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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 …

Wasn’t that a historic couple of years! At CMS Web Solutions, we’ve been so impressed by our clients’ creativity and responses during this pandemic. Many didn’t change what they did, they changed how they did it. That opened new opportunities, new markets, new ways of running their organization. Big round of applause from us all here at CMS Web Solutions. Businesses don’t like surprises. We work extra hard to get ahead of issues, so our clients weren’t surprised. Most times, our clients have no idea what we do. But we thought we’d highlight five things that impact our clients. Our …

Want to know if your website is accessible or not?  One of the simplest ways to check is imagining you can’t use a mouse. Go to your website right now and try using only a keyboard to navigate. Use the tab key to move around. Go on, I’ll wait… Did you know where you were at all times? No? That means whoever built that website likely didn’t take accessibility into account. It’s a flag. It also means if you’re selling a product or service you may be excluding paying customers. And it could be even more serious. I had a …

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 …

Over the years we’ve had many clients asking us if they should continue buying Yellow Pages advertising. My answer is the same. Look at your websites visitor data and see how many visitors are coming directly from yellowpages.ca. Use the numbers to determine if it’s good value or not. This year I received a different call, not from a client, but a prospect out in the west coast. He asked if he left Yellow Pages could we ensure that his website still be found in Google for his business name? “Of course”, I said, “you don’t need them for your …

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 …

1.  Small-town customer care: It’s the little things that count Remember what it was like to call a company and get a live person you actually wanted to talk to? That’s us. Have a problem? We’ll fix it fast. Working with a boutique web development firm like CMS Web Solutions gives you some immediate advantages. Our goal is to ensure our family of clients feels looked after. You can ask us about whether mail addressed to your business is spam (and you do) and we are always happy to assist. We advise you when your email account is sending spam and …