The new Facebook 2020. How it looks and works?
Four major changes have been made to Facebook's history. The latest, FB5, also known as New Facebook, maybe the most dramatic of all. It's a total change in how Facebook looks and works on computers and mobile devices.
Do not give up. It has been many years since a significant change of appearance appeared on Facebook, so this message is both welcome and much needed. So what can we expect?
What is New Facebook?
Social network plans were announced at the F8 2019 conference, including the redesign of Facebook. The new Facebook is an interface update that places more emphasis on Groups and Events - the two biggest reasons people visit Facebook every day. It also means that the news feed will be less available on New Facebook.
Both the desktop page and the mobile application will automatically receive this update. It aims to facilitate navigation on Facebook while modernizing the appearance of Facebook for the new decade. Until now, few have access to New Facebook.
When will New Facebook be available?
It is not possible to activate the update, you have to wait for Facebook to invite you to test the new look. The announcement took place in April 2019. In November 2019, the first people in the USA were invited to the tests, then Canada, United Kingdom. There are still no updates for users, Facebook said they plan to offer a new look in a wider range in spring 2020.
"A small percentage" of people who can access new features on Facebook will see a pop-up window after logging in with an invitation to test New Facebook.
Facebook Design 2020
The Facebook you know will soon become a thing of the past. We found ourselves in a group of users selected by Facebook who was given the new Facebook look.
In general, the site looks more minimalistic than the current version and contains more white space. Top of page is no longer blue. Instead, it is white and divided into three sections. The left one is the Facebook icon pointing to the news feed and search field. The middle section contains light grey icons: your news feed, video centre (watch), the marketplace, groups and gaming. The right section is the feedback button and reporting problems with New Facebook (probably it will disappear in the final version), then Messenger and your profile icon.
It is worth paying attention to the new Facebook logo. There used to be f in a blue or white square. Now the letter f is larger and has a lighter blue circle.
Facebook Stories are highlighted in the centre in the form of rectangles, as in the mobile application. Just as reports have caught up on Instagram and sweep, so on Facebook they are probably not very popular.
Profile on the new Facebook
The appearance of the profile on the new Facebook has also been modified, however, the profile page most closely resembles the look of the old Facebook we are used to
New Facebook Post
Very intuitive and modern. After clicking "What's on your mind?" a new post a window appears. The first checkbox is the audience, then the post content. The bottom bar brings some news. You will find, among others, various fonts and backgrounds. Of course, classic options for inserting photos, gifs, tagging people and places, or emotions are available. See for yourself in the video below.
New look for Facebook notifications
In the header on the right, we have a section for notifications, messages and profile options. A complete transformation of all functions. Notifications and messages open in the column, also profile options. It looks modern, and most importantly, it's transparent.
Message windows on new Facebook
An interesting way of presenting current (open) conversations on Messenger. Old Facebook opened them in the bar at the bottom of the page. The mess was getting rather fast on small screen resolutions. The new Facebook design has active messages hidden under thumbnails on the right. To start a chat, simply click the plus icon in the bottom right corner of the browser.
Facebook Dark Mode
The long-awaited Facebook Dark Mode is available at one click. The classic light version will change into a snap into dark mode, which will be a good option when watching videos or Facebook Live.
Other features for the new Facebook
Facebook has announced several new features for events and specific social groups (Gaming Chat and Gaming Stream). Interactions for Facebook Live will also be improved, especially for people who use it for sales purposes. Has a great webinar tool been created?
Above, we briefly introduced you to the new look of Facebook for 2020. We are interested in your opinion, reaction … which functions did you like and which you are not convinced of? Or maybe you already have access to the new Facebook? Write your first impressions in the comment below.
What happens to .eu domain after Brexit
We are not into politics at all. We serve our hosting with no boundaries. However, few of our customers asked us recently what will happen to their websites after Brexit. Simple answer: nothing. We will continue our hosting services. There is one exception. UK citizens won't be able to use .eu domains. Yes, we know, that's silly, but that's the part of Brexit. So what's the story?
The latest stats show 345,339 active .eu domains owned by UK citizens. To be eligible to hold a .eu domain name you must be:
- an EU citizen, independently of where you live
- resident in the EU or EEA
- an organisation, business or undertaking that is established in the EU or EEA
That brings a serious question...
Will UK companies have to give up .eu domain names after Brexit?
The short answer is yes. According to EURid’s dedicated Brexit webpage:
When the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, after full ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement, the UK and the EU will enter into the so-called “transition period”. This time-limited period was agreed as part of the Withdrawal Agreement and will last until 31 December 2020 at least. During the transition period, UK residents and citizens will continue to be able to hold and register a .eu domain name.
That means you need to secure your business now. Go ahead and find a new domain that you will be eligible to register (.com, .co, .co.uk, .uk etc). Don't wait until the last minute, because the migration of your website domain will do some damage on SEO and it will take some time to settle down.
How to keep .eu domain after Brexit?
Well, it's possible! You will need a valid address in a European Union country (excluding UK). You can keep valid your .eu domain name(s) by updating your contact information (EU).
We hope that answer your questions about the .eu domain after Brexit. Share your thoughts in a comment below, are you affected? Of course, if you need any help and tips for the migration from the .eu domain to your new one, let us know!
How Serwer.io helped Carine Bea Photography
Carine Bea is a wedding photographer based in London offering thoughtful and creative documentary wedding photography in London, the UK and overseas. Her popularity grows every day and her old hosting Wedhosts limits became a bottleneck for visitors and Carine. She asked us for help.
Website Migration
The most important step was to migrate her website from Wedhosts. Her old hosting limits became too low with time. Wedhosts offered only 2MB/s disk transfer limit; 1024 IOPS; and low CPU usage. We've noticed also that Wedhosts server is build built (their shared hosting is built on 8CPU machine with average load 2.5 CPU)
We've migrated Carine's website from Wedhosts to our infrastructure and she is using now our hosting plan with NVMe disks (30MB/s transfer soft limit). We've set flexible limit of 3 CPU usage (on demand 6 CPU) and IOPS 2048. Each Serwer.io machine built contains minimum 24 CPU's and we have average load of 0.90. That gives plenty of resources for high-traffic clients websites.
Website Optimisation
We've provided full performance optimisation for WordPress. Total website size decreased from 6.83GB to 3.5GB without changing images quality. After that all images were manually optimised for speed (still keeping high quality) and we've added WebP format to serve website even faster. On Serwer.io we are using Litespeed Technology, so we've set proper caching for the website and turned on Redis cache for Carine's website. Last step was to serve her website using the latest PHP version 7.4 - cherry on the top. Of course we did custom optimisation config for JS, CSS and images with exclusion list to don't break the website. We've disabled Cloudflare. It's an amazing tool but at this point our WordPress hosting performs better without CloudFlare. There are some areas to be improved, however Carine's website is using not supported WordPress theme, so some technology tricks are not possible to apply. Final results below:
Why Serwer.io?
Since the switch to Serwer.io, Carine's page load speed times are now 9x faster comparing to Wedhosts. We have also reduced the number of headaches like redirects, https, refreshing caches, backups, automatic image optimisations etc. It wouldn't be possible to get fantastic page loading times with Carine's old hosting.
Serwer.io helps also to save money on hosting. Carine's new WordPress hosting plan is cheaper than Wedhosts. We really understands clients and WordPress. That's why we are here to help.
Ready to get started? Hundreds of clients use our infrastructure to help their business, including startups, high-traffic photography blogs, online shops... See our plans.
WordPress Heading Tags – How to use them
Time to spread some word. Hopefully this will be helpful to all WordPress users. Lately I’ve seen some bad trend in WordPress SEO. People don’t know what is the purpose of Headings in WordPress… actually in whole HTML structure (the code of your website – big thing). Understanding WordPress heading tags and how to use them correctly makes a huge difference in content quality. By using Heading Tags, we differentiate our web page content. Use heading tags for headings only not for making Text Large or Bold! When used correctly it adds semantic meaning, helps with accessibility and can boost your search engine rankings however when used wrongly it can cause problems for your users and search engine rankings.
What are Heading Tags?
<h1> to <h6> tags are used to define Heading on a web document. According to W3Schools – <h1> </h1> is the first heading which is critical for any web document and <h6></h6> is the least important heading that holds very less importance in a web document as compared to other heading tags.
h1 tag should be main headings which if followed by further h2, h3 and so on. The <h1> is usually the boldest one whereas <h6> font size is smallest.
To access it, users have to click on the furthest button on the right that says Toolbar Toggle. Only then does the second row of buttons appear.
So, what’s the big deal?
Sometimes little things can turn into big things. Lately when I was optimising some of yours websites I’ve seen some funny things. You guys were making simple mistakes; here they are:
Using the heading tags because it matches the font size. Yup, that’s the reason number one. Common mistake for newbies to WordPress and CSS. People who don’t understand their theme and CSS properly will sometimes avoid using a particular heading because it doesn’t match the appearance that they’re looking for in their design. Quite often this will be because an h1 is too big for what they want so they might use an h2 or h3.
Using Multiple h1’s on the same page. The <h1> tag should be used to markup your heading for the current page and should come at the top of your content. If you have a page which contains information about Wedding photography in London then it would make sense to use your h1 with that text within the element:
<h1>Wedding Photography in London</h1>
But if you have another piece of content which went into detail about Wedding photography in Liverpool then you should have a separate document with that text as the <h1>. In a situation where you’re only briefly touching on each subject and there wouldn’t be enough content to justify breaking it into separate pages then it would make more sense to have a document structure like this:
<h1>Wedding Photography in UK</h1> <h2>Wedding Photography in London</h2> <p>Content about wedding photography in London</p> <h2>Wedding Photography in Liverpool</h2> <p>Content about wedding photography in Liverpool</p>
Not using heading tags at all. I’ve also seen the opposite happen on websites, whereby instead of misusing the heading tags, people simply don’t use any at all. This is quite often the case when users doesn’t understand the purpose of the heading element but this is an easy problem to fix. All content should be headed up with an h1 tag so adding that to the beginning of the content is a great start.
Heading Tags Provide SEO Value
Visitors of the website aren’t the only ones that benefit from headings. Search engines also scan your site for headings. Using H1-H6 tags shows them how different blocks of content are connected and stand in relation to one another. That’s also the reason why headings are usually configured to get consecutively smaller with higher numbers. Apart from that, Google will try to use the content of your headings to understand the topic of your writing better. That’s why SEO plugins such as Yoast WordPress SEO routinely check whether your keyword or phrase appears inside heading tags. The reason is simple: Search engines want you to create content that is pleasant to consume for the visitor they are sending your way. When you provide a scannable and logical structure, Google and their competitors will reward you for it.
Conclusion
- DO use only one H1 tag per page
- DO keep a logical heading structure
- DO include keywords in your headings
- DO NOT use heading tags for styling
- DO NOT apply heading tags to entire paragraphs
Learning to use WordPress heading tags correctly is essential for every blogger or website owner. It’s part of the basics for content creation, providing both readability for human visitors and important information for search spiders.
Using header tags will display your posts and pages in a structured and organised manner and show Google and other search engines that they are dealing with high-quality content.
Always think about your readers first and Google second
How do you use headings inside your content? Thoughts on the above? Please share in the comments!
How and why use Gmail with your own domain?
I remember when I purchased my domain name, tomphotography.co.uk, I’ve created an email address through my web hosting. It was in my domain, something like office@tomphotography.co.uk. Just normal email, but the problem was that the email interface (gui) was just awful. I couldn’t get used to that, it was very difficult to organise emails, all the time things got lost and it looked like it was from the 90’s. So I quickly configured this email address in my Mac Mail. That was a pain too, some weird smtp/pop3/imap server names, problems with secure connection, ports blocked or not working – what a mess!!! Then I moved to Gmail and ended up losing the professional “@tomphotography.co.uk” part of my email address. That’s it.
Business email through Gmail
After some time I realised I could have both! It was possible to use Gmail with a custom domain name! You can have your email like hello@tomrobak.com in Gmail within minutes. Brilliant solution for every business. That’s why I introduce to you G Suite or you can call it Google Apps for Work (old name).
G Suite is a set of intelligent apps including Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and more — designed to bring people together, with real-time collaboration built in from the start. And there’s a lot more on the way. When organisations break down silos, connect people and empower them to work together, they get the speed, agility and impact needed to compete in today’s market. When your business is powered with G Suite, information can flow easily between apps, devices, people and teams. Imagine the future of your business, if this was how it could be… But lets focus on Gmail in your domain.
5 reasons why you might want to use Gmail with your custom domain
- Security and SPAM protection. Yes, this is what I love the most in Gmail. Lets be honest, how many times you hear from your clients that they didn’t receive your email huh? Or how many people filled a contact form on your website but you didn’t receive it (with this you actually won’t know unless your contact form saves enquiries into database). Here is my the biggest YES. Start using Gmail in your domain for that reason.
- Having own domain in email address makes you appear more professional. I used to use “tom.robak@gmail.com,” which gets the point across, but doesn’t execute the same level of professionalism that a branded email address. I mean, you’re promoting your business, not Gmail’s.
- Let’s face it, most of the email software included in your web hosting really sucks. It appears to have been built in the 90’s.
- Gmail is kind of awesome. I’ve tried several other email providers like outlook.com, Yahoo, HotMail, ZOHO and I always go back to Gmail. I appreciate its clean interface and the way it’s organised. I also love that I can use Google Drive 30GB, which really helps when working with clients. Plus the configuration in Mail App is so easy. Just Add Email, enter your email address and password – most softwares recognise it as Gmail and do all configuration for you. The easiest setup ever.
- Built-in chat: text, voice, or video. With just one click, you can chat in Gmail with the people you already email or reply to emails by chat. You can even talk face to face with Gmail voice and video chat. All you need is a webcam and mic.
How to configure Gmail with your domain
- I reckon you have your domain already, if not, purchase one. I purchase all of mine from GoDaddy.com.
- Go to G Drive website.
- Click “Get Started” and then enter your basic information in the steps that follow in order to create your account.
- Once your account will be created you need to sign to your new email.
- Follow the steps on the screen
- Verify your domain. You have some options here. In my opinion the easiest one is to upload HTML file to your hosting. However for you the easiest way might be adding meta tag to your WordPress via theme or via plugin Head Meta Data. It’s easier than it sounds, I promise!
- Now you can confirm this step and go to editing MX records. This is also easy step. Here is the manual how to setup MX records for specific hosts. You could always ask your hosting support to do that for you.
- Last configuration step – Verify Domain and Set Up Email
- Once you are done, login to G Suite Admin and update your billing details.
- That’s it! You’re done! Wahoo!
If you have any questions about using Gmail with a custom domain, feel free to leave a question in the comments!
Missing the Underline and Justify Buttons in WordPress
In WordPress 4.7, the core developer team decided to make various changes in the editor (TinyMce WYSIWYG), including removing the underline and justify buttons and rearranging some of the toolbar buttons. If you don’t want to change the way you edit your content and/or don’t want to confuse your customers with a new contribution interface, there is a simple and lightweight plugin that will set the editor style back to its previous state.
3 options are available for the Editor style:
Installation
- Upload and activate the plugin (or install it through the WP admin console)
- Go to Settings -> Writing and select the option you want under “Editor style”.
- That’s it, it is ready to use!
Download
This plugin is available on WordPress.org -> https://wordpress.org/plugins/re-add-underline-justify/
If this article helped you, please consider sharing it or leaving a comment with your experience. It may help other people!
Why SEO costs?
Despite the constant increase in customer awareness about SEO, many of them are still asking "why SEO is expensive?". Let me start off by saying that everyone out there has a different definition of what “expensive” is. Some people will say that paying £300 for website SEO is “expensive” while others will pay more than £2,000 for website SEO before they consider this being “too expensive”. So the term “expensive” is relative. Below I present a list of several key aspects of the SEO, which affect the fact that website positioning is effective, reliable and expensive:
Experience and knowledge
More successfully completed SEO projects, then bigger experience that allow us to perfectly optimise websites for Google. However, SEO industry is very dynamic. It's necessary to update knowledge and learn more to satisfy future clients.
Software
There are numerous tools that helping us to analyse website, competitors or to plan SEO. More likely they are pricey and paid monthly. However, they deliver important data that in connection to our knowledge can be successfully used to build a good SEO.
Outsourcing
Depend on the project, not all tasks are done by us. If it comes to writing articles, creating infographics or doing some long term marketing we must outsource them to better manage our timeline.
Analytics, monitoring and reporting
Thanks to website monitoring and analysing our strategy we can achieve all goals easier. It's also important to do reports for clients so they can know the stats.
SEO Warehouse
It's simply keeping hosting, domain names, websites, develop versions that helps during the SEO process.
Others
Boring list of technical bits... But without that, every project we did would take much more time...
Who uses WordPress
WordPress allows you to easily add new content and build new pages for your website. However, WordPress has evolved into becoming a platform to build sophisticated, robust websites. It is a rare beast which gets better every update. You have endless possibilities to make it look like you want (via WordPress themes) and do anything you want (via WordPress plugins.) WordPress is extremely powerful. Because WordPress is so flexible you can build almost anything. For use WordPress is the Swiss Army Knife of web design and SEO.
We are focused on wedding photographers, simply because of our business experience. But WordPress is used by many companies. Here is a list of Super Famous Brands Using WordPress:
BBC AMERICA
Mercedes Benz
Time
Beyonce
James Bond 007
Vogue
Sony Music
Glamour Italy
PlayStation
Surprised with above brands? Comment below great example of WordPress websites. Let's talk about WordPress vs other competitors...
5 Minute Guide to GDPR for Wedding Photographers
It’s almost like it’s 1999 again and the Y2K bug – except this time you have Facebook and everyone and ramming GDPR compliance at you. The scare tactics are working - people are running around dazed and confused. The headlines of fines of 4% of global turnover and 20M euro fines are enough to scare anyone – but, what is the risk to a small business owner – and what should us wedding photographers be doing?
For those who have managed to ignore it so far. The General Data Protection Regulation is a set of legislation introduced across Europe to harmonise privacy and data handling rules across the EU/EEA. It is going to be adopted into UK Law on 25th May 2018 – so not that far away! In short, the regulations tighten up how businesses are using people’s personal data within the business and introduce greater transparency to how people can see what a company is doing with their personal data.
The GDPR is not something that you do once and forget it – and as a business owner, it means understanding the processes and procedures within your business and what that means to the handling of your data. GDPR affects several areas, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to address the specific areas that apply to us as photographers and what we can do quickly to start to move towards compliance
Our Privacy policies
Add a GDPR compliant Privacy notice to our website.
This website provides a great privacy policy generator for your website and allows you to customise the policy based on what external services you use. You will need to review and make some grammatical changes to the output from this!
Send a copy of our privacy policy to our mailing list subscribers
We need to inform our subscribers how we processing/storing and managing their data. At the same time, we could also ask them to confirm their consent to whether they still want to remain on the list and being specific about what we are going to send them (see below for more on this)
The econsultancy website provides some great examples of privacy notices and how this can be displayed and used.
Telling our clients about 3rd party suppliers
In reality, we'll probably deal with people who visit our website and people such as our clients in a slightly different way. We could have two privacy policies - but that's just confusing so we could just combine everything into one privacy policy that addresses everything our potential clients/subscribers/clients could want to know. So, if we are using Studio Ninja/Tave to hold our client's data, if we are using Google/Office 365 for our emails (as personal data may in emails etc), Mailchimp, The Image Salon. Any 3rd party that we use to store or process personal data with, should be in our privacy policy.
Consent
As I mentioned previously, the need for consent in certain activities has become greater under the GDPR. Mainly around the grounds of mailing lists etc, we need to start being more granular with the consent and transparent as well. Again the econsultancy website has some good details in this area.
We also need to remove any implied consent clauses from our terms and conditions. for most of us, we have a clause in our contracts that says to our clients that we may use the images for marketing purposes. Under GDPR, this isn’t allowed anymore. Consent must be explicit and granular, and we must have a record of when we obtained that consent. This means that we can’t bury a consent clause in the small print.
So, in essence, this means taking the consent clause out of our terms and conditions and making it clear to our clients what we are asking:
I/we consent to the following use of the wedding photographs:
On the website of Fred Bloggs Photography Yes/No
On the Social media (Facebook/Instagram/Twitter) Yes/No
In print for promotion material e.g. brochures Yes/No
Signed ________ Date
The above example breaks down how exactly we want to use the images and gives the couple control over what they are agreeing to (btw, you can’t make consent a condition of the contract). In this example, if we wanted to use images on a wedding blog, we’d have to ask the couple later to obtain their consent for that.
In terms of our marketing, we can’t automatically add people to our mailing lists – so just because someone has sent us an enquiry on our website, that doesn’t mean that they want to receive our newsletter.
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IT Security
This is a mammoth topic in its own right but basically, the GDPR says that we should be adhering to best practice in terms of information security. A strong password, two-factor authentication on email and online services were available, keeping our websites up to date and things like WordPress plugins are up to date. We have backups which are secured, we’re using encryption where necessary on devices like laptops and USB drives. We’re transferring data to 3rd parties in a secure manner e.g. over https/sftp.
And Finally
These areas cover the majority of what first steps we should be doing as photographers right now. As part of the ongoing work we need to be looking at areas such as data retention, and identifying how we would report on or delete our clients data if they should ask us to (covered under subject access requests and the right to be forgotten), however, if we’re using a CRM system that is compliant with GDPR then this becomes straightforward.
There are some aspects of our photography which fall into a grey area – such as consent from 3rd parties in our photographs – as technically we can’t rely on our couples do give consent on their behalf. The ICO says that is okay we don’t need consent– some lawyers argue we need consent – other say we don’t. Along with GDPR, there are also changes to the PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation) which also have an image on some of our activities – but that needs another post to delve into that.
For us as small businesses, the risk doesn’t come from the massive fines – it potentially comes from people trying their luck complaining to the ICO that their privacy has been breached in some way. If we can show that we are doing our best to be compliant and working towards addressing any gaps, it’s unlikely that any small business will face large fines.
So, don’t panic, read around the subject and start to understand it. The ICOs website is very good and provides great examples. GDPR is a good thing moving forwards and highlighting a lot of issues that business haven't addressed under the current Data Protection Regulations. Every business needs to look at the GDPR and be pragmatic in their approach to it, and the risk level that they want to run. A wedding photographer is not handling the same volume of personal data as say a large charity - but doesn't mean we should ignore it. Start putting a plan in place to address what you need to do and work through it. GDPR is here to stay so building compliance into your business is the way to go.
We would love to hear your thoughts on GDPR. Are you ready?
Resources
The UK ICO
Website Privacy Policy Generator
Email campaign consent examples
Example privacy notices
Complete solution to increase the WordPress Memory Limit
We have all seen it at some point. A common error in WordPress is a PHP memory limit error. This happens when WordPress doesn't have enough memory to achieve what you want. It can be caused by poorly written plugins that will continue to run a procedure until the installation runs out of memory and of course WordPress memory consumption increases with the amount of modifications. Simply the more plugins you install and keep activated , the more memory power your website needs.
As a first step of solving this, you need to know where you are at. It's usually the best way to see your hosting memory allowance. Install a free plugin WP-ServerInfo. It adds a new dashboard widget, that also displays the amount of memory allocated.
Once you have determined your initial value, you should do the following to increase the Memory Limit. First of all add these lines to your wp-config.php file.
define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );
define( 'WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT', '384M' );
What numbers you put in is up to you. WordPress memory can be different to the server – you need to set this regardless of server memory settings. Me, I like to think big. However do not overdo it and put in 2048MB. Try to stay under 512MB. Then check again via the WP-ServerInfo Widget. All good? Good. If it still says the same value (which has never occurred to me), then try editing you .htaccess file as a last resort, by adding this line to it:
php_value memory_limit 256M
However this will be useless if they are overwritten by the php.ini. You must also edit your php.ini. The php.ini is a file your hosting provider makes available for you. You cannot edit it from your WordPress installation. If you don't have php.ini file please contact your hosting support. If your hosting doesn't support memory allowance more than 96MB you need to consider changing hosting provider asap. If you have access to your php.ini file, change the line (if your line shows 64M try 128M):
memory_limit = 128M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB)
Good luck and as always: Backup your files before you attempt any of this.