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Adding new email accounts and email aliases to your domain

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If you are hosting your e-mail with us you can easily setup new email accounts or aliases.

Generally speaking you should set up one email account per real person, and then use aliases for generic terms for example [email protected]  An alias is an email address that receives emails and redirects it to a full email account.

When your domain was set up on Locally you should have received an email containing your master account name and password.

Follow the instructions for logging in to your control panel using your master username and password.

The main options you will need to use on your control panel are

1. Edit Users

and

2. Edit Mail Aliases

Edit Users

This is where you can add, change and delete email accounts.  When you set up an email account you can control individually the amount of disc quota each account has, if you have many individual accounts you may want to set this up to stop one account using up all the space.

Edit Mail Aliases

This is where you can add, change and delete email aliases

You will find that at least 4 standard aliases have been setup and set to forward to the email you first provided to us, you can change where there are forwarded too.  The aliases abuse, hostmaster, postmaster and webmaster are pretty standard and you are advised to keep these aliases pointing to a working email account.

You can optional forward aliases to every one or just a list, and if you like you can add a courtsey auto response.

The number of email accounts or aliases may be limited by your plan.

Using the Canvas Slider

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Capture2The main Locally theme (canvas) has an in built slider that can be turned on or off for the front page only.

The switch for enabling the slider can be found in the easy edit customisation options for the theme.

The radio button ‘slider’ enables the slider, ‘static’ creates a single item slider useful to create a large image banner when sliding images are not appropriate, and ‘remove slider’ of course removes it.

Tick box options also displays the slider arrows (on each side) and/or slide buttons (clickable dots under the slides).

The slider works off pages or post that you have ticked to show on slider. This enables you to showcase pages or posts, if that is what you want.

The slider image is driven off the post’s featured image.Capture4 To get the best proportions it it often easier to resize the image to the right dimensions outside WordPress using an image editor, although WordPress media centre has the capability to change sizes, you may find that you get unexpected results, often ‘regenerating’ thumbnails will resolve that.

The appropriate featured image sizes are

  • Image only – 924 x 250 px  (example of static image with multiple photos combined here , example of full image sliding here where the text is part of the image )
  • Image with text on the right – 338 x 226 px

If you use ‘text only’ you will find embedded images are displayed , but great care needs to be taken to get the sizing right to avoid overflows.

Getting the style right can require a little bit of thought, and consider creating full size (924 x 250 px) images that are constructed from several images or where text is added using an image editor.

We have another feature, when using a full size image, to specify the link that the image will go to, this means that several images can point to the same content page, this is specified through the media centreCapture3

Remember a page doesn’t have to show on any navigation menu, so if you have three full width images, just create pages called Slider 1, Slider 2 & Slider 3 and set the featured image for each new page, don’t add these to any menus (or if your menus have auto-adding turned on, go and delete them from the menus)

There are some developments to the sider in the pipeline that will add addional features, such as selecting a % width for images and allowing different slide transitions such as fade-out/fade-in.

Selling Your Web Design Company or Website Portfolio

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Are you a freelance website designer or a small web design agency that wants to move in another direction?

Perhaps  you now have demanding job or your business has changed direction? Maybe you found that being a web designer just wasn’t right for you now, financially or personally? Maybe you are retiring?

Rather than leave your clients in the lurch, we would be very interested in taking them on and providing them ongoing support and hosting.  Rather than letting your clients fade away you could even end up with a small amount of cash in your pocket too.

Locally provides websites and hosting mainly for smaller UK businesses and primarily WordPress or OpenCart based solutions. We have a personal hands on approach to our clients, just like you would have had, so you can be confident your clients won’t feel abandoned by you.

We are happy to purchase small portfolios and even single sites. We are seeking web design clients and web hosting clients that would  normally be ‘full service’, i.e. they would not normally expect control panel access. We can assist with the migration too, we are very flexible.

In summary, if you need someone to look after your portfolio of web clients and for them to continue to get the personal service you were proud to give, then contact us and let’s talk.

Adding content & text to your website – getting started

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Deciding what text should go on your new website can be a frustrating & time consuming task.

If you find sometimes you can’t quite put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, & deciding what text needs to be on your website gives you cold sweats & sleepless nights, read on!

We’ve put together some pointers which help kick-start the process of creating good quality relevant content for your website.

Firstly, so you get the tone of your website correct, you need to decide who are your target audience – what type of visitor to your website do you imagine thinking, “hmm yes I need that service or product”.

Remember what are selling, you wouldn’t turn up to an interview in shorts & flip flops for an office job, likewise if your website gives the wrong impression of you or your products it will cost you business.

Below is a list of subject areas you may want to add to your website, some may be relevant to you, some not. It’s geared more towards businesses that offer services rather than products as we find people find it harder to sell themselves.

The list is not extensive and you should review your website content on a regular basis.

 

Home Page

–  Depending on what industry you’re in adding qualifications & membership to associations can give you credibility, likewise adding the address of where business is/will be registered (if you’re happy to put that on the website)

–  Contact details – make it easy for visitors to your website to contact you (if you want to be contacted!)

–  Where you are based and areas you cover

–  What type of work you’ve carried out – (domestic, commercial, industrial etc)

–  Examples of the work you have carried out.

–  Locations/areas of work, commercial, residential etc-

–  Previous clients & testimonials if possible.

 

Services Page

–  Pricing/Quote ( do you want to display pricing or give an indication, or ask to contact for a quote?)  

–  The type of services you can offer   

Under each service you are ideally looking for 100-200 words, detailing the standards it adheres to, how the work is carried out, servicing & and any other information you think will be useful/ required. 

The more information you can provide the more chances your website will be found online & it will give more creditability in the minds of the visitors to your website, this can always be built on over time

 

About

–  Your experience

–  When you qualified & what you qualified in

– Work Ethic – friendly, reliable, quality, safety etc.

–  Reputation – customer satisfaction etc.

 

Images

Images are key to any website as it can give your business a character that your potential customers can related to. If your target audience is more domestic you would likely do better if you upload pictures of yourself offering that personal touch, likewise if it was more industrial a more formal approach to images might be more suitable.

What’s key with any website is that you can add, delete, edit your own images and text with ease yourself.

Questions or Comments? – post them below!

Added features for the Simple Gallery

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The Simple Gallery, implemented in Locally, allows an easy way to add a group of pictures to your website, including ability to re-order and delete unwanted images.

We have just released three improvements to this feature

  1. Ability to set the size of the gallery thumbnail pictures the size for your site.  This is really useful if your pictures are mainly portrait or mainly landscape.
  2. Giving you the choice of placing the galley at the top of your page or at the bottom & giving a choice of three lightbox themes to display the expanded up images with.

These features are accessed through the advanced setting > default image settings, on your Locally dashboard.

Wordpress Media Settings

Web page design – creating columns in WordPress

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Using the standard WordPress visual editor can be a little tricky to design a web page that requires columns. It can be achieved using HTML, but that isn’t that helpful if you don’t have a reasonable understanding of HTML and just want to get your layout sorted. So we have created a set of shortcodes to help with this layout issue.

Shortcodes are special instructions enclosed in square brackets e.g. [shortcode]  and normally, when a shortcode effects an area of text or images, there is a terminating shortcode designated by a forward slash e.g. [/shortcode]

Shortcodes are used in the visual page or post editor but do not change the text in real-time, so you will need to use the preview mode to check the impact the shortcodes have.

The column short codes divide the post or page into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths our sixths.  Additionally the last column has to be designated as specifically as the last using the appropriate shortcode e.g. [[/two_third_last]]

Two Columns

Using the following shortcodes like this:

[[one_half]

Regal Development [/one_half]][[one_half_last]

Eve Tree Care [/one_half_last]]

Will produce an effect like this:

[one_half] 

Regal Development [/one_half][one_half_last]

Eve Tree Care[/one_half_last]

Three Columns

Using the following shortcodes like this:

[[one_third]  

Regal Development

[/one_third]][[one_third]  

Eve Tree Care[/one_third]][[one_third_last]

Surrey Lawncare[/one_third_last]]

Will produce an effect like this:

[one_third] 

Regal Development[/one_third][one_third] 

Eve Treecare [/one_third][one_third_last] 

Surrey Lawn Care[/one_third_last]

There are multiple combinations of columns & widths that you can achieve.

The full list of column shortcodes are as follows:

[[one_half][/one_half]]

[[one_third][/one_third]]

[[one_fourth][/one_fourth]]

[[one_fifth][/one_fifth]]

[[one_sixth][/one_sixth]]

[[two_third][/two_third]]

[[three_fourth][/three_fourth]]

[[two_fifth]]two_fifth]]

[[three_fifth][/three_fifth]]

[[four_fifth][/four_fifth]]

[[five_sixth][/five_sixth]]

[[one_half_last][/one_half_last]]

[[one_third_last]]one_third_last]]

[[one_fourth_last][/one_fourth_last]]

[[one_fifth_last][/one_fifth_last]]

[[one_sixth_last][/one_sixth_last]]

[[two_third_last][/two_third_last]]

[[three_fourth_last][/three_fourth_last]]

[[two_fifth_last][/two_fifth_last]]

[[three_fifth_last][/three_fifth_last]]

[[four_fifth_last][/four_fifth_last]]

[[five_sixth_last][/five_sixth_last]]