News&Updates Archives - WiNN Marketing Web Services

Form Madness – Why won’t my contact form email…

Can’t email yourself from a contact form plugin?

Here’s the problem – the contact form you set up in WordPress with either Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, or any of the millions of other contact form makers won’t send you notifications of a form completion. Well, it is, but you aren’t getting them.

That’s the frustrating part – there’s no errors from the sending end but it never shows up in your inbox, nor your spam box, nor the quarantine box, it just doesn’t get there. What the heck is going on? (Ok, to be fair, email admins would know to check the server logs and you might be able to figure this out faster than I did but typically they aren’t the peeps building a contact form in WordPress either.) Read more “Form Madness – Why won’t my contact form email me?” →

Social Marketing for Small Business

I was asked to speak to a few independent mortgage brokers recently on why they should use social media to help promote their new endeavours. My first thought was “why wouldn’t you?” But I live in that world – it’s my go-to approach and first thoughts on marketing. To others, steeped in traditional marketing methods, or new to marketing themselves, they have to see the benefits first before they are willing to plunge down that rabbit hole. Read more “Social Marketing for Small Business” →

Install the same theme twice – how to double…

A client recently asked if they could install the same theme twice in WordPress to build and test different looks using the same theme. Yep, you can do that, and here’s how: Read more “Install the same theme twice – how to double dip” →

Google and WordPress – let’s talk integrations

How to integrate some Google Apps and services into a WordPress site.

Google Products you Need to Integrate Today

Google has so many free and great options that can integrate and support your site that you absolutely have to have a Gmail account these days. Remember the golden age when you had to be INVITED to get a Gmail account from some in-the-know tech guru that you knew? Good times that changed the times. Ok, I’ll presume you’re logged into your Google account at this point and let’s get started. Read more “Google and WordPress – let’s talk integrations” →

WordCamp Winnipeg Presentation 2016 – Marketing Magic

October 22, 2016, I presented what I know about WordPress and marketing to a bunch of really great people, who know way more about WordPress and marketing than I do.

Yeah, that’s not scary at all.

Twitterific @rodsalm

Review This! Why you should REALLY care what people…

In the world of hyper SEO competition it takes a lot of effort to get a site to dominate the search rankings or to get on the front page. Google is getting ever more clever at filtering out the junk and stopping the so-called blackhat SEO experts from dominating the SERPS (search engine ranking positions). Google just wants to bring you the best results – ad or regular searches – for your terms entered and are happy when you get there!

Reviews are one way Google makes sure their search results fit what you are looking for by ensuring authenticity. Read more “Review This! Why you should REALLY care what people say about your business.” →

Plugin Review – Advanced Code Editor

Some plugins greatly enhance WordPress’s functionality, others allow for greater control of the dashboard, and some, like Advanced Code Editor, just make your life a lot easier when you’re working behind the scenes in the WordPress Dashboard.

Let’s talk Site Security with the iThemes Security plugin

Your Site Needs to Be More Secure

I’ve been the admin of a few dozen WordPress installs for over seven years now and if there’s one thing that keeps me up at night it’s the thought of one of my sites getting hacked. As a result I’ve developed a not-too-healthy state of constant paranoia. I subscribe to several security focused blogs, I follow security plugin developers on twitter, and I watch any wordpress.tv episodes on security. I immediately update any security upgrade releases and test, than upgrade any release of plugins, themes and core files. All to keep those sites secure. Like I said, not too healthy but so far it’s working and haven’t had a ton of trouble on my sites (other than of my own devising).

The Campaign that Worked on a Campaigner

With this post I want to discuss a campaign (communications and advertising that involve both PR efforts and marketing elements) that have influenced me. Which is a particularly daunting task. As a marketing professional for over– let’s just say approaching decades, I like to think I’ve built up an immunity to the crafty and brilliant efforts of marketing departments. Slick multi-million dollar ad campaigns are wasted on m as I’m too clever to fall for an ad-man’s tricks. Read more “The Campaign that Worked on a Campaigner” →

Stubborn database problem in WordPress with cPanel

Error Codes in WordPress – Cannot Modify Header Information

When trying to login to your newly configured/built WordPress site are you getting this error?

Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at blah, blah, blah). Read more “Stubborn database problem in WordPress with cPanel” →

Management Job Interview Tips

My sister is, for lack of a better word, a goober. Always has been, but I get the right to say that for being the younger brother who’s always looked up to and admired here (and getting beat up by my older sisters during childhood is also a reason I get to say that). She’s incredibly smart, talented, driven, successful, brilliant, outspoken, speaks several languages, won many awards, loved by everyone, warmhearted, and wonderful. So, you know, a goober. She’s also humble, so you won’t find her on the internet much and I won’t be giving away her name here.

She’s also a mentor to me and recently I asked her why anyone would want to be a manager, or more specifically, how to answer that question if asked in an interview. Here’s what she had to say about it:

Finding help with WordPress the easy way!

WordPress out of the box is quite grand. Grand I say, mighty grand. With a little poking and prodding around, you can start creating content and fire it out to the interwebs. You don’t have to know how to do everything before you start doing anything in WordPress (and you’ll never know everything, so don’t worry about it). Joomla (another Content Management System) and DOS for that matter, are at their base essentials “get trained before you try and do anything” while WordPress is “doing is your training” which very much agrees with my learning style. Read more “Finding help with WordPress the easy way!” →

Waste Your Time Wisely: How to Improve your Social…

This is an intervention. It has to stop.

The internet was built by really smart people who needed a tool to do even more really smart things. And the world wide web was built to connect information to people. Yeah sure, first we connected slow streaming porn to sex-starved guys with university computer access, but we did move on from that point. We evolved, we went from using it as a replacement for faxing bad jokes, to being able to develop and share real ideas that didn’t involve nudity. Searching for that information became easier (thanks to Google and other search engines) and we evolved as users of this marvelous tool.