Blog Archives | Page 52 of 60

Christopher Wray

Broadband Price Cuts!

October 26, 2009

Breaking News: RSAWEB ADSL users are receiving big price cuts.

Recent developments in the South African broadband landscape have empowered us to pass on significant broadband savings to our customers. It’s about time.

With immediate effect, we are pleased to announce price cuts on our Super, Premium and Ultra DSL products. Selected packages have been discounted by as much as 60%, which will bring much needed relief to broadband consumers.

Go check out our new broadband pricing structure today.

Existing DSL customers will be billed according to our new pricing starting from next month’s (November) billing cycle.

Christopher Wray

Pimp your wordpress website with plugins

October 19, 2009

WordPress plugins can add awesome functionality to your blog without writing a single line of ‘code’. In this tutorial, we discuss which plugins we find useful and which ones we think can add value to your website.

To find and install any of these plugins, login to your wordpress admin panel and go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’, type in the plugin name below and click ‘Install’ – you may need to configure the plugin thereafter, most of the time this is done in the admin panel.

Gravatars
Gravatars are a great way to bring interactivity to the comments section of your posts. The Gravatars plugin gives your comments personalisation. The Gravatar service is one that users upload a photo once and it will be retrieved if they comment on your site or other sites and the photo will be displayed. Many of your visitors may already have a Gravatar. It’s a simple easy way to identify users and a great way for you to have a profile picture that interacts with your users when you comment.

Google XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps assist search engines by making content easier to find, by generating an XML sitemap that all major search engines can view. Sitemaps give your site additional visibility that other competing websites probably won’t have. Every time you create a new post or page, the sitemap is generated and Google is notified of your new page. This is definitely a must have.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the de facto standard now for evaluating your website’s traffic. This essential tool shows you all sorts of data. Learning to interpret it can take your website from good to great. Installing this plugin means you don’t have to go and fiddle the code manually to add Google Analytics tracking code into your theme.

Google Analytics Dashboard

This nifty dashboard plugin shows you your visitor statistics on your WordPress admin dashboard. This gives you a quick overview to how many visitors you are receiving and other interesting stats without having to login to Google Analytics.

WordPress Caching with Hypercache
Caching can give your users a much faster webpage load time. It allows the server that your WordPress site is installed on to do less work. We have typically seen on busy WordPress sites of drops of up to 80% CPU utilisation on busy servers because caching was not installed, this can make a massive difference to your end users as the page will load significantly faster and their experience will be significantly improved.

Don’t use WP-Cache, but rather WP-Super-Cache or Hyper cache, both are excellent. Hyper cache is easier to install and disrupts existing WordPress sites less.

Akismet Antispam
This antispam plugin works wonders for spammers trying to post rubbish in your comments section. You will need to get a WordPress API key – very simple, its free and all you need to do is insert it into the settings of the Akismet plugin in WordPress. Don’t worry, you can do all this via the WordPress Admin panel.

WordPress Database Backup
A simple plugin that backs up your valuable website. Once installed, you can backup your websites database and download it via FTP from an RSAWEB Web Hosting or get it emailed to an address (not always guaranteed to work due to the large potential size) actually a backup happens whenever you do anything major. It’s always better to be safe.

All in One SEO Pack
This enables your website to have proper ‘Title’ tags – this makes Google like your site more, its more descriptive (see the blue bar at the top of the window? That’s the ‘title bar’) and its essential to have good Search Engine Optimisation.

Subscribe to comments
Also a definite for websites/blogs that want to allow comments on articles. This allows a user to leave a comment and get notified of a reply. Eliminating the need for them to return to check the page to see if someone has replied. A definite must.

Conclusion
We regularly use these plugins and there are many different variants of some of these plugins. They will greatly improve your ability to manage your WordPress site and make it more appealing to the end user. All the plugins above can be installed directly from the WordPress Admin interface by going to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’ and then searching for the name as they appear above.

How is your wordpress experience going? Post a comment about it and tell us which plugins you like. What other plugins do you want to see mentioned in this list?

For WordPress Web Hosting check us out.

Christopher Wray

World Class WordPress Themes

October 15, 2009

Themes allow you to easily extend your WordPress based website or blog and make it look good. The advantages of using a pre-built theme are endless, some of which being time and cost. Choose a theme, upload it, tweak it a bit and you’re ready to roll.

Theme providers like Woothemes and OboxDesign allow you download pre-built themes at a superlow cost and they even allow you to reuse them. Doing design for a traditional website can cost you thousands, but using a pre-built theme will either cost you nothing or for the more sexier themes anything from $30-$100. The three themes below are examples of wordpress templates.

Key points to consider before choosing a theme:

Layout – people are using fairly standard layouts to navigating the web, look at the templates, they work. Dont go for anything outlandish, your users wont wont be able to navigate your site
Flash – websites built exclusively in flash are a disaster. Google and Bing will never find you. What’s the point of building a site if nobody can find it? That’s like having a postal address without a post code.
Clutter – don’t load every wordpress widget you can find, make sure the menu structure works nicely, only use ones that are essential.

Installing your custom template:

Get your theme (pay or not) and download it to your computer. It usually comes as a zip file (that’s fine)
Login to your WordPress Admin
Go to “Appearance” and “Add new themes” (red marker 1)

Click the ‘Upload’ button (marker 2)
Click ‘Browse’ and find your theme file (where you downloaded it to)
Click ‘Install Now’
If you are asked, please enter the FTP connection info and the hostname is your websites name eg. www.blognow.co.za (your FTP account details that came with your hosting account – For RSAWEB Customers –> you can get them from the webhosting section in the MyRSAWEB Control Panel)

It may take 2-3 minutes to complete. Then click ‘Activate’

Your theme is now installed! Check it out by going to your website. The www.Blognow.co.za demo looks like this:

Go and test out the new theme, add some content!

Look out for the next in the series of the “RSAWEB WordPress Tutorial Series 101” – you can follow us on Twitter or signup to receive emails when a new release is announced

Christopher Wray

How to setup your first website using wordpress

October 14, 2009

Creating your first website or blog using WordPress can be quite a daunting task. Most people have in the past chosen to fully outsource their website and most probably still need to. Websites have evolved and many more people are launching their own personal and business blogs. WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging tools that can now easily be installed on your web hosting using the WordPress auto-installer we have developed in our MyRSAWeb control panel.

WordPress while primarily designed as blogging software can be used to build far more than a standard blog. We often see our clients hosting incredibly elaborate websites that have been built on WordPress. The Content Management System at the core of the software allows you to easily update website content and embed rich media like videos and photo’s easily via a web interface.

You can install wordpress manually or you can signup for a business web hosting package with RSAWEB and install WordPress automatically from the MyRSAWEB control panel. This makes creating your site ultra simple without having to FTP or manually edit settings in random files. For the inexperienced user, we recommend this option to get you started.

How to install WordPress with RSAWEB:

Order a Linux Business Hosting package
Wait for the confirmation email from RSAWEB
Login to the www.myrsaweb.co.za control panel
Go to “Webhosting Services” and click on your new website
Click ‘WordPress’, fill in the details and click ‘Install’
Your site should be up and running! Go and check it out http://www.yoursitename.co.za – dont worry it probably wont look like much until you enter in some content.

Now go to http://www.yoursitename.co.za/wp-admin/ and login. You will see the control panel (like below)

Create some new ‘Posts’ and ‘Pages’ and see what it looks like on your site.
Thats it! You now have a wordpress website up and running!

You will probably not be happy with the look of the site as its the basic WordPress default template. WordPress can be themed and skinned to your hearts content to get your website to look the way you want it. The next article in this series will tackle the design aspects of WordPress and help you make your website look amazing without the need for advanced design skills!

Manual WordPress Install
Installing WordPress manually can be a challenge and should only be attempted by those with a understanding of basic web development. If you want to do attempt the manual install yourself this article will help.

Christopher Wray

WordPress Tutorial Series – making the most of your website

October 13, 2009

WordPress is an easy to use website management system and also happens to be one of the most popular blogging platforms available out there.

Over the next few weeks we will be discussing WordPress, how to set up your own blog, as well as posting our thoughts and advice on how to get the most out of WordPress on a budget. Whether creating a large, high volume WordPress site or your average smaller site, the following tutorials will definitely assist you.

Topics include:

Setup – How to setup your first website/blog using WordPress
Design – Easy ways to make your WordPress site look world class with themes
Plugins – Pimp your wordpress website with plugins
WordPress Security – securing your site
Make a success out of your website

This series should put you on the right path to building a successful website and possibly even a sustainable business. WordPress isn’t for everyone, and although RSAWEB uses an alternative, Joomla for our main site due to the finer control it provides, our blog is a WordPress designed site.

That said WordPress is an awesome tool and always worth using.

Please let us know if you would like to see any further topics and subscribe to our twitter feed at http://twitter.com/RSAWEB to receive updates about any new posts. Click on the ‘Get Updates’ and ‘Get Tweets’ icons on the right to follow this series. RSAWEB offers WordPress Hosting with any Linux Business or larger package as an “Easy Install” option.

Christopher Wray

A mobile phone retrospective

August 26, 2009

It’s easy to take for granted how far mobile phone technology has come in such a short space of time. Once a simple communication device, the mobile handset has evolved into a serious business/communications tool that most would feel completely lost without.

RSAWEB TV chats to gadget guru Noel Ross-Gillespie about the progression of mobile technology – the past, present and future.

Christopher Wray

FREE Tickets for District 9 opening night!

August 21, 2009

The whole world is talking about home-grown movie phenomenon District 9. I’m sure you’re just as eager to go see it as we are. Just so happens we’re giving away 15 tickets for opening night next week Friday at Cavendish Classic, Cape Town!

All you have to do to stand a chance of winning one of these tickets is become a fan on our RSAWEB Facebook Fan Page. (to become a fan, all you need to do is login to Facebook, go the RSAWEB Fan Page, and click on the button at the top of the page that says ‘become a fan’)

The winners will be announced next week.

Christopher Wray

New home-grown Twitter innovation

August 19, 2009

White Wall Web has just launched an exciting new home-grown Twitter application called Twitsumé, which allows Twitter users to capture and share their résumés with the world and immediate Twitter networks.

RSAWEB TV caught up with Peter Flynn, MD of White Wall Web to chat about this new innovation:

Christopher Wray

RSAWEB TV is born

August 18, 2009

We’re proud to announce the launch of RSAWEB TV – a video platform that will enable us to tell our story in a more dynamic manner than ever before.

RSAWEB is alive with activity. There are many new exciting products, projects, Team RSAWEB adventures, industry insights, social investment projects, new technologies and other interesting developments we’re itching to talk about – all of which we hope to capture through the RSAWEB TV lens.

You’ll also get to meet the people behind the brand, see our lighter side, and get better feel for what we’re all about.

In our first episode, co-founders Rob Gilmour and Mark Slingsby talk about their preparations for the Cape Epic 2010. Enjoy.

Christopher Wray

The benefits of Virtualisation

July 27, 2009

Virtualisation in the context of hosting has come a long way in recent years. Creating and using VM’s was once a risky business, used only by the brave on low risk projects.

These days, virtualisation is fast becoming an industry standard, as the technology behind it has matured, offering a totally robust and reliable product. Businesses across the globe are already taking advantage of the overwhelming benefits that virtualisation provides:

Better utilisation of resources
Multiple virtual servers / applications can be consolidated onto fewer sets of physical hardware, making better usage of physical resources. Though the virtual environment is ‘shared’ across physical hardware, each virtual server still has its own dedicated physical resources (RAM, CPU etc.).

Reduced risk
The architecture of Virtual environments allows for more redundancies (such as centralized SAN storage) to be built in, significantly reducing down-time in the event of hardware or software failure. Things can fail independently. For instance, one operating system can fail while others running on the same machine continue to function normally.

Virtual servers consist of a single system file, which means you can easily create a backup copy of your entire VM. If you encounter problems, you can replace your existing VM with your backup copy.

Scalability, Flexibility and Availability
The process of ‘installing’ new servers or allocating additional resources to a particular virtual server is now faster and easier to achieve, it can be done in minutes instead of having to do a physical machine upgrade and buying new hardware. We can just ‘turn it on’ by giving your system more RAM, CPU and storage.

Combined with shared storage device, virtualisation enables you to migrate from one physical machine to another without a single second of downtime allowing easier maintenance of physical hardware. Should a server have a hardware issue, the virtual machines can quickly and easily be restarted on another physical set of hardware, minimising any downtime.

It’s Greener
Better utilisation of resources reduces energy consumption in data centre environments. As much as 70% energy consumption can be achieved in most cases.

RSAWEB has extensive experience with virtualisation technology in various different applications. Many of our Dedicated Server & Managed Hosting Server customers are currently utilising virtual platforms to great effect. Give us a shout to find out how virtualisation can benefit you.