Latest posts
#flattenthecurve – Flax Digital faces COVID-19
Today the World Health Organisation declared that novel coronavirus, aka COVID-19, has officially reached pandemic status. By now you’ve quite likely seen this graph, or something like it: Early containment, largely through isolation and quarantine measures, slows down the virus enough that health services can cope. This in turn means that the mortality rate drops from around 4% to under 1%. (Read more about these figures.) Flax Digital will be going 100% remote as of next week As a tech-oriented…
Read More »
One day SEO training comes to Ballarat
A full day Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) training workshop, taught by Ballarat’s foremost SEO expert, Alex Bayley (ex-Google San Francisco) is coming to Ballarat on 29 April 2020. Crammed with engaging, hands-on activities, live demonstrations, and deep insight into the search industry, this training will give you the skills you need to see your website’s traffic take off! The benefits of SEO Build brand awareness and exposure Gain more traffic to your website or local shopfront Increase sales and leads via…
Read More »
Celebrating Ballarat Buzz’s growth
Ballarat Buzz passed a couple of milestones recently, gaining 1,000 likes on Facebook and over 7,000 monthly unique visitors to the website itself. Ballarat Buzz launched in October 2018, offering free event listings for Ballarat and the surrounding area. Since then we’ve had: 66,041 unique visitors (that’s almost 2/3 the total population of Ballarat!) 910 people subscribed to our weekly “What’s on” newsletter 70 newsletters sent (every Thursday afternoon except over the Christmas break) 585 events listed by the community…
Read More »
A lesson from nine weeks in Facebook jail: diversify your digital marketing mix
Are you one of those business owners who rely on Facebook for all of your digital marketing? You have a Facebook page, an Instagram account (owned by Facebook) and you engage with your clients only via Facebook. What would happen if one day you found yourself locked out of Facebook, sent to so-called Facebook jail? Indefinitely. Can’t happen to me, you say. Well, it can. It happened to me, for no apparent reason that I’ve been able to fathom then,…
Read More »
Increase your profits with SMART website planning: FREE download!
As a small business owner, website planning may not be top of your priority list for the New Year, but it should be! You’ve probably spent the last week of two making plans, setting up new projects and dreaming about the future. But has your website been part of your planning? All too often, a website is seen as something static, like a brochure, and once it’s put in place it’s largely ignored until it’s outdated. But a website can…
Read More »
Website speed worries? You might need better hosting.
As WordPress experts, we deal with some pretty beefy WordPress websites with lots of custom functionality. We’re also experts in making sure that, no matter how complex the site, your website speed and performance are taken care of. Clients often come to us concerned that their website is running slowly. Often, they are running a complex business with many digital applications, and aren’t aware that their commodity website hosting just isn’t up to it. What is commodity web hosting? Most…
Read More »
Website Wednesdays: WordPress Security
What would you do if your website was hacked? Here at Flax Digital we regularly review client sites for security issues and have helped a number of businesses deal with everything from malware warnings to complete takeovers of their sites. A well configured and maintained website can resist almost anything, and recover easily from the rest. But how can you be sure your site is set up this way? Join our website security workshop In July’s Website Wednesday workshop, we’ll…
Read More »
WordPress security: why regular software updates should be your top priority
Why you should care about website security You have a beautiful website. It generates sales, bringing a steady flow of customers to your business, filling your diary with bookings or filling your visitors’ shopping carts with your goodies. And then one day, you don’t. Instead you have a flashing sign “Hacked by Robot.team!”, or worse, it’s full of porn. Either way it’s a disaster. If you’re lucky, you have a back up and can restore your site with a singe…
Read More »
Website Wednesdays: Facebook – Friend or Foe?
If you’ve been paying attention to the media over the last couple of years, you’ll have heard plenty about Facebook. You’ll have heard that they’ve had massive security breaches, they’re implicated in election fraud, that they unethically experimented on users to make them feel bad, that they practice political censorship, that their ad targeting is discriminatory, that they ban user accounts for spurious reasons with no appeal, that they condone and even cause hate and violence, or that even as…
Read More »