Category Archives: Websites

Website Showcase – Shillington Village Hub

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We were tasked with consolidating a number of existing Shillington web sites into a centralised platform, where everything could be accessed from a single “hub” site.

This project has been in discussion since around 2021 and much planning and thought has gone into it, as well as securing funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The new web sites have taken three existing web sites for Shillington Village, Shillington History Society, and All Saints’ Church, as well as creating one whole new site and a gateway portal to group them together.

The main Hub site also provides links to other Village organisations as well as Shillington Lower School. These sites were not built out by us and are just linked.

All sites are provided with SSL, SEO, backup and hosted reliably by Frantik.

Training for this project was also provided to key players working on the project.

Please feel free to take a look, any feedback provided helpful and appreciated.

Shillington Village Hub front page

You may view the web site at www.shillington-hub.org.uk

The best WordPress Plugins for your Site!

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WordPress Plugins

We last posted about WordPress Plugins here in 2017 so it’s time to do a refresher.

This is great if you’re setting up a site for the first time, and want to have everything safe and secure so you can maintain your site worry-free.

  1. Askimet Anti-Spam – This is the GOAT of all plugins. Something you should have enabled on any WP site to prevent unecessary spam. If anything, it’s the first plugin you should have activated to protect your site from the get-go!
  2. JetPack – another out the box must have. Additional layer of security for your site.
  3. Classic Editor – If you’re not a fan of the new style Gutenburg and prefer editing your posts and pages using the TinyMCE editor, this is what you’re looking for.
  4. Contact Form 7 – a simple and no frills contact form for your site with CAPTCHA integration. On every site we configure we implement this over the standard out the box contact form. Reduce spam, and stay secure.
  5. Really Simple SSL – activate SSL on your site in the simplest way possible. This does require your site to have a valid SSL certificate applied, or active Let’s Encrypt functionality (all our new hosting packages feature this out the box).
  6. Site Kit by Google – great new plugin developed by Google to get your site linked in to Analytics, AdSense, and Search Console. Improving by the day with new features and functionality.
  7. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore – nothing worse than making changes to your site and / or it getting hacked and you not having a backup. Schedule automated backups for your site’s database and files on a regular basis.

There are several others that we use, so if you would like to know more please do get in touch or comment on this post 🙂

If you would like help getting these setup and working on your own site, get in touch with us through our contact form.

WebSite Showcase – Club 85 revamp

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We have recently had the pleasure of taking on the revamp of the Club 85 music venue web site. This project has been in the pipeline for a while and has taken a lot of planning. The site is built upon WordPress which is a very versatile platform that has now moved on from the web blog platform it started out as. The old web site was based solely around the gig calendar so this was the plan for the new one.

We have utilised a platform provided by ModernTribe called Events Calendar which is an all-in-one calendar and ticketing solution to allow the venue the full scope of end to end scheduling and ticket sales. Due to Covid-19 the calendar is looking a little bare right now but will eventually be populated.

The website itself is still waiting on a colour scheme and logo which will be coming soon but for the time being the main aim was to go live with a web site and take ownership of the domain which we now have. This will allow the management to focus on bookings and day to day business.

The contact form has been configured to allow easy contact for bookings and management respectively.

The image gallery is currently linked to the club’s Instagram account but will eventually be transitioned into a separate gallery where guest photographers can upload their own images.

Simplicity was key for the brief

You can visit the new site at the usual address: www.club-85.co.uk

Resolved: WordPress redirect issue on multi-site config

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We recently resolved an issue that we couldn’t quite resolve easily so thought we’d share the solution.

Sometimes you just have to go back to basics and start from the beginning.

On one of the sites we host, WordPress is configured with multi-site. There was one domain in use for the site and another one parked, that we wanted to point to the same document root. We had the parked domain set to use the WordPress root of the existing site thinking that should just load, but instead we were greeted with a Registration error. Registration for the site was disabled anyway, but as you were hitting the blog from another domain, the blog didn’t know what to do with it.

After much head scratching and searching, and going round in circles with multi-site help documents, it wasn’t that at all.

We needed to add one line of code to our WordPress config file – “noblog”

define( 'NOBLOGREDIRECT', 'http://www.fightify.com' );

Obviously, replace with the domain of your main blog. The result of this is, that if you hit your site from www.site1.com you will no longer get a signup page error, but the front page of your www.site2.com domain.

And in case you’re also wondering, as off WordPress 4.5 you don’t need any additional plugin for multi-site domain mapping – see here

Top WordPress Plugins you must Have!

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This is a much discussed subject but we wanted to share the must have plugins you definitely need to install having first installed WordPress.

Having a whole site running off WP is a much debated topic but the ease of use and endless addons you can install to get your site to do pretty much whatever you like, is just one of the reasons why WP is one of the most used off the shelf content management systems currently available.

  1. NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

Everyone has either a Twitter or Facebook account and the easiest way to get your blog post shared on either is by using this plugin. Yes WP does it natively, no it’s not the greatest. We use this plugin on every WP site we configure and it’s ease of use and simplicity is why it’s on our list. PS. It does share to so many other websites too…

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpshare

2. Shareaholic

Everyone loves to share content. This plugin adds cool share buttons to your blog posts and also allows you to monetize your content (optional). We’re mainly including it here due to the buttons, and the ability to customize and use URL shorteners to track click throughs.

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpbuttons

3. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore

We’re surprised that WP doesn’t have native backup tools, allowing you to backup to external cloud storage or FTP sites. We’re sure it’ll come in future updates but for now, this nifty plugin does the trick. The free option gives you the ability to schedule backups to remote storage with completion/failure notifications. A must to ensure that your site’s files and database are backed up safe and sound!

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpbackup

4. Disqus

WordPress’s built in comment system is OK, but not brilliant. It works in the most part but Disqus has been doing a better job of it for a long time. It allows better customization and many more configuration options than included with the basic WP install.

Link:  http://go.frantik.it/wpcomments

5. Askimet

Everyone hates spam, especially spam comments. We’re sure you’ve been on a site with random comments unrelated to the original post. With this installed that should reduce the amount of spam comments and allow you to better moderate comments posted to your site. This is included by default with the WordPress.com sites but if you’re setting up a custom install make sure to activate it!

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpnospam

6. JetPack

Advanced stats, sharing, and a whole load more. Most of the stuff you need to pay to get the extra features but we just like it for the additional stats. It adds this to the Dashboard and admin bar when an admin is logged in. Worth having for that alone we think.

Again, if you have a site hosted via Wordpres.com then this is included by default, but if you’re self hosting you’ll need to add it. We still think it’s worth installing.

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpjet