Consulting
January is when a small business decides what its website will cost this year.
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West Coast Media Solutions builds, hosts, and maintains websites for businesses across Canada, with the strategy work to go with it.
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