The latest from Flax Digital's blog
PHP 7.2 update for all WordPress maintenance clients
PHP is the programming language that WordPress is written in. Every website we manage is built on PHP. The developers of this software have announced that as of today, versions of PHP older than 7.0 will not be receiving any updates, not even security patches. Old PHP versions mean your website could get hacked PHP 7.0 was released in December 2015 (3 years ago) and PHP 5.6, still used by many websites, was released in August 2014. If your website…
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Small Business Summer Special
Summer can be a quiet time for a lot of small businesses as our customers take time off work and go away on holidays. This also makes it an excellent time for you to work ON your business rather than IN your business, so activities such as business development and general house-keeping can finally take centre stage. This is the perfect time to get your bookkeeping up to date, develop new products or services, or get your digital marketing sorted…
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WordPress 5.0: Big changes are coming!
You might have heard that WordPress 5.0 is just around the corner. WordPress initially announced that the release date would be November 19th, but after more beta testing that date has been pushed back a few weeks. WordPress 5.0 includes a new editing experience for WordPress, called Gutenberg. Gutenberg introduces a block-based way of editing WordPress pages and posts, so you insert blocks of content such as paragraphs, quotes, images, maps, and so on. Plugins can provide more complex blocks,…
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Flax Digital is proud to sponsor Ballarat’s Frolic Festival
Ballarat’s Frolic Festival is an LGBTQ+ event running from November 8th-14th this year. Founded in 2017, it’s a fantastic community event bringing together a diverse selection of Ballarat’s queer community. This year, Flax Digital are proud to be Rainbow Sponsor of Frolic Festival. As part of our sponsorship, we’re providing web hosting, WordPress maintenance, email marketing, and other digital marketing services. We’re delighted to be working with Frolic Festival and we hope you’ll check out their website and attend their…
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WordPress Tips: Declutter Your Dashboard
If you have a WordPress website, you might be overwhelmed each time you login and see everything on your dashboard. Welcome, Quick Post, At a Glance, WordPress events around the world… what is all this, and why are you seeing it? If you’re like most people, you probably just ignore it. I’m going to show you how to make your WordPress dashboard actually useful! It’s the simplest trick, but I guarantee it will improve your quality of life. How to…
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Web Design vs Web Development: What’s the Difference?
A lot of people ask if Flax Digital does web design. The answer’s a little complicated, so here’s our explanation of the difference between website design and website development. What does a web designer do? A web designer has a background in graphic design. They may have studied visual arts, may have a background in design or marketing, or might be self-taught. A web designer specialises in: developing a “look” for your brand creating custom art such as logos making…
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Flax Digital ❤️ WordPress
Flax Digital are WordPress specialists. We do almost all our work with this amazing platform, because we think it’s the best there is for our customers – both here in Ballarat, and around the world. WordPress powers more websites than any other platform Not only does WordPress power 26% of the world’s websites, it’s used by some huge businesses, from the BBC to Time Magazine to Beyoncé! WordPress is a solution that will grow with you, no matter how big…
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Reflecting on 2017: How Has Your Website Performed This Year?
How is it mid-December already? And yet here we are approaching the end of the year, and in no time we’ll be thinking about new year’s resolutions for 2018. Before we do that, let’s take some time to reflect on 2017 and what we achieved. We’ve worked with lots of businesses in the last year and we’re proud to have helped them launch new websites, improve their digital strategy, or increase their search traffic. We hope it’s been a great…
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Business directories and SEO – what’s legit?
Let’s say it up front: business directories are often spammy One of the most important ranking factors in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is incoming links from other websites, also known as backlinks. But not all backlinks are created equal. Bad backlink practices can be seen as spam, and many businesses get themselves in trouble by buying into SEO schemes that don’t follow Google’s guidelines for links. In particular, Google’s Webmaster guidelines forbid: Buying or selling links that pass PageRank (i.e. are not “nofollow”)…
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