What’s happening?
This month GOOP’s owners Amanda and Karl, along with our senior web developer, visited all our websites in one place, at one time! All our websites live on dedicated servers in a state-of-the-art facility in Brisbane. The facility where our servers are housed is highly secure and constantly monitored. The photos don’t do it justice and the sound inside was incredible – you had to shout to be heard over the whirring of the computer fans and air-conditioning. Our server monitoring company took us on a tour and the photo on the left with Amanda is where our dedicated servers live – behind the red metal mesh! We monitor our servers in-house at GOOP in Geelong too, but our server monitoring company is also capable of running updates on our servers and stays up-to-date with the latest server technology so we can focus on building the websites. The GOOP trio enjoyed their visit and your websites said to say hello from Brisbane!
GOOP featured sites
New site – Geelong Football Club Past Players and Officials Club Inc
The Geelong Football Club is an important part of our community today and has been throughout AFL and the GFC’s history. It’s important that players have support in the community once they retire from their football career. Whether it’s feeling welcome on match days and watching the game with other past players or attending social events so they can stay in touch, this is what the Geelong Football Club Past Players and Officials Club Inc is all about. Their new WordPress website is designed to further bring together past players and provide a central location for them to refer to for upcoming events and relevant information. We added an events plugin which allows the Club to add events as they arise. As the Club starts adding news items to their news page, they will be able to categorise the individual articles into “past events”, “player profiles” or “where are they now?”. It was a pleasure working with the team from Geelong Football Club Past Players and Officials Club Inc and we love the traditional blue and white branding which reflects their position as part of the GFC community.
Upgraded site – Forest Logging
Forest Logging is a highly-reputable tree felling company operating throughout NSW. One of the focuses of the company is tree thinning to encourage forest regeneration. Of course the logs do not go to waste and are sold to wood mills for processing and then production into many of the common wooden items we use today, including furniture and house frames. Forest Logging also keeps a portion of the felled trees and produces quality bulk firewood supplies available from their purpose-built wood yard in Balranald. The company also specialises in River Red Gum plantations.
We upgraded their website to a responsive design by migrating their existing data with us to WordPress and then tweaking and testing how the design works while freshening up the look and feel.
GOOP client benefits
As your web developer in Geelong, we constantly monitor how Google’s search works, what’s new with Google Analytics and how best to use this tool to improve the performance of your website, how you can write more effective blog posts on your website and much more. We don’t just monitor these things for our own benefit, but to educate you so you can improve your own online marketing plans and processes. We certainly consider our comprehensive support service to be a major benefit to our clients.
Something that has come to light is the types of referral sources popping into our clients’ Google Analytics data and whether some of them are harmful or not. A referral source which you might’ve seen popping into your list of referral sources is “semalt.com”.
We have been endeavouring to block semalt.com and others such as “simple-share-buttons.com” and “doradar.com” from appearing in your Google Analytics data. These types of sites have a habit of distorting the results you receive in your Analytics. The reason why these websites insert themselves into your Analytics as a referral source is debatable, but it appears at this point in time that it is not malicious. The purpose appears to be an attempt by these site to spam you via your Analytics in the hope that you will visit their site and then use their services.
From our end, blocking these sites on a server-wide basis is not feasible due to the resources it consumes and the potential of slowing down of our servers. You can block these spammy referrer links on an individual basis in your own Analytics accounts by doing the following: Admin > All Website Data > Filters. Please note this is also not foolproof because the people behind these sites can simply change the domain URL slightly, i.e. semalt.com becomes semalt.semalt.com. We will continue to look into this for you, but it would appear there isn’t a lot we can do at this stage and are we are not concerned about safety. A good reminder out of this is to never click on links if they look dodgy or you’re not really sure where they lead – the same principle applies in emails too.
Don’t forget Google’s April 21 deadline for non-responsive websites is creeping closer. If your website is not responsive or you’re not sure what this means, please contact us as a priority and avoid the full brunt of this major change. That’s all from us this month!