This week has been a busy one here at the JamJo HQ. WordPress has been the target of a global brute-force attack. Sites across the world are being affected. Even the major news agencies such as BBC are covering it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22152296 BBC actually explain the attack quite well. So what is your hosting company doing about it. Well here at JamJo we take security very seriously, we try to prevent these attacks from effecting our network as much as possible. Most hosts tend to rely on their firewalls and not focus on the hosted application itself, WordPress in this case. The founder of WordPress: Matt Mullenweg, has confirmed that plugins should NOT be used in this situation: Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP [...]
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RSS feed for this sectionJamJo Backups your website via Amazon S3
Most website owners don’t even ask their web host how their website and ultimately their data is backed up and they certainly do not ask how their website can be recovered in the event of an unthinkable disaster. Why don’t people ask, well because most cheap web hosts state on their websites that your website is “backed up”, but on the same server as your website!! So it is backed up right? Well it might not be backed up in the best possible way and let us explain why. Typically your website backups are done a few ways and we have seen them all here at JamJo. Our backup option here at JamJo is perhaps the least well advertised out there and its because its extremely thorough and a very [...]
Mobile Website and Responsive Website Design
Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning —across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones). This is the Wiki definition and its a good starting point to explain this post. More than ever we have been asked about mobile versions of websites and luckily JamJo is uniquely positioned to help because all our designs try to incorporate the best of responsive design techniques. 1. Responsive Design A responsive website is basically a website which can adapt itself on different screens regardless of the device you are playing it on. You build one single responsive website and it resizes itself accordingly. This has a number [...]
Happy Crimbo from JamJo
Happy Crimbo from JamJo The end of the year is nigh. And your trusty JamJo are signing off for a few days to sip mulled wine and down mince pies (not too many tho, we don’t want to be adopting the shape of that poor fella in the header above!). We had a great year and tis time to hang our pixel tool belt on the wall for a wee bit. 2012 saw us launch our Managed WordPress Solution. And it’s been taken too like the proverbial duck to water (We launched quite a few new projects around it with more to come in the new year). The feedback has been good and we’re going to continue to develop on and refine that solution in the new year. 2013 will [...]
WordPress Hosting: What are the differences between JamJo and normal hosting companies?
This is a question we get asked repeatedly by clients before joining up with the JamJo team, after people join up it all becomes very clear of course, so lets try and explain why the web is moving to this space of managed website updates on a month to month basis. The following is a typical question we get… info@jamjo.ie “My understanding is unless I want to change data or something structural on the website, there is no support or maintenance or security required, beyond what a normal hosting service would provide anyway. Is my assumption correct? “ quick answer is no and here is why. JamJo provides Managed WordPress Hosting, which means you (the customer) give up control over things like direct system access, hosting configuration, and the ability [...]
WordPress Security: Is your theme design secure?
As all of our clients know, we take security pretty serious and we are always aiming to do better on the security stakes. We have learned from the past ourselves with our own personal web projects how important security can be. It’s the reason we are so passionate about trying to keep every website we come into contact with up to date with our Managed WordPress Hosting plans. We work very closely with Sucuri Security, a company that monitors our client websites and keeps them free of Malware each month. We pro-actively run a Sucuri Scan each and every month on all our customers websites and if we find anything we jump in and clean it up like it was one of our own. If you want us to run [...]
JamJo in the Irish Examiner
Have you heard of Google Business Photos? It’s basically Google Maps with Street View except now you get to walk in off the street and view the interiors of buildings. (Don’t worry not residential properties!) Pretty sweet if you’re a restaurant or pub for example. Your customers can walk around, explore, and interact with your business with a 360-degree, interactive tour. See it in action here for the Market Lane Restaurant off Oliver Plunkett Street. (It’s making me hungry!) We recently teamed up with a photographer who’s offering this Google Business Photo service. He’s name is John Roche and he specialises in these Google Business Photos panoramic photography to capture the inside of your business. He was featured in the Irish Examiner last Friday and JamJo got a wee mention… [...]
Some new work
Your ever trusty JamJo have been busy in the web mill of late. We’ve launched 3 new websites that you can feast your eyes on at the links below. First up is Supernova, Corks premiere location for Children’s Birthday Parties and Adventurous Play. Visit the website here. Next up is Working4Talent. It’s an EU project under the INTERREG IVC Programme, funded by the European Regional Development Fund. Visit the website here. And finally we have Victoria Mills. Spacious student apartments near UCC. Visit the website here.
Client Spotlight: University College Cork
This month in the JamJo client spotlight is University College Cork. UCC Accommodation & Student Activities to be precise. JamJo took on website design duties for the Student Accommodation website last year. Give the site a wee visit over here: www.uccaccommodation.ie We also got our web design mittens into the UCC Societies website but that’s for another day! The website is built using WordPress software. Great for dynamic content. It needed to be user friendly (updated regularly with new properties) and search engine friendly (big brother Google is watching!). The design and identity? Well, we were required to diligently follow the visual identity guidelines on this one. The U.C.C. crest reproduces nicely in black and white so we went there first and introduced a dash of red for navigation and [...]
JamJo features you may not know about!
Managed Website Updates 1. WordPress core updates become available regularly. Almost every popular CMS releases security updates and major version updates regularly at least once a quarter. We keep your site secure without you having to think about it. Whenever WordPress issues a security update, we test it, then proactively apply it to your site. 2. A website will typically have some plugins installed on it, sometimes even up to 10 to 20 plunging installed. Just like WordPress itself regular updates will become available, you will need to test each one, then upgrade each one and then test some more. Just leave JamJo look after this for you and each month we will search for new releases of all your plugins and proactively apply them to your site. 3. WordPress [...]
