Posts by Alla Ollen-Bittle

Google is making changes to analytics and this will affect your website and tracking. Google will be ending tracking with Universal Analytics by July 1, 2023 You may start seeing some notices regarding this from Google. What does this mean to you? This means that if your website uses Google Analytics and you want to continue tracking visitors, you will need to make the switch. You can make the switch yourself if analytics is set up in your own Google account. You will still need to send us the new GA tracking number – ie G-ABCDEF7X999, so we can add …

In spite of best efforts, sometimes unforeseen issues arise with hosting and email. To improve communications with you, we have set up a system status page. Please bookmark it so you can check the page, for any known email or hosting issues. We will post status updates here: https://cmswebsolutions.statuspage.io/ and will share whatever information we have, so you can be up to date. If you don’t see the page updated, it may be because we are not aware of an issue. So if you notice it before we do, please don’t hesitate to contact us as you normally do. This …

It’s Thanksgiving and we have so much to be grateful for. We are thankful to all the essential workers including: all Heath Care Providers, Truck Drivers, Grocery Store, Drug Store, Gas Station,  Government employees, Maintenance workers and the list goes on. We are also so thankful for the creativity of many of our clients adapting to these changing times in order to be able to continue to serve their customers and the community. It hasn’t been easy. Some of these adapting measures include: Van Belle Flowers & Garden Center creating a temporary drive through for ordering and pickups of certain …

CMS Web Solutions continues to monitor the Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Canada and around the World. Since SARS, CMS Web Solutions has been gradually making our business and infrastructure more resilient. Our top priorities are the health and safety of our team members and support partners, providing mission-critical services to our clients. Infrastructure support was designed around a remote-based workforce, one that encourages team members to work from home office locations. At this time, all CMS Web Solutions staff are working from home. Our Port Perry head office is CLOSED. All Canadian client websites are hosted and backed up in Canada. …

Don’t be fooled by domain renewal scams which you may receive by postal letter as a “Domain Name Expiration Notice”or by email. By mail they come from iDNS Canada, which has also been known as Domain Registry of Canada (DROC). These notices look very legitimate and even provide a return envelope and you can actually get to a website. They prey on domain owners who are conscientious about keeping their domains renewed, but because renewal is annual, the domain owner may not realize / recognize that this is not the Registrar that they registered their domain with. This is referred …

Google Warned Us and they are on a Roll: Back in 2016 Google warned us and we warned you, that your website needed to be mobile friendly or your rankings would suffer.  Google warned us that they would be switching from a desktop focussed index to a mobile-first index and it’s happening now. Below is an excerpt of the confirmation that Google is sending to our Webmaster tools for all accounts. Mobile-first indexing enabled for https://cmswebsolutions.com This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the …

Important Reminder from Google: Review your Data Retention Settings before they take affect on May 25th, 2018! Effective May 25th, 2018 Google is changing the data retention controls of your Google Analytics. If Google Analytics is set up on your own account (as is the case with most of our clients) then you would have or should have already received reminders about this. By default, Google sets the User and Event data to expire in 26 months. This can be changed to: 14 months 26 months 38 months 50 months Do not automatically expire Should you require other settings you …

Starting in April 2015 Google wanted your website to be more mobile friendly and if it wasn’t they started penalizing non-mobile friendly websites, on their search engine, when visitors searched from a mobile device. (Google article here) “The search engine already promotes sites that work well on mobile devices over ones that don’t, a change introduced in April 2015”. In typical Google fashion, they are signalling that they will be taking mobile search even further…very soon. Google will be switching from a desktop focussed index to a mobile-first index. “Google is fully splitting its search index into two distinct versions: a rapidly updated …

It used to be that we would get frantic calls: “My web designer has gone out of business … help!” The seasons have changed and the current call of the wild, from those business owners that like to live dangerously, seems to be like this:  “My free (or purchased) website theme isn’t working for me. Can you help me with it?” We don’t work with template themes (free or purchased) for a variety of reasons.  In the past, we have tried to work with themes that include excess code and plugins that cause security issues. Hacking to work around the …

Sharing information on social media networks and blogging have become increasingly popular in recent years.  In the past we have talked about Social Media Communication and Online Marketing, but in this post we’ll talk about the reasons to add a blog to your website. 4 reasons to add a blog to your website: It’s a way of keeping your audience aware of news and changes in your industry. You have lots of knowledge to share and sharing your knowledge in a blog can help position you as an expert in your field. This will add to your credibility and encourage customers to do …