Ever Been Asked to Send a High Resolution Image?

Sometimes a printer, graphic designer or website developer will ask you to send a photo as a high resolution file. Great quality photos will give your project a professional appearance. Conversely, poor-quality images will reflect negatively on the project's overall look.

The quality of an image depends on two things

1. The original quality
2. How it is transferred

Original Quality

One of the most common questions we get asked about image quality for websites is if photos taken on mobile phones are going to be good enough quality. The short answer is yes, but there are a two things to consider.

1. Mobile vs Digital Camera
2. Lighting, Focus and Framing

Mobile vs Digital Camera

Even though a mobile camera can produce a good enough quality photo for a professional looking website, print project or newsletter, a digital camera, with a good photographer, is likely to produce a better photo. Digital cameras have more control over things like aperture, shutter speed and focus. A good camera, in a professional photographer’s hands, will almost always get a better photo than one taken by an enthusiast on a mobile phone.

Lighting, Focus and Framing

Luck might produce a great photo from a mobile camera, but planning, preparation and good photography skills are more likely to produce a photo that is feature image worthy. A blurred photo or one that has a messy background or a photo where the main subject is poorly lit, does not make a good image for your project, regardless of what camera it was taken with.

How it is Transferred

Often not much thought is given to how an image is transferred to your graphic designer, printer or website developer, yet this can significantly impact on the images fitness for purpose.

The reason why we come across poor quality transfer of photos is because mobile phone cameras are ubiquitous – they are universal and ever-present. Almost everyone has a mobile phone and all mobile phones have cameras. We’re all use to uploading our photos, from our phones, to Facebook, Instagram or texting or adding them to our What’s App chat. Many of us don’t know how to upload our photos to our desktop computers. But that is the first step in getting photos to your designer.

What Not To Do

Here’s several things we commonly come across that we ask you not to do

1. Texting photos
2. Sending photos via email or What’s App via the phone
3. Sending photos via email from a desktop that were previously transferred via phone
4. Taking screenshots
5. Downloading from Facebook
6. Cropping or manipulating the image
7. Sending the image as a pasted image in a Word document

What To Do

OK, so now we’ve covered off what not to do, where does that leave you?

Here’s a few tips that will hopefully help.

Uploading Photos to a Desktop

Uploading photos and managing image files on our computer might very well become a lost art. But if you’re responsible for starting or maintaining an image library for your business or organisation, this skill set is well worth having.

The old fashioned way of uploading a photo to your desktop (or laptop) computer was to connect a cable to your phone and with the two devices connected, the photo is transferred across. This may still be the best way for you, depending on your circumstances. Here's a YouTube video tutorial on how to upload your photos from an andoid phone to a PC or laptop.

Most often the method used now will be via AirDrop (iPhone / Mac) or Nearby Share or File Sharing (Android / PC).

You’ll need to be familiar with Wi-Fi or Blutooth and your own device and computer to master this.

Uploading your photo, taken on your phone, or with a digital camera, directly to your desktop or laptop computer will not compress the image. The photo will maintain its original size and resolution 😁.

From Desktop to Designer

Once you’ve got the image on your desktop or laptop, you can now email it (from the computer not from a phone) to your designer. If you feel it is too big for email, or there are too many images to transfer, consider using We Transfer.

We Transfer

We Transfer is free to use. You do not need to create an account or have a log in and password (although this is an option). If you’d like to send files without creating an account, choose the “I just want to send files” option.

Why Authenticate Your Email or Authenticate Your Domain?

Have you received a notification from MailChimp or your bulk email marketing platform to authenticate your domain?

Google is strengthening its rules and enforcing tighter anti-spam requirements. As Google represents 30% of emails sent worldwide, bulk email marketing platforms, like MailChimp, need to ensure they are complying with Google’s new rules.

MailChimp is responding to Google’s new rules and asking you to authenticate your domain so that the emails you send will land in a person’s inbox (or at the very least their updates or others folder) and not the spam or junk folder.

What is Authentication of Your Domain?

Authentication is a way to prove the emails sent from your domain are legitimate and not fraudulent. This helps improve deliverability and prevents your emails from being marked as spam.

In other words, authenticating a domain helps ensure your campaigns actually make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.

Free Email Addresses

You can’t authenticate an email address that is not associated with a domain that you own, this includes free emails such as @gmail or @yahoo or @outlook.

If you are using a free email address for sending emails from MailChimp, MailerLite or other bulk sending software you could be receiving messages that you need to purchase a domain name email and authenticate it.

The rules are tightening around using free email addresses for business. Slowly but surely the ability to use free emails for email marketing is likely to be restricted, unsupported and eventually phased out altogether.

If you’re unsure what a domain name email is, how to get one and what it will cost, read our article about domain name emails here.

WordPress and Websites

Many websites and WordPress sites will also be impacted by the new Google anti-spam rules, especially those with contact forms, booking forms and e-commerce sites.

If users fill in a form or buy a product they may not receive a verification or confirmation email as Google may flag it as spam. For some transactions, these confirmation emails are very important. You as the business owner may also not receive notification that someone has made a booking or purchased a product – as the notification email could be marked as spam - unless you are regularly checking your spam folder you won’t see it. Not good for business as you may have customers who you are inadvertently ignoring 🥴.

Having your domain authenticated is quite techy and will most likely require a conversation with your website developer.

If you are using a free email address (eg. @gmail or @outlook) as your receiving email address in WordPress, you will not be able to authenticate this, and therefore you run the risk of your emails ending up in the spam folder. Time to upgrade.

Bulk Senders

Google’s new anti-spam rules will particularly impact senders with lists of over 5,000 subscribers.

However, email authentication is best practice and should be set up to maintain good deliverability — even if you’re not a bulk sender.

How to Authenticate Your Domain

There can be several steps to authenticating your domain, depending on the platform or software you wish to authenticate it with and how seriously you want to get into it.

At its simplest the process is a matter of

• adding a CNAME record
• adding a TXT record

to your domain’s DNS record

Website owners are likely going to need a few more techy things done (like DKIM and SMTP records).

It can seem overwhelming if you've never come across this stuff before.

Your domain name registrar, however, will not be overwhelmed by this. This is their bread and butter and they will understand it.

Examples of domain name registrars are Go Daddy, Crazy Domains and Web Central.

Our advice is to screenshot and copy and paste the instructions from MailChimp, WordPress or whatever platform that has requested authentication, and send it to your domain name registrar.

The screenshot will give context to the job request and cover all the instructions. Copying and pasting any snippet of code can ensure the zeros are not confused with the letter O and the number 1 is not confused with the letter l. That's why we recommend sending a screenshot and copying any code and sending both of these to your domain name registrar.

MailChimp Newsletter Course

Learn how to upload your list and create your e-newsletter in MailChimp. Especially suitable for business-to-business and not-for-profits.

Step-by-step videos with screenshots, examples, explanations and demonstrations.

Google Analytics - Remove Your IP Address

In Google Analytics you can remove your own IP address from being recorded. This is useful if you visit your website a lot. If you, or your team members go to your website a lot to edit and update it, or visit it for other reasons, you’ll want to remove your, and their, IP addresses.

If removing your, and your team members IP addresses is important to your analytics, you’ll need to first get your IP address. You can do this at What Is My IP Address.

Copy your IP address for pasting into the correct field later on.

Log into Google Analytics

With your IP address copied, log into your Google Analytics account. Navigate to Admin (the cogwheel bottom left) and choose the Property Column. 4th down is Data Streams. Click on this.

Here you should see the notification confirming your site has been receiving traffic in the past 48 hours.

If you do not see this, the tag may either not be installed or may not working. You’ll need to trouble-shoot that issue.

If you do see that traffic has been successfully received in the past 48 hours click on the reveal arrow on the right. This opens the Web stream details window.

You may need to be patient with the right reveal arrows - they can sometimes take a little time to open up.

Web Stream Details

This has 3 main sections

1. Stream details
2. Events
3. Google Tag

You’ll be pleased to know we are ignoring most of this and keeping the settings to their default values. However, we will explore Configure tag settings which is in the 3rd section, Google Tag.

Click on the reveal arrow that is on the right hand side of the Configure Tag settings section.

In the settings section, click on the light blue button Show all. There are 8 rows in this section. The 5th row down is Define internal traffic. Click on the reveal arrow that is on the right hand side of this row to create a new rule.

IP Address – Create Rule

1. Add a name for the IP address (best to name it with the person’s name and device)
2. Keep it to the internal default value
3. Change it to IP address equals
4. Paste in the IP address
5. Click on the blue Create button (top right)

PS - you may need to add a “/32” at then end of the IP address so that it meets CIDR notation requirements (it’s a very odd instruction I know – but it worked for me).

When Finished

• Close the internal traffic section window by clicking on the “X” top left
• Close the Google tag section window by clicking on the “X” top left
• Close the Web stream details section window by clicking on the “X” top left

IP Address – Activate Rule

Click on Data Settings via the left hand side navigation menu. This opens up 4 options. Choose the 3rd option Data Filters. Click on the reveal arrow that is on the right hand side of the data filters row.

• Change the filter state from Testing to Active
• Click on the blue Save button (top right)
• Click on Activate filter

A message will come up suggesting you test it before making it active. If you want to come back in a few weeks and do this, once it is tested, by all means do. But most clients I know just want to get the job done here and now.

When finished the Data filters screen will be the active one. Job done - you can now log out of Google Analytics.

Why the Bubble?

If you don't remove your IP address from Google Analytics you might be living in a bubble - thinking your website is getting lots of visitors. But those visitors may be you! Removing your own IP address from your Google Analytics is recommended.

SEO Course

A practical, step-by-step video course with screenshots, examples, explanations and demonstrations. Carefully created and produced video tutorials for your learning.

Especially suitable for e-commerce sites or multi-page websites.

Take action on your Google Analytics account

If you’re a business with a legacy (i.e. older than 2 years) Google Analytics account you are likely receiving emails from Google Analytics telling you to take action.

In this situation you either need to create your G4 Google account if you haven’t already or set up the G4 Google account to get the most out of the features it offers.

Many small businesses and marketing staff are struggling to understand what needs to be done and why.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for the basic setup

Our guidance is for those business who want their analytics account to tell them

• How many visitors the website is getting
• Where the visitors are coming from (eg. organic search, paid ads or socials)
• How long the website visitors are spending on the site
• What pages are the most popular

This article is not good advice for those businesses who wish to use analytics for more advanced measuring, for example

• Linking to Google Ads
• Defining Audiences
• Measuring Conversions

Therefore this article is not recommended for e-commerce shops, businesses with advanced marketing funnels and other sophisticated websites.

Log into Google Analytics

• Log into your Google Analytics Account
• Navigate to the G4 Property

Check Your Tag is Installed

Check you are receiving data, that is, that your website successfully has the Google Analytics tag installed and analytics is seeing and recording visits to your website. To check this, the graph on the dashboard should not be a flat line – it should show you that users are coming to your site, as in the graph below.

If it is a flat line, the tag is either not installed or not working. Check out Google’s article and video on how to get this done.

Set up G4 Property

Once you’re confident your G4 property is collecting data, you can take the next step to complete the G4 set up.

• Click on the red “Complete setup” button at the top right

If you don’t see a red button, navigate to the set up assistant via Admin (cogwheel bottom left) and choose the Property Column.

This should get you to the set up assistant. Here you are likely to see a green bar with 0/7 marked complete.

In this blog article we will be showing you how to:

• Change the default data retention from 2 months to 14 months
• Mark everything as complete

By marking everything as complete you'll still be able to view the important data, such as how many visitors your website is getting and where they are coming from.

As an optional extra you may wish to remove your own IP address, which we show you how to do in this article.

Data Retention to 14 months

Click on Data Settings via the left hand side navigation menu. This opens up 4 options. Choose the 2nd option Data Retention.

• Change the option from 2 months to 14 months
• Keep reset user data on new activity to default on
• Click on the blue Save button

When Finished with Data retention, go back to the Setup assistant, via the left hand side menu.

Set / Check Time Zone

Click on Property Settings via the left hand side navigation menu. Check the time zone settings are right for your location.

When Finished with Data retention, go back to the Setup assistant, via the left hand side menu.

Set up Assistant - Mark as Complete

The Set up Assistant has 4 main sections

1. Data collection
2. Property Settings
3. Google Ads
4. Advanced setup (optional)

We’ll be marking these as complete.

Data Collection

Go to the Data Collection section. Hover over the reveal arrow to the right of Collect website and app data and click on Actions. If you are confident analytics is collecting data from your website, mark as complete.

If you want to take a peek, click on manage data streams. Here you should see the notification confirming your site has been receiving traffic in the past 48 hours. If you do not see this, the tag may either not be installed or may not working. You’ll need to trouble-shoot that issue as a priority as. See the section above - Check Your Tag is Installed.

If you took a peek, navigate back to the set up assistant via the left hand side menu and now mark this as complete.

Property Settings

• Turn on Google signals – mark as complete
• Set up conversions – mark as complete
• Define audiences – mark as complete

Google Ads

• Link to Google Ads – mark as complete
• Bid on G4 conversions – mark as complete
• Target ads to G4 audiences – mark as complete

Advanced Setup

Don’t worry about it – keep everything as default.

The green bar will now show as 7/7 marked complete!

SEO Course

A practical, step-by-step video course with screenshots, examples, explanations and demonstrations. Carefully created and produced video tutorials for your learning.

Especially suitable for e-commerce sites or multi-page websites.

Lost an email? It might not be gone—it’s just hiding!

Sometimes important emails sneak off into folders like Updates, Promotions, or even Other. Here’s an article to help you track them down.

Types of emails that go missing

The types of emails that sneak off into these folder are

• forgot password email
• verification code
• course link
• re-set WordPress password
• Payment notifications
• Newsletters from your favourite networks
• Email delivery failed notifications

Gmail and Outlook

Email hosts, such as Gmail and Outlook are constantly changing their algorithms to deliver you a better inbox. They’re trying to avoid sending spam to your inbox and in doing so, emails you want to receive may also be prevented from getting there.

Gmail and Outlook have created folders or tabs in addition to their primary inbox.

If you're reading your emails on a mobile you may not have discovered a bunch of other folders that Gmail and Outlook use. Even if you are on a laptop or desktop, if these folders have not been set up for viewing, they could be missed.

In Outlook the folders are called

• Focussed
• Other
• Clutter
• Spam

In Gmail the folders are called

• Inbox
• Social
• Promotions
• Updates
• Junk

So where do the password and verification emails end up?

• Inbox – rarely
• Spam / Junk – occasionally
• Updates / Other – almost always

Gmail Updates Folder

Find out how to set up and view your folders in Gmail.

Check your spam or junk folder, as well as your inbox, for these emails. However, in most cases the email ends up in the Updates folder (Gmail) or Other folder (Outlook). Many people are unaware these folders even exist and therefore are not checking them to see if that is where the email for the password reset has been sent.

Other Things to Try

Here's two other things to try

• Use the search bar—type the sender’s name or a keyword from the email.
• Double check the email address you are using. Most of us have more than one email address. A work email address, a home one and perhaps one from 5 years ago. Check you are using the right email address when you are requesting a reset password link.

What to do once you've found the email

Here's a few things to consider when you do find the email.

• Once you find it, drag it into your main inbox so future emails land in the right spot.
• Have a go at whitelisting, or creating a rule that tells your email platform to send it to your inbox.
• Add the sender to your contacts.

Passwords

If you’re asking for a reset password link it may indicate you don’t have a reliable method for storing, filing and retrieving your passwords. Check out our article on using a password manager here.

Broken Website?

We can help fix your broken or slow WordPress website, support you to keep it in tip top shape and boost the browsing experience of your audience.

Unmiss.com SEO Podcast

In July 2022 Fiona from DIY Digital was interviewed by Anatolii Ulitovskyi of UNmiss.com.

In this Episode

In episode 231 of Anatolli's Unmiss SEO podcast, Fiona and Anatolli discuss

• Writing Text
• Using Words People Use
• Answering Client Enquiries
• Working with Copywriters
• GT Metrix for Technical SEO
• Identifying Errors
• Top 3 things for Websites and Website Developers
• What a Website Doesn't Need

Click on the play button to listen to the full episode.

Writing Text

Writing a page about your products or services is a great starting point for your SEO. Google loves text. Create or update a page on your website, for example a

• Service Page
• Blog Article
• Product Page
• Collection Page

Use Words People Use

Using words people use in everyday language is usually the best option for SEO. Don't be too academic. For example

• Teacher is used more in everyday language than educator
• Moisteriser is used more in everday language than Bodycare

Use Google Trends to get an idea about words that are used as search terms.

Answer Client Inquiries

Most businesses will have questions that customers and clients repeatedly ask. These client inquiries are great ideas for writing about your business in a blog article. These articles are useful beyond existing for Search Engine Optimisation purposes, as they are a helpful resource for clients and customers.

Work with Copywriters

If you're not able or interested in writing about your products or services, you can hire a copywriter to do this for you. Copywriters are experts in researching and getting to know different businesses and products.

Allow a copywriter time to get to know your products or services. Work with them, especially in the early stages, to ensure they get to know your voice and your business.

GT Metrix for Technical SEO

GT Metrix is a useful, free tool that can be used to measure a website's technical health, such as

• page load speed
• image sizes
• broken links
• out-of-date software
• old or no caching

Often a site that has been left to languish for more than 3-4 years has a poor result. GT Metrix gives us insight into how the website is performing and what technical items need to be addressed for good SEO.

Identifying Errors

When people are on a website that appears a bit odd, because of an error, this often translates into not trusting the business. We don't tend to notice sites that work well and are seamless, but we do notice them when something is amiss.

Fixing these errors is what website developers do as part of their day-to-day job.

Often there are errors that not even the website developer has seen before. In this instance they are likely to:

• read online forums on the issue to see if other website developers are talking about the problem
• lodge a support ticket
• wait for the software author to fix the problem and release it in the next update

Top 3 Things for Websites and Website Developers

1. Keep the website up-to-date and maintained

2. Store and be able to retrieve usernames and passwords for:

• WordPress website
• Google Analytics
• Google My Business

or for what-ever online platforms being used.

Encourage clients to have a system for their usernames and passwords, whether that be:

• a paper notepad
• an Excel spreadsheet
• an electronic password manager

3. Have a back up of the site

What a Website Doesn't Need

Most websites don't need moving parts, bells and whistles. Keeping it simple is often the best, especially for small businesses.

SEO Course

A practical, step-by-step video course with screenshots, examples, explanations and demonstrations. Carefully created and produced video tutorials for your learning.

Especially suitable for e-commerce sites or multi-page websites.