Essentee Blog

Everyone knows when a website has been hacked, right? It will have a message saying 'hacked by' – right? Wrong.

The scars might be invisible to the average site visitor and the owner not even know their website has been compromised. Think that little old New Zealand minding it's own business isn't a target? Wrong again.

How do you know if your website has been a victim of an attack ? How do you fix it? And more importantly, how do you prevent it having serious repercussions for your business?

It's that time of year. The time when predictions are made and last year's are picked over to see if they came true and if not, the justifications made for why not.

So you've spent months and probably more money than you would have liked to, bringing your new website to life.

It has recently been announced that from September 1st, a new top-level domain name (or TLD for short) was going to be available ie ".nz"

Keywords - an absolutely critical piece of the web marketing puzzle. Not of themselves, but because they act as a lens through which to laser-focus your marketing efforts.

Whether you know it or not, your website will be broadcasting certain words and phrases – but they may not be the right ones.

How important is it, really, to have a some specific goals for your website?

Why not just get on with it and just aim for "lots of" something - like paying customers?

It is important that your web strategy is integrated with your overall business plan.

Traffic is the lifeblood of a website. But you need something to encourage visitors.

There are a lot of useful free tools out there - here is a selection of them.

• Keyword generator - free keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker.
• W3C CSS validator - run your site through this checker to see if there are any CSS errors on your site, or run it through the HTML validator to check the markup validity.
• W3C also have a link checker to make sure there are no broken links on your site.
• Website optimizer - will check the speed of your site (a bit outdated, but fun non the less)
• Google ad planner - for certain sites, you can see what their traffic is (even if you're not planning ads!)
• Google analytics - official site from where you can follow the blog and get help with Google analytics.
• Lorem Ipsum - This lets you create psudo latin dummy text to use as a placeholder alternative to 'insert text here'.

Why do I need web hosting?

Website hosting is, simply put, a place to store your website and all its contents where the general public can find it. It is the destination that your domain name leads people to.