We Will Make This Quick

First, here are our holiday hours through the end of this year (finally).

What if My Website Goes Kaput When Jollity is Closed?

First, when you host with us, your website does not go kaput. That is part of why we are the best WordPress hosting solution out there. Do you hear our horn? It is saying "Toot! Toot!"
If a website emergency occurs ("website emergency" = immediate impact to your revenue), and you host with Jollity, we will be there for you even when we are closed.

Do I need to monitor my Jollity-hosted site when you are closed?

No. We monitor hosting websites 24/7. If a tornado takes out your website, we take care of it automatically. It's part of your hosting service.

No, a tornado can not really take out your website. Our physical servers have location redundancy and... wait, you do not want to hear about how the magic happens, you just want to know we have you covered, right? Ok. We have you covered :-).

A Few Final Updates...

We will be making a donation to a charity at the end of the year. We feel that you probably already have enough fruit baskets. Or, due to COVID, you don't want to go near those baskets anyway. We will share the details in a separate message.

Thank you for being wonderful, amazing clients to work with. We are incredibly fortunate to work with a fantastic set of organizations that we believe in, and enjoy supporting. We are grateful for each one of you. THANK YOU for choosing Jollity!

With Nerdy Love,
The Jollity Team -- Keely, Leo, & Lauren

Hosting has changed... and so did we! In January of 2020, we launched our brand new hosting program. We vow to provide the best small business hosting service out there for WordPress websites. We aim for a solution that lets you focus on your business, knowing we have your website covered. Since we first launched hosting 10 years ago, the requirements of a solid WordPress managed hosting provider have dramatically increased. Here are just a few examples of how we take care of our hosting client website that you may not be aware of:

The same website you may have had for years is more complicated to keep running well, securely, and quickly today. Security, speed, and uptime are also vital for SEO.

Consumers demand that websites look great on all devices of all different screen sizes that are upgraded increasingly often, and consumers want it faster than ever before. And if they don't get it, they bail and visit a competitor's website in 3 seconds flat.

We're always improving

Taking better care of our client's websites is a job that is NEVER done. Our new hosting program, launched in January 2020, represented a giant leap forward in providing a "set it and forget it" hosting service for our clients. But we're going to keep making it better. If you have suggestions for how to improve our services, let us know! Current clients, email us your thoughts and suggestions anytime.

How to get in touch

Have a problem or a question? Chat with us via the chat window in the bottom right corner. Start a support ticket with a quick, short ticket email form, or email us at [email protected].

Are your emails not going through? Have your customers said that they never got your email, or keep going to their spam folders? It is likely because Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Google Apps, and Microsoft Office 365 are BLOCKING your emails due to a lack of authentication or a strict DMARC policy on your email.

Email authentication requirements have ramped up in recent years, and for good reason. In 2019, 55% of all email sent was SPAM! Yikes. If you get a ton of scams and spam emails in your inbox every day, you’ll eventually change to a different email provider, right? Email providers want to keep you as a customer, so they add extra security to help keep your inbox free of SPAM via 3 things: DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. We’ll talk more about what those are later, so don’t get bogged down in acronyms.

When you send emails to your customers, you have to make sure that your email passes these email security tests. That applies to everywhere you send an email, including:

  1. Your email provider: Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, Gmail, or Yahoo.
  2. Newsletter / email marketing: MailChimp, SendinBlue, HubSpot, or Constant Contact.
  3. CRM tool: Do you use sales software to send or receive CRM or new lead emails? Like HubSpot or PipeDrive?
  4. Recruiting tool: How about a recruiting tool where you send/receive emails from within the software to new applicants?
  5. Support Tickets: How about sending emails through a support ticketing system that sends emails from your domain on your behalf to and from customers to answer questions or solve problems? Examples include FreshDesk or ZenDesk.
  6. Review Request Tool: Do you have a review system that sends emails to customers asking them to review your company online? Are those emails set up to send from your email address or any email at your domain? Some of the popular ones include Podium, TrustPilot, and GatherUp.
  7. Website form notifications: Do you get an email every time someone fills out your website’s contact form? That email is sent through your website as a notification, does it come from an email at your own domain? You may also have email confirmations automatically sent to form submitters.

How Do DMARC, DKIM, and SPF Work?

Email spammers can fake the email address that they’re sending from to pretend to be a person or business you are familiar with. For example, a scammer may pretend to be your bank or facebook.com to try to get you to click on a fake link and enter your login details to a fake form. Scary, right? That’s why email clients take authentication seriously!

Email authentication via DMARC, DKIM, and SPF make it harder for spammers to fake that email address. Let’s use Gmail as an example. When I (from my jollity.io email) send an email to your Gmail account, Gmail sends a message to my jollity.io DNS (Domain Name Service) provider saying 

“Hey, I just got this email from this server claiming to be @jollity.io, is that legit?”.

My jollity.io DNS provider reviews the server that the email was sent from and either says

“Yep, that’s a real email, go ahead and deliver it”

OR says

“NO WAIT! We don’t recognize that server! That is suspicious! Send it to SPAM!”

OR in some cases may say “DON’T deliver it at all!”

In the above scenario, SPF and DKIM both tell Gmail (or your email server) if the email is legit or not. DMARC gives Gmail instructions for what to do if the email appears to be suspicious. Think of it as having a fancy alarm system with a fingerprint scanner for your email inbox: nobody gets in unless they’re authenticated. 

 

Example of blocked emails

Ok, I’m done with all this technical lingo. How do I fix this?

The solution, of course, is never simple! How annoying, right? Keep in mind that all this mambo-jumbo originates from protecting you and your email recipients against scammers and spam, so direct your anger towards those scam creeps :-). How you set up authentication to ensure that you can send emails that get to your recipients depends on which type of emails you’re trying to fix. I covered a few basics below. For other providers, you’ll want to search their knowledge base or contact them directly. Or if you don’t want to mess with any of this, then reach out to us at Jollity via chat, support ticket (existing clients), or email and we’ll help you get it setup.

Google Apps:

Google Apps has a pretty straight-forward set of instructions on authenticating for DMARC. Before you get started, make sure you have current access to:

  1. Your domain registrar or host, whoever manages your DNS records. Don’t know? If you host with Jollity, just email or chat to us, we’ll help you out. If you do not host with us, you can try tools like https://mxtoolbox.com/. However, their results can be a little technical and confusing, and haven’t you already had enough technical lingo for one day?
  2. Your Google Apps account, administrator-level (technically “super admin,” but just use the same user who created the account and that has the access you need).

Follow these instructions for Google Apps: 

Microsoft Office 365:

Follow these instructions for Microsoft Office 365 email: 

Your Website:

If you host with us (Jollity managed WordPress hosting), on the business plan or above you have nothing to worry about as your website’s emails now come from an email address that is authenticated automatically. Hallelujah! If on the freelancer plan (our introductory tier), unfortunately, the new server perks don’t apply. If you don’t host with Jollity, then SendGrid could be a great option to consider. Or, my preference: switch to Jollity hosting!

SendGrid is also a great option if you want your website’s email notifications to come from your own domain. SendGrid has a free plan. https://sendgrid.com/. We are not affiliated with Sendgrid, we just like them 🙂

MailChimp:

MailChimp provides instructions for setting up both SPF and DKIM here: https://mailchimp.com/help/set-up-custom-domain-authentication-dkim-and-spf/. BEWARE one step of their instructions says to create a new record for SPF. THAT IS NOT ALWAYS TRUE!! The instructions MailChimp provides fails to address that you can only have 1 SPF record per domain, so if you already have an SPF record in your DNS, you can not create another record. You can, however, have multiple domains in a single SPF record. It is insane to me that MailChimp doesn’t address this in their instructions, but they don’t, so be careful.

Your Next Steps

Ok, so what do you do now? Ask your email provider if SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are set up on your email account. In some cases, Jollity hourly support can help you. We can help you test for and configure SPF and DKIM authentication for your website’s email sending, for Google Apps, and for many of the 3rd party email services we mentioned above.

 

Images can be worth a thousand words, just don’t let them end up costing you a thousand dollars (or more $$$) by using a licensed image illegally! Images are a powerful tool to capture attention, support a message and improve the readers' experience. It’s important to be aware of licensing and ownership when pulling images from the web for use in blogs and ads.

It’s safest to presume that any image you find online is protected unless explicitly told otherwise. If you can uncover the source of the image, you can establish if there is a license such as creative commons, or if it is public domain.

Small businesses, you are NOT immune to litigation! In the 10+ years I've helped clients manage their websites, I've had at least 5 come to me for help with a lawsuit threat they've received. Most of the time, it's a complete accident. The image was pulled from a Google image search result and used on a blog post or promoted in a Facebook ad. Each business had no idea. Some of you reading this may be nodding your heads remembering your own nightmare, receiving an email or certified letter demanding compensation for illegal use of licensed images on your website.

Licensing: Important Points

Creative Commons License

Even though it’s title would imply “free picture!”, a Creative Commons license doesn't necessarily mean you can use it. The license gives the owner of the image the capacity to publish to the public whilst keeping some control over how it is used. Keep reading.

Here is an example of a license on Unsplash.com, a popular image sharing website:

 

Understanding Licenses

A quick rundown of what kind of licensed work can be used:

Ads:

  1. Creative Commons commercial use allowed and no attribution requirement (mods allowed preferred)
  2. Creative Commons Zero
  3. Public Domain
  4. Anything with written permission from creator

Blogs & Non-promoted Social Posts:

  1. All of the above
  2. Creative Commons non-commercial (with caution)

How to Attribute

If you use an image that requires an attribution there is no solid rule on how to attribute. The attribution can be put underneath the image or at the end of the blog. In the attribution it is best to include:

  1. Title (if including this is awkward, it's safe to exclude.)
  2. Author
  3. Source link
  4. Creative Commons License Link (as there are 6 different types)

Below is an example of attributing credit to meet image source requirements.

Where to Find Images for your Website & Blog

We made you a list! See our list of websites with free images for use on websites, blogs, and more.

For more information: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution

***If creating content for a client, always err on the side of caution:

Did you know that 65% of the web's content are images? Here are a few ways that images contribute to your website's success:

Images can also have drastic consequences if not sized correctly. They can make a website look clunky and dated. A single oversized image can increase the size of a webpage by 100x, slowing down the entire webpage's load time in a browser for a visitor. Slow websites are terrible for SEO and can lead to website visitors leaving before the page ever loads. Large images also take up valuable server space, which over time can make your server bloated and can lead to paying more for extra server space, yikes!

Images downloaded or imported off of digital cameras (or smartphones) are often 10-20x larger than they should be on the website. They need to be re-sized and optimized BEFORE uploading them to your website.

Here are some suggestions for keeping images sized appropriately for the website before uploading:

Size:

Size matters and bigger is not better! Producing images with the smallest possible file size without reducing image quality is the aim here.

For background images and any image that is full-width (spans the full-width of the screen/website), aim for:

For any other images that are embedded on any post or page, aim for:

These are guidelines. Once in a while, you'll have to make an exception for a very vivid image, and that's ok!

Format:

For the image format, always export as a .jpg unless the image has transparency in it. If the image has transparency, then use .png. Most image editing tools have export options that allow you to declare the width and quality of the image when exporting. That's where you can optimize the image for the website before uploading it.

Clean:

Finally, when you have time, try to keep your WordPress media library "clean" by clearing out old image files that are no longer being used.

By following these steps, you will enhance site performance and reduce precious storage space.

Where to communicate your business's changes

Whether it's reduced hours, special hours for risk groups, a switch to online-only customer service, or a complete temporary closure, here is a checklist for where and how to update your customers. It's important to inform all of your stakeholders - the public, your existing customers, and your potential new customers.

1) Update the website contact page and footer

Some businesses also put hours in the footer of their site. Make sure you catch all possible online locations and add a temporary closure text notice next to the hours!

2) Add a website banner or pop-up notification

Create a banner notification that lets everyone know your doors are closed with your expected open date (which you can keep updating as things change).
Provide an email sign-up list in the banner (see #3) that allows your website visitors to elect to be notified via email when you re-open.

3) Offer to update visitors via email

Provide an email sign-up list in the banner (see #2) that allows your website visitors to elect to be notified via email when you re-open.

4) Update your Google My Business listing hours

For many such as restaurants and retail, this is more important than your website. The hours provided in your Google My Business listing show up in Google searches AND are used by Google Maps. If reducing hours, update the hours on the Google My Business listing. If closing completely, you have a few options and need to be VERY CAREFUL which you pursue!

IMPORTANT NOTE: Google has recently launched a "temporarily closed due to COVID19" feature. We have seen businesses reporting issues with using this feature, including not being able to receive reviews, having to contact support and not getting a reply when needing to remove the notice, and listings are being REMOVED from Google Maps (local) search results entirely. YIKES! One workaround to this is to use Google's "holiday hours" feature. You'll need to maintain it more often, but it appears to be a safer bet at this time.

If still serving customers online (such as a restaurant with take out or an insurance agency providing customer service via phone/email), it may be worth considering keeping your hours listed as open, then using Google's "post an update" feature to post your online-only status.

5) Post an update to your Google My Business page

Google has an option to create an update post. Use it! From your Google My Business dashboard, navigate to "Posts" then "Post update". See screenshot below. Post your reduced hours, closure, or alternative means to for customers to get in touch as needed.

6) Post an update to your social media channels

Usually, the biggest are Facebook and Twitter, but post an update to any social media channels that you regularly use. If you have written a blog post or put up a website page with more details relevant to your stakeholders, link to it in your social media post.

7) Put a sign on your door

Don't forget your storefront! Put a sign on the door. Be humble, apologize that they've come all this way only to see closed doors, list the reason as being due to city mandate (or whatever level order applies to you) and refer them to your website for more details. Provide contact information if applicable.

NOTE FOR RESTAURANTS: Open for takeout/delivery? Tape your take-out menu to the door! We walked through our small town recently, and everyone provided a phone number for takeout, but many small restaurants do not have current menus on their websites. Some don't have a website at all. How do we know what to order? Or for better results, offer to email the take-out menu as a PDF if you can't get it up on a website page.

How to blog on a small business budget

Businesses often have a goldmine of blog content at their fingertips.  This post provides tips on how to manage your blog inhouse.

What I always tell my clients usually generates a big groan, but the best way to generate quality content that is useful for a potential client is to have it done in-house. That does NOT require a dedicated marketing team, but it does require a point-person to keep everything organized (almost easier to outsource the organizing of it, really). I recommend having the internal team write blog posts based on the questions that they most commonly get from leads and customers. Here are a few ways to generate blog topics:

The biggest thing that I see companies overlook with blog posts is that the content comes from knowledge that already lives within the company. Nobody needs to do an 8-hour research blog post to blog about an industry that they work in all day already. What is common knowledge to the staff is valuable insight to the potential customer reading.

What you CAN outsource: What tends to be the most cumbersome to internal staff writing is forcing them to each learn how to create and publish a new blog post. That's confusing! Who wants to learn a whole new system? To take away that obstacle, I suggest having one person in charge of collecting the blog posts, editing (grammar/spelling), sourcing/adding images, putting them into WordPress and publishing them on a schedule. THAT role can be outsourced to an SEO or developer with a blog publishing program.

Need help setting up, optimizing, or publishing your blog posts? Jollity's web dev and SEO team can help - get in touch now to discuss.

In your outreach email, include specific dates and times. Give them at least 3 options on at least 2 different days and no more than 5 total options (avoid decision paralysis, it’s a thing). Convert time options to the CLIENT’s time zone. This isn’t about you, it’s about the client, remember? Make sure to mention the time zone you quoted in. The easier you make it for them, the faster and easier it will be to schedule.

Send them a calend

ar invite! ALWAYS! The calendar invite should have:


After sending the calendar invite with the conference line details included, send them a confirmation email letting them know that you’ve sent a calendar invite with the conference line link in the invite’s details. MixMax does this automatically for you, but I still send a separate one from my email the first time I interact with a client.
5-10 minutes prior to the start of the scheduled call, send the client a brief 1-sentence email with the conference line link included for their convenience. That increases the chances that they’ll remember the call (everyone is more on top of their email than their calendars, go figure).

Here is an example of a well-written meeting request email:

Save $25 when you sign up for MixMax here: http://ssqt.co/mQfAGaC
*I have no affiliation with MixMax, except as a customer.

Your new website is like a car.

It starts out shiny and new. No wear and tear. Jollity websites are like driving off the lot in a brand new custom-ordered Mercedes. The code base is the best and newest available with the most reputable parts. Everything looks and feels smooth and fast.

3rd Party Integrations: Plugins are like car manufacturer suppliers

In a car, many parts are made by a 3rd party supplier. Some of those 3rd party companies may go out of business, get bought or sold, or stop making the part in the future, and those elements are beyond Lexus’s control.

We select plugins and add-ons to websites made by reliable, reputable companies whom we have vetted extensively, but we can’t control their future business decisions. The company making the plugin may change focus. Maybe they get hit by a bus.

Like car manufacturers, most websites today require 3rd party integrations. The alternative— coding or manufacturing your own version of every part— is an unrealistic and unprofitable business model. It makes the car and website cost way too high for small businesses and car manufacturers. Even Bentleys have parts from other manufacturers: more than 700 businesses supply 18,000 parts to each Bentley.

You MUST care for It: monitoring and maintenance

A new car requires monitoring and maintenance from the day it is pulled off the lot. Fill it with gas, wash it, change the oil, rotate and replace the tires, replace the battery. Add and maintain the coolant, windshield washer fluid and oil. Buy and maintain insurance and registration. Replace the brake pads (coming soon to BMW owners).

WordPress websites need their theme, plugins, and WordPress versions updated regularly. They need to be monitored in case of an outage. The forms need to be tested on occasion. Someone needs to click-through the website. If you never drive your car, you never know if anything’s wrong. We hop behind the wheel for you to make sure the website is driving correctly.

Like a new car, higher performing new websites will need more extensive monitoring and maintenance sooner. For example, a high-performance race car needs a lot more attention and care than a base model Toyota Corolla. A simple 5-page marketing websites with no fancy tricks will require less work than a 200-page site with dynamic content, real estate listings, custom-designed social media feeds, and shopping carts. There’s just more complexity to the latter.

Gas mileage varies: Website speed and performance

A Honda Civic gets 36 mpg. A Cadillac Escalade gets 14 mpg. BUT both vehicles can drive through Wyoming enjoying the 80 MPH speed limits side by side. It takes a lot more horsepower to keep that giant Escalade rumbling along, which equates to filling up the tank more often. One just spends more money on gas than the other.

A simple, small website and a large, complex site can both load fast. It takes optimization to get any site fine-tuned to load fast. But it can be done. Keeping any website loading fast takes time and money.

Summary: Take care of your car, and your website.

*Stats source: https://www.bentleymedia.com/en/company/facts-and-figures accessed 11/5/2019

Quick N Dirty Checklist: Email Rules

Once you learn the concepts, here is a quick n’ dirty checklist to refer to:

TYPOS & SPELING MISTKES R UNACEPTABLE. DONT DOO IT.

See how it appears to be a moron typing? That ’s why.

Email Concepts

Words Matter in Emails.

Email Structure: Use these, like this

Subject Lines

Body

To:, CC: and Reply All

How to add a reCAPTCHA field to WordPress forms using Gravity Forms. reCAPTCHA is a spam filter that helps make sure only real people (not bots) can fill out your website form. It will often minimize and sometimes eliminate spam from coming in through your website form.

For this tutorial to work for you you'll need:

  1. A WordPress site
  2. Gravity Forms for your form

That's it!

Why, oh WHY support tickets? Are we turning evil?

No, not evil. I just want to take better care of you, our client. Over the last few months, Jollity has outgrown my email inbox. I noticed my average turnaround times for requests sometimes getting up to 5-7 days. Our clients deserve better. All of our client communication was silo'd exclusively through me. Sometimes, work would get done but clients wouldn't find out for several days. Yikes. In our world, that's too long. I always vowed to deliver personalized, better service to clients than what I saw in our industry. We differentiate through personalized, marketing-savvy, smart solutions for clients. We're the marketers who code! We think about your business with every request and come up with solutions, alternatives, and consulting advice that will help your company grow and make more money.

We have been testing our new setup in the background for a while, and now we're ready for prime time! 

What you can expect (summarized: continued awesomeness)

I am committed to maintaining that higher level of service we promise through Jollity's growth. I needed to find a way to achieve 3 important missions:

  1. Maintain our smart, marketing-savvy, consultant level of service. We must stay awesome (or get more awesome).
  2. Get back to resolving ALL client requests in a reasonable timeframe - for simple requests, I consider this to be 48 hours or less.
  3. Affordability. I aimed for a solution that did NOT require an hourly support rate hike. No change to your billing setup at all. The market rates we see for our work run around $135-$250/hour. Can you imagine paying as much as you pay your lawyer per hour? #letsnotgothere

To accomplish #1, we needed the right people. Lucky us, we already have some. We have added a few more WordPress developers considered to be among the top 2% in the industry worldwide. Yea, they're pretty awesome. To accomplish #2, we needed to take me out of the middle of every conversation. Revolving the business around yourself is a classic founder mistake, and I made it. Funny thing is, the talent has always been far more than me - designers, developers, and marketers have contributed to everything Jollity does for years; they've just been in the background. Well, that's just silly. I picked and vetted the Jollity team because of their top talent AND excellent communication skills, so they should get to talk to our clients too. Now we have a project manager on board helping us, as well as developers who can chime in as needed.

So how's it work?

You, the client, fill out the ticketing form on our Client Support page. We put buttons all over our jollity.io website to make sure Client Support is always easy to find. I REALLY wanted to make reaching us quick and easy for you. Here's what I focused on:

  1. Support chat - the fastest, easiest way to get us. It's monitored by 1-2 of us at any given time. BUT as I said, we're a small team, so we can't promise 24/7 chat availability (unless you'd like me to double all of your prices...). For quick, easy questions, you can chat us. Chat tells you if one of us is available or not. If not, we still get back to your chat message via support email as long as you've given us your email address in the chat window. Our chat is meant to be EASY, so we require NO information upfront before you get access to us live. But if you want us to get back to you later, you will have to give us an email :-).
  2. Support ticket - fill out a form, we see it and jump on it. We get back to you via email! It's as simple as that. I aimed to keep our form as simple as humanly possible while giving you the opportunity to explain what you need all at once.
  3. Email - Once you've interacted with us, you'll have our support email address, which you can use to open a new ticket.

How we beat the system with a system (and why our helpdesk is the best)

See what I did there? ;-). Support tickets can feel less... personal. It feels like you've become an anonymous number in a cog instead of an important client. Or that's how it feels to me when I use tickets. However, ticketing is important for us to approach support as a team (and remember that team is the key to getting back to you consistently faster), so we are personalizing the system as much as we can. Here's how we made our system BETTER THAN ALL THE REST: 

  1. You'll work consistently with 1-2 team members throughout the support ticket: me and our project manager. You will not have to re-explain yourself to a new person at random. We are a small business who is personally familiar with you and your company's website(s).
  2. You still just email, you'll just hear from us via email. I picked a ticketing setup that did NOT require you, the client, to create and remember a new set of login credentials to access us. Having to login to a helpdesk is the most annoying thing on the planet (perhaps dramatic, but it seriously sucks). I have over 200 sets of logins for different companies' help desks and every system is different; it's out of control. We are dedicated to supporting you how YOU like to communicate: email and chat.

This is getting long, and if I still have your attention I'm likely to lose you soon to the next email that pings you or customer awaiting your attention. Our team is here if you have questions or issues while you adjust to the system. And remember, when you need to reach us, just visit our website and click on Client Support, or chat with us. We put that support button all over the place.

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