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2013 Reviews of the Year

December 30, 2013 By Dan Thornton

As 2013 draws to an end, almost everyone is busy either compiling their reviews of the past 12 months, or publishing predictions and trends for 2014.

Predicting the future is always difficult, even when you spend your life watching an industry closely – it’s easy to get caught up in enthusiasm and shorten the timeline that you might have logically thought, and there are always external factors and events which we don’t know about yet which could mix things up a bit more…

Annual reviews can also lead to an overwhelming amount of information and data, but there’s often inspiration to be found, so we’ve compiled some of the 2013 reviews from the big internet names to share:

Tumblr 2013 Year in Review:

Tumblr has released a big categorised review, including everything from New and Top blogs, to the most popular in Movies, Music, and even Sponsored Posts. Plenty of inspiration and enjoyment to be had, particularly if you’re a fan on animated Gifs.

Pinterest: Top Pins of 2013:

Staying with categorised imagery, Pinterest has also released a ‘top pins’ for 2013, separated in categories such as Home Decor, Art, Design and by country ( UK, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland).

Google: Zeitgeist 2013:

As always, Google has produced a range of videos and data to cover the top searches in 2013. Exploring the data via Google Trends is a bit more useful from a business perspective.

Bing: Review of the Year 2013:

Bing has released the 2013 top searches etc in a more traditional article style via MSN news. Strangely they released the url bingtrends.com which redirects to MSN news for the UK. Either way, the information is there.

Facebook: Stories 2013

Facebook Stories 2013 includes video and the Most Talked About Topics etc near you, as well as personal Year in Review features. Also available in text format for global and US information.

Reddit Top Posts and Stats of 2013:

When you start a look back at 2013 with 56 billion pageviews, 731 million unique visitors and 404,603,286 comments, it’s not been a bad 2013 for Reddit. Also includes top countries, top posts, and highlights from the End of Year awards.

Slideshare Zeitgeist:

SlideShare Zeitgeist 2013 from SlideShare

Instagram has released blog posts covering 2013 Top Moments, and 2013 Top Locations.

And with a day to go, the most popular articles on TheWayoftheWeb.net in 2013 were:

Is Feedburner About to be Closed by Google?
Top social networks: Guide to images for company pages
How to import Posterous to self-hosted WordPress
The 3 big marketing fallacies for 2013 (ironic at this time of year!)

A Movember warning for our clients…

November 7, 2013 By Dan Thornton

We’re sure you’re probably already aware of Movember, the annual moustache-based fundraising event which raises funds and awareness for prostate and testicular cancer and mental health.

It requires volunteers to sport facial hair for the month of November, in return for donations prompted by the attempts to model a “Tom Selleck”, “Burt Reynolds” or for the UK, a “Des Lynam”.

If you’re a client or prospective client, we wanted to warn you that Dan is taking part this year for the first time in a while. And so far it appears his moustache growing and grooming talents have not improved

So if you have any face-to-face meetings or Skype calls etc with us this month, please do not be alarmed.

But please do feel free to be amused, suggest facial hair styling techniques, and donate to a good cause.

WordPress 3.7 released, including Automatic Updates

October 25, 2013 By Dan Thornton

WordPress 3.7 is now available to install for all users. It’s codenamed ‘Basie’ for Count Basie and includes a number of new features, with the most notable one being automatic updates for maintenance and security updates. The full details are available in the Codex on the WordPress.org site.

There are some additional great new features, including:

Better password recommendations, as it will now detect common mistakes which can weaken passwords, such as dates, names, keyboard patterns etc.
Better global support for localised version of WordPress and language files for translations.
Improvements to Search.

Automatic updates: Some benefits, some risks:

Currently the Automatic Update function is purely for maintenance and security updates issued by WordPress, which will mean that most sites are now able to automatically apply these in the background, with additional security checks and safeguards now in place. It’s disabled if you need to use FTP for updates and requires your credentials, or if you’re using SVN or GIT.

So basically the majority of self-hosted WordPress sites will be able to run automatic updates.

Benefits:

The benefit is that a lot of WordPress sites can go weeks, months or years before the administrator will update them to the latest version of WordPress, which is a big security problem. Generally security and maintenance releases are tackling exploits which can or have been used maliciously, so by not updating regularly, you’re leaving a big invitation to anyone attacking WordPress installs, particularly when they are probing sites en masse.

If you’re using a non-English install, Language Packs should also be automatically updated.

Currently, automatic updates won’t be enabled for major releases, themes or plugins, so those updates will still need to be enabled manually. If you wish, you can enable automatic theme and plugin updates with some code changes.

Risks:

There are some issues which cause us some concern regarding automatic updates.

There is no way to turn these on, or off, without editing code in your wp-config.php file, which not everyone is comfortable doing (Although we’d urge anyone to backup everything properly, or to create a test site, and then have a go).
Security and Maintenance patches may cause conflicts with existing themes and plugins. In addition, other fixes may sometimes be included in these releases.
Lack of scheduling for updates – given the potential for disruption with any update, we make sure we implement them at times which are less critical for our clients, particularly with regards to eCommerce etc. With automatic updates running in the background, you won’t know when your site will be updated, and have no way to direct it to be at a convenient time. For instance Basie appeared late on Thursday night UK time, so potentially we wouldn’t discover any conflicts until starting work Friday morning.

Our recommendation:

For non-business critical WordPress sites, we’d suggest that you upgrade to WordPress 3.7 and enjoy the automatic updates. Certainly I’ve updated my personal site straight away to test and explore Basie and check how it all works.

The potential risks for most sites from automatic updates are probably much less than the risk of being exploited for running a massively out of date WordPress install.

For anything relating to business, including all our client sites, we’ll be disabling automatic updating for the following reasons.

We already monitor and quickly update WordPress versions, themes and plugins upon releases and testing to confirm they won’t break any existing sites or functionality.
We need to ensure that any new versions do not impact on increasingly complex functionality, such as eCommerce platforms.
And we need to make sure that when we’re updating business critical sites, we’re doing it at a time when there is minimal disruption in the event of any problems. Generally updates go fine, take a few seconds, and the site is back. And if there are any problems, we can always roll back straight away to the backup, but we’d rather keep any disruption away from peak business hours.

If you do want to disable automatic updates, then the details are included in this comprehensive guide to Automatic Core Updates by Dion Hulse. The simplest way to disable it is to add define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true ); to your wp-config.php file

A big week for celebrations…

October 1, 2013 By Dan Thornton

There are a few different reasons for us to be celebrating this week.

(Not us): The GNU system celebrated 30 years at the weekend, and has resulted in tens of millions of free software users worldwide, with free software also powering more than 95% of the world’s supercomputers and the majority of web servers.
(Us): This week marks the 3 years since I started freelancing. Despite some big ups and downs, within a short space of time I’d decided working for myself was what I wanted to do for the foreseeable future, and that hasn’t changed.
(Us): It’s also 6 months since TheWayoftheWeb Ltd was formerly established as a business, and my fellow Director and business partner Sean Ible joined the company, which has led to major improvements in everything we do.
(Not Us): Family is extremely important to both Sean and myself, so as my parents have reasons to celebrate at the moment, I wanted to publicly mention how vital they’ve been in everything I’ve ever achieved.
(Not Us): Google turned 15 last week – and unveiled various changes and projects, some of which are good for everyone, and some of which have changed the way SEO will need to be implemented. Proof that our work is a journey of constant evolution and change, which keeps us enthusiastic and learning all the time!

It seems like a good moment to thank friends, family, clients, contacts and our networks of specialists for all their help, support, hard work and encouragement so far, and hopefully we’ll continue to pay back their faith in us by delivering even better work in the future….

TheWayoftheWeb quoted in Econsultancy article on SEO

September 25, 2013 By Dan Thornton

It’s always nice to be able to contribute to respected websites and publications, particularly when it means I’m quoted alongside some people who I respect a lot in the marketing and search engine optimisation world, such as Rishi Lakhani, for example.

The article is a response to Google encrypting even more organic search queries, and features responses by myself alongside Rishi, Andy Heaps, Neil Yeomans and Kevin Gibbons. It’s well worth reading for both the insights in the article and also some good contributions in the comments regarding something which has been seen as a bit of a bombshell for the SEO industry, despite signs it was coming for a long time.

I won’t quote from it too much, but there was one answer I gave which I intend to expand on in a future article:

Could it be good for SEOs, in that it makes it harder for amateurs?

It won’t massively affect larger agencies and companies who can afford the additional time and cost.

But it will damage small businesses, including agencies, who now have an additional challenge to building their businesses, and I think eventually this will hurt both search results and indirectly impact on search usage, as the incumbents for any term become much more entrenched.

I don’t believe making search engine optimisation less accessible is a good thing – the majority of SEO outsourcing isn’t a question of intelligence, but generally one of training, resource and cost, and this continues that trend. I don’t believe that’s good for small businesses in particular, I don’t believe it’s good for consumers who have their choice limited, and I don’t believe it’s good for Google if it is perceived to be closed to all but the big players who can afford enterprise tools.

We work with a wide range of clients, from individual consultants and small businesses to large global manufacturers, and there are great things about working with each size and type of company. The idea that cost will become a restriction to the entry level for quality SEO measurement isn’t a pleasant one.