Blogging Along

If you would like to change the height of your message box area using the WordPress plug in “Contact form 7” it’s simple. The line in bold below has 2 numbers at the end of the code inside a closed square bracket 31/3. 31 is the width and the 3 is the height.

Change these amounts to reflect what width and height you’d like your message section of form to be. This also works for other fields if required.

On the same plug-in adding a “*” after text in the name section makes it a required field and can be added to any field to implement.

<p>Your Name (required)<br />
[text* your-name] </p>

<p>Your Email (required)<br />
[email* your-email] </p>

<p>Subject<br />
[text* your-subject] </p>

<p>Your Message<br />

[textarea your-message 40x10]

</p>

<p>[submit “Send”]</p>

Need website Advice? Give me a call 01482 247123 quoting this site.

Vebra helps customers find property that is for sale and rent in the UK. By adding properties visitors can search for property and Estate Agents with ease.

What a lot of Estate Agents don’t realise is as soon as you ask your website developer to add a feed from Vebra, you stop your website getting credit from search engines. The feed isn’t seen as content on your website and Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo know this and isn’t great for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Here’s a test you can do just to prove what I’m saying is correct.

In Google search for the Phrase “Your company name 4 bedroom houses” e.g. browns property agents 4 bedroom houses

You’ll find it comes back with many websites with property on but NOT yours.

Sites such as:

• findaproperty.com
• rightmove.co.uk
• zoopla.co.uk
• primelocation.com
• homesandproperty.co.uk

When entering all the property details into Vebra’s system it goes on many sites such as RightMove.com and if embedded it will appear on your own site in what’s called an iframe.  As mentioned above this isn’t seen by Search Engines on your site only Right Move.

When people search for property and maybe your company name they will more than likely (if the company uses Vebra) end up on Vebra or Right Move etc amongst other estate agents listings and potentially going with another agent.

Here’s a good example of a site that does’nt rely on Vebra. Search again like the above example but with a company that doesn’r rely on Vebra.

Plum Properties 4 bedroom houses as you can see in the results the company website is top of the search engine and has the visitors full attention. Not listed with other agents.

I’m not saying DONT use Vebra just don’t completly hand over your websites content over to a simple feed from them add property to your own like Plum do.

Need Advice? Give me a call 01482 247123 quoting this site.

If you have installed Word Press and get the message “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” because you have created a link for a subscriber to login. If a subscriber tries and login again using the link they will get the error mesage “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

Look at the file menu.php in the folder /wp-admin/ and edit one of the last lines in the file

wp_die( __(‘You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page..’) );

Replace the text and maybe add a link to help the user back to the main part they subscribed to the below.

wp_die( __(‘You are already logged in, please visit the <a href=”http://website-address.co.uk/members-area/” title=”members area” >Members Area</a> to see the content.’) );

Hope this helps and is a quick fix to a simple problem!

I have collected 150+ Geo & service/product domains besides the 500+ Hull domains I have like BristolGyms.co.uk and the others below.

• CardiffLocksmiths.co.uk
• CardiffNetworking.co.uk
• Edinburgh-SkipHire.co.uk
• BradfordNetworking.co.uk
• BelfastAccountants.co.uk
• LincolnDoors.co.uk
• LincolnEstateAgent.co.uk
• LincolnFencing.co.uk
• LincolnGarages.co.uk
• LincolnGyms.co.uk
• LincolnLighting.co.uk
• LincolnOpticians.co.uk
• LiverpoolNetworking.co.uk
• PlymouthNetworking.co.uk
• SheffieldAdvertising.co.uk
• SheffieldCleaners.co.uk
• EdinburghNetworking.co.uk

A guy contacted me trying to sell a .com domain he had registered only 30 days ago and I had the .co.uk version. By the sounds of things he has blasted emails out to all local businesses suggesting they make an offer for the domain.

Doing it they way he has, has probably pissed a lot of businesses off and has put a lot of brick walls up in front of them if I ever wanted to offer my domains to them. Although I do make money from them monthly it was nice to feel I could at some point offer them for sale to local businesses.

I’m just on a mission to get all of my geo domains live and have decided not to go down the WordPress route for them all to save time and resources – At the moment the sites live generate a nice bit and once all live, indexed and have visitors I think £1k+ a month would be ideal sum to start at (fingers crossed). It would help if the revenue increased a bit soon, as renewals come in batches and can be £100+ a pop.

I have had a few calls regarding the geo domains and would rather rent them out than sell out right! So I’d best build them quick and stack em high!

UPDATE

I was called in December 2010 by a local Aerial fitter who wanted a Hull, Goole, Scunthorpe etc numbers from my Hull VoIP website which diverted to his mobile. I got him setup with a Hull number and made my HullAerials.co.uk reflect his new number to drive traffic to him.

I can see he’s had a fair few calls but think it will be in the first few weeks of 2011 he’ll see more calls filter through. I will be renting the site out to him at just £25 per month and will add content weekly to help with rankings.

I’ve been using WordPress for quite a while now and upgrading seems second nature TBH. I’m quite lucky all my upgrades have gone swimming well. WordPress is a nice CMS to setup, upgrade and keep tip top but agreed your first time can be a bit “now what”.

Just recently I’ve been getting an upgrade error in WordPress on one of my budget Blue Host servers used for mini sites when attempting to auto upgrade with WordPress’s built-in upgrade option. To version 2.8.5

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2354671 bytes) in /home6/main-domain/public_html/domain-name-co/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331

Basically I think the server is throttled and WordPress kicks off because of it.

Few ways to get round it.

1. Deactivate all plug-ins and retry the built-in WordPress upgrade.
2. Download this plug-in “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” and try this method. With the upgrade happening in small bites the server isn’t using as much memory I guess.

Hope one of them works for you but a few other plugins I’d suggest to install to safe guard your WordPress install are

1. WordPress Database Backup run before an upgrade and schedule to run every day.
2. Limit Login Attempts which blocks out people who are persistant in trying to guess your login details and mess things up for you.

Keep backed up, updated, be careful of rouge theme’s with dodgy coding and all should be fine!