Have you been keeping up with the latest news regarding Google and the persistent hacking coming from China?  It’s a big deal and certainly at the forefront of web and computer security in the news right now.  In fact, as of today, it looks like the U.S. government might even be providing some help from the NSA.  Google has even considered pulling out of China in a dramatic way.

Here’s the deal—if a company as big and well-protected as Google can be hacked, it really is just a matter of time before your open-source powered website could meet the same fate.

And who knows what the purpose will be.  It’s not likely that your website is going to be harboring any classified government secrets or anything, but that’s not the only thing hackers are after.

Your business might have proprietary information that you need to keep prying eyes away from.  A crazy, but hacking-proficient someone might be out there who wants to turn your website upside down for some reason or another.  Hackers might just want to install spyware on your website to steal private information or perform identity theft of your hard-earned customers.  Who knows.

Whatever the case may be though, one thing we can all agree on is that getting hacked is just not a very pleasant situation at all.

But What’s So Bad About Open Source Web Software?

Well, technically there’s really nothing wrong with open source software in general.  Some is coded quite securely for that matter.  But the bottom line is that if hackers can get away with repeatedly attacking Google’s systems for a good part of December, they can certainly get through the open source software you’re running, no matter how well it’s been written and implemented.

That said, there are a few solid reasons why running open source can put you at risk:

First of all, open source is just that…open.

Hackers practically have access to a complete encyclopedia worth of information on how it works and what security flaws have been identified and patched (as well as those that are still ripe and available for exploiting).

Secondly, open source software is a BIG target because it’s so widely used.

Let’s face it, if a hacker has the opportunity to exploit hundreds of thousands of sites with one “hack,” the chances are pretty big that they’re going to seize this opportunity rather than go after a single little website somewhere that’s running its own secure proprietary software.

And then there’s the updating issue.

We know for a fact that hackers go after open-source software so frequency because it’s such a large target market—and one that’s full of readily available information.  There are even communities of hackers that dedicate their efforts exclusively towards just one open source platform or another.  But even the sense of security that updates and patches provide is really just another falsehood—by the time the latest patch comes out (and if it ever actually gets installed…which is another huge issue), the hackers have already long since moved on to the next opportunity.  Retroactive open source software updates are simply too little, too late for eager hackers.

Here at Sleepless Media, we strongly encourage the use of custom-built software to run our clients’ websites and web applications.

Of course we’re proficient at developing incredibly secure software, but beyond this fact alone, it’s been proven time and time again that hackers simply ignore one-off professionally developed sites like this.  They’d rather achieve notoriety within their software-specific communities or go big time by targeting the widely deployed open-source software that so many websites are using these days.  Being a small fish in a really big pond has its benefits!

Let’s cut right to the point today.  Unlike opening up your word processing software or graphic design program and creating exactly what you have in mind, selecting from a plethora of hundreds of different attractive fonts to use, the way fonts work for your website is quite bit different.  In order to maintain compatibility across the widest variety of web browsers and devices possible, there are strict standards, rules, and guidelines that must be followed on the web.

This Current Practice Is Here To Stay.

Basically, even though new technologies for using different fonts in web design are on the brim of reality, for the near future, best practices will still demand the use of just one of a few web-safe fonts.  While the list is slightly different depending on PC vs. Mac use, the most commonly utilized web safe fonts include:

• Arial
• Helvetica
• Courier
• Georgia
• Lucida
• Tahoma
• Times
• Times New Roman
• Verdana
• And a few more…

Again, it’s slim pickin’s, but these fonts are considered to be universally safe to use in web design—meaning that they’ll render reliably (or at least similarly to how they’re supposed to appear) on almost all web browsers and devices.

The Upcoming Promise Of CSS3

There are some cool new features and capabilities coming forward with the advent of CSS3, including the ability to use a wide variety of fonts; the future of fonts in web design looks bright indeed!  But again, there’s a catch.  It’s great technology, but until it goes completely mainstream, which could take years and years, it’s not really all that reliable.

Of course, there are also a few other tools and techniques that can be used to “implant” a certain font you’d like to use onto a website.  The thing is, they’re just not going to work for everyone—in fact, they very well might not work for most.  For the time being, in order to be compatible with mainstream web browsers, it’s important to specify and design around the standardized list of fonts.

This isn’t to say that it’s not impossible to present new fonts on the latest compatible web browsers, it’s just that you’ve still got to use backup.  A designer doing so will have to plan, design, and fully test the compatibility of using a cutting-edge modern font option with ensuring scaled-back compatibility with older generation browsers.  It’s more work, more time, and naturally, more money.

Isn’t There A Better Way?

Unfortunately, right now there really isn’t.  Some will use graphics to present the fonts of their choice—and appearance-wise, this works great.  However, even though it’s perfectly okay to do in some circumstances, there are also several caveats to using graphic-based text components on a website.  Two of the main fallbacks include causing significant problems with Usability and SEO.

Fonts are important.  Typography has been a staple of graphic design (and the field’s ancestors) for hundreds of years.  Make it attractive and don’t clash by overusing fonts in your design, but also, keep it as simple as possible to be on the safe side.

WordPress seems to have become all the rage over the last year or so.  More and more businesses and organizations are turning to the open source web software platform to power their blogs and websites, and some are even using it as a full-fledged CMS (content management system).  And this is where the problem begins…

Now first things first, let’s make it clear that WordPress is pretty cool blogging software.  In fact, the blog you’re reading right this moment is powered on the back-end by WordPress.  The software was designed for blogs and it’s quite good at powering a blog with all of the right tools and features built right in.

But to use WordPress as a CMS to power an entire website—can this possibly be a good idea?  Unfortunately, the answer is, “No it’s not a very good idea at all!”

WordPress was designed to be blogging software, not CMS software.  Here are three specific examples:

1. WordPress is awfully “heavy.”

In other words, the software is loaded up with a feature set that is great for blogging.  But these features just kind of add extra baggage when it comes to using the system for CMS—they can really make a site sluggish.  Also, because of the extensive blogging feature set, the user interface is full of options and features that will only serve to confuse a CMS user whose primary goal is to add or update website content.  On the other hand, a well-designed CMS system is very clean, simple, and straightforward to use for even the novice user.

2. CMS requires more plug-ins.

To effectively use WordPress as a CMS requires the use of numerous plug-ins.  While using a couple of plug-ins is okay every once in awhile, the fact is that each different plug-in developed by different programmers with different skill sets interfaces in a different way with the blogging software and with other plug-ins that are installed.  The end result can be a compatibility nightmare—especially when a new release or update to WordPress comes out and all of the plug-in developers must scramble to get a new plug-in version together to be compatible.  We won’t even mention the plethora of potential security issues that arise from this scenario.

3. It’s not designed to organize large amounts of information.

Because WordPress was designed primarily to be blog software, it does great with categories and tags—the foundation of blog organization.  The problem with using it as a CMS for a larger website lies in the fact that it depends on the installed theme to establish a proper website navigation structure, and most available CMS themes just don’t handle the task very well at all.  Although it’s the standard for blogs, using time-based content presentation (where newest content forces older content down the list into obscurity) is not a good way to organize most website content.

Sure, go ahead and use WordPress to power your blog (or the blog portion of your website).  This is exactly what it was designed to do, and it works great for this purpose.  But be aware of its pitfalls and limitations before planning to deploy the popular blogging software as a full-fledged CMS.

SEO – The commonly used acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.”  Most often used to describe the practice of optimizing a website, through both on-site and external supporting factors, in order to increase the site’s ranking and prevalence in organic search engine listings for specified keywords and keyword phrase searches.

Organic Search – Organic search results refer to the search engine listings that are essentially free.  These are usually the main body of search results shown for any given search query, excluding the paid search results (PPC ads) shown on the side and/or above and below the main body of organic listings.

PPC – Stands for “Pay Per Click.”  This is a method of paid search engine advertising, wherein a website owner bids on ads pointing to their site that are to be shown within the search engine results pages (SERPs) when a certain term is searched for.  Each time a searcher clicks through via the ad, the bid-for or pre-specified amount is charged to the site owner’s PPC account balance.

CPC – This means “Cost Per Click.” CPC refers to the bid or specified cost for each time a visitor clicks through on a PPC ad to the website.

CTR – Stands for “Click Through Rate.”  Basically, CTR is the percentage or ratio of how many times a PPC ad is clicked on by searchers, compared to how many times it is shown or displayed.

SEM – Stands for “Search Engine Marketing.”  Basically, SEM is the practice of using SEO, PPC, and other forms of online search engine advertising and promotion to attract visitors to a website via the search engines.

Backlink – When another site links to your website, this incoming link to your site is referred to as a backlink.  Having quality backlinks that are both relevant and on-topic helps a website achieve better search engine rankings.

Link Popularity – This is basically a relative score of how many incoming backlinks a website has from other sites around the web.  Google PageRank is one popular and reliable measure of link popularity—although it does take into account additional relevancy factors beyond the sheer number of backlinks a site has.

Anchor Text – This is a word or phrase that is highlighted and selected to be linked to another web page or website.  In other words, when you link to another site or page, these are the words that a visitor would click on to visit that site or page.

Meta-tags – These are markups within the code of a website that include components such as title tags, header tags, descriptions, keywords, image titles, and so on.  Correct use of Meta-tags can effectively support a website’s search optimization strategy by providing helpful background details and clues to the search engines about what a web page is about and which parts of the page are intended to be most important.

SERP – Acronym standing for “Search Engine Results Page.”  When you perform a search on one of the search engines, the listings page that comes up for your search query is a SERP.

Search Engine Spiders – Search spiders—commonly referred to as search bots and sometimes as robots—are the programs that the search engines use to analyze and review your website to determine what it is about and how well it should be ranked within the search index.

Black Hat – Black hat is a term commonly used to describe using SEO tricks and techniques that are against the policies of the search engines or are in some other way against the best interest of the visitor (and are simply used to “trick” a searcher into visiting a site).  A few common black hat practices include doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing, and spamdexing.  The bottom line is to steer clear of any of these SEO methods—while they might work for a short-term boost of traffic, they are unethical and will eventually get a site banned or substantially penalized by the search engines.

White Hat – The polar opposite of black hat SEO is what we would call “white hat SEO.”  It is the practice of following the guidelines, policies, suggestions, and terms of service set forth by the search engine companies to maximize a website’s search performance by providing the search engines with exactly the information they want to see in a helpful, organized manner.  Using white hat SEO puts the interests of the search engines and their visitors first and foremost—it helps search engines provide more accurate, helpful, and relevant results to their visitors.  It’s a win-win proposition for all involved.

You’ve probably run across several web designers who insist on using Flash to create websites.  Most have good intentions, but are just not fully aware of the pitfalls that come along with relying too heavily on Flash web design.  Others are probably just really bad web designers altogether.  Enough said about that.

But one thing is true.  Regardless of what you’ve heard, using Flash on the web has some really great applications and some that are, well, just not very good at all.

For example, a couple of good possible uses might include:

• Using Flash for video. Flash-based video has more or less become the iron-clad standard for streaming video on the web.  It works very well.
• Using Flash for image libraries or other “widgets” or “apps.” Flash works nicely as a sub-component in many photo sharing slash portfolio types of website applications.

That said, it’s still probably best to use Flash components on your website as sparingly as possible.  And it’s all for very good reason.  In fact, Google themselves has even laid forth the shortcomings of using Flash on websites.  They spell it out very concisely and clearly here on their Webmaster Central Blog:

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

Now when talking about ranking well in the search engines, it’s hard to argue that Google’s position on Flash isn’t pretty much definitive.  The more you use Flash as a component on a website, the less the search engines are even able to recognize it—let alone effectively rank it.  Search spiders are getting better at understanding Flash, but there are still severe repercussions that can be completely avoided in entirety by choosing to use a more universal web design platform.

In Summary

Even though many web designers insist on using Flash-based websites, it’s just not a good idea if you plan on attracting organic traffic from the search engines.

• Flash effectively prevents search engine spiders from recognizing and understanding your site correctly.
• Without being able to understand your website, the search engines are not able to rank or list it appropriately within their search indexes.
• Flash can also be non-compatible with certain web browsers and mobile browsers (meaning visitors using these browsers will see a blank space or error message instead of the site as intended).

Don’t become overly afraid of using a small Flash component or two on your site.  But just don’t fall into the trap of using it for the entire site…unless you’re trying to prevent visitors.

It’s hard to believe that 2009 is drawing to a close already.  Time flys, and so do plans to grow and improve websites and online marketing plans.  The good news is that with the fresh start of a new year, you can start anew with making improvements to your websites at the same time and not have to feel overwhelmed.  Keeping this in mind, here are just a few small—but effective—ways to improve your website in 2010.

Upgrade to more professional web hosting. Few realize it before making the upgrade, but the bargain-rate shared hosting services that many sites utilize can really adversely effect site performance and search engine performance.  Moving your site to a better web hosting package can be just the performance boost you’ve been seeking—and the price could possibly even be less than you’re paying now.

Continue to expand your social networking efforts. If 2009 was the year of Facebook and Twitter really going mainstream, then just imagine what 2010 will bring for social networking!  The benefits of using social networking to drive traffic to your website are undeniable.  If you’ve already begun, then by all means—keep it up!  And if not, don’t worry…it’s not too late to get started now.  Just try not to put it off until the next new year rolls around.

Integrate CMS into your website. Have a great website already, but beginning to get tired of having to pay the pros every time there’s a small content update to make to the site?  If this sounds all-too-familiar, adding a CMS (content management system) will be the improvement of the year for you.  It’s simply a system that enables you to log in and make content edits and additions with a few simple clicks.  Cost savings and time savings from CMS really add up quickly!

Improve your existing website copy. Speaking of adding and editing your website’s copy, have you given this much thought since first developing your website?  It’s important to keep your website’s written content fresh, accurate, and up-to-date.  After all, visitors and search engines alike practically demand it.

Beef up your site’s security. With a seemingly ever-growing onslaught of security exploits to worry about, web users these days are becoming more and more conscious and wary about what sites they visit and how they transmit information on the web.  Regardless of if your website is e-Commerce enabled or not, you still need to do frequent security audits on your site to make sure your visitors are receiving a safe experience.  Making sure your security certificates are all up to date is just one such example in this department.

Develop an organic SEO development plan. Ready to start improving your website’s organic SEO so you don’t have to spend so much on PPC and other costly paid online marketing promotions in 2010?  Well, the good news here is that it’s simpler than ever to improve your site with quality organic search optimization.  Here are a few SEO pointers to help you get started.  And by laying out a solid plan at the beginning of the year, and working diligently to implement it accordingly, you might even be surprised at how simple, affordable, and downright effective it can be!

Let 2010 be the year that you take your website and your business to the next level (and know that we’re here to help you when you need it).  Wishing you all of the best in the New Year!

Providing a safe, secure, and reliable e-commerce experience for your customers is vital at a time when online competition is just downright fierce.  The last thing you want to do is work hard to attain a new customer online, only to lose them because of a security problem…even if it is just a “glitch” and not a real exploit.  Thankfully, securing your e-commerce website really isn’t all that difficult; it just requires competent experience by those putting together the system.

SSL Security Certificate Encryption

This is the baseline level of providing security between your visitors and your website—it’s an absolute must for any e-commerce site for sure.  Using SSL encryption means that all private data provided and transmitted in a transaction is completely locked down to any and all would-be prying eyes out there along the stream of transmitted information.

Getting such a security certificate does require the authentication of your website first; in other words, the issuer does a check before the certificate is issued to make sure you are who you say you are.  Providing this standard level of security can also involve the need for a dedicated IP address on your web hosting.  This is also a good thing for e-commerce website owners, as web hosting with a dedicated IP is much more professional than potentially sharing an IP address with bad neighbors on shared hosting.

Use A Respectable E-Commerce System

It’s simply going to work better, be better and more thoroughly tested, and come across as more professional to your website’s customers than one that’s hacked together by an amateur.  Also, when you’re using professional e-commerce software, like open-source osCommerce for example, the developers of the system will usually work hard to release updates and security fixes any time a potential problem is exposed.  In an age where hackers are often several steps ahead of the curve, it’s good to know that experts are right there alongside as well, keeping the software safe and secure on your behalf.

Ensure Custom-Developed E-Commerce Software Is Secure

Using widely available open-source e-commerce software such as osCommerce is a popular and safe way to go for many websites.  However, sometimes something a little bit more custom is necessary to meet your website’s objectives.  If this is the case, it’s no problem at all—in fact, in some cases, custom e-commerce software can actually be more secure because it’s not a “popular” target for the bad guys.

Now at the same time, you’ve definitely got to make absolutely certain that the custom software your website uses has been built by true experts with years of experience developing security-focused commerce software applications, not just some kid down the block that knows how to make websites.  At Sleepless Media, custom secure platforms are actually one of our specialties.

Putting All The Pieces Together…

Naturally, there are additional steps that should be taken to really ensure an enterprise-level secure e-commerce experience for your website’s visitors—and we’ll be more than happy to discuss these ideas with you at any time.  Just give us a call!

Web stats are a mystery to so many.  And what’s worse, some of the unscrupulous practitioners of search engine optimization and other internet marketing practices (and there’s always going to be a handful of people trying to take advantage out there) actually use truthful but inaccurately represented web stats to enhance the perception of what they’re doing.

Remember the old slogan that goes something like, “statistics never lie, but liars often use statistics?” Same goes for web stats.  To make sure someone’s not making a faulty representation of your numbers—regardless of who’s to benefit from the misrepresentation—it pays to have a good understanding of web stats, including Hits, Visitors, and Unique Visitors.

Hits

A hit is simply a statistic that tells you a page within your site has been visited and loaded.  The hit counter is notoriously inaccurate as a measure of actual visitors because one single visitor to your site might visit 10 different pages, only to revisit all ten once again in the same browsing session.  Click, click, click, and before you know it, one single visitor might have racked up 20 or more hits on your site in just a matter of seconds.  Your own visits are also generally counted as hits—making your site’s hit count fun to watch, but not much good for real action or visitor tracking other than for novelty purposes.

Visitors

Quite a bit more helpful than hits alone, measuring your site’s number of visitors takes out some of the duplication and redundancy from the overall hit count.  The visitor count statistic tells you how many times your site has been visited for a given period of time.  But still confusing as a reliable source of transparent tracking information, even your site’s visitors count can have quite a bit of duplication built in.  The Visitor count can count the same visitors (again, including yourself) over and over again—the main difference between visitors and hits is that visitors only count the visiting session to your site once, while hits count each inner page visit, back button click, and page refresh as a additional hit.

Unique Visitors

This is probably the most trusted and dependable web stat of the bunch, due to more advanced tracking capabilities.  Your site’s unique visitor count takes into account unique visitor identifiers (such as a visitor’s IP address) to determine if it is the first time a visitor has landed on your site ever or the first time within a given period of time.  In other words, a unique visitor count only increases by one for each time someone new stops by the site, say in any given day.  While this can still include your own visits to your site, it is much more revealing than the other types of count statistics.

So, using the types of stats above, a typical day for a website might look something like this:

• 1,000 Hits – Each time a page is viewed or refreshed.
• 500 Visitors – How many times during the day that the site was visited, which could include the same individual visitor coming back later in the day for an additional visit to the site.
• 400 Unique Visitors – How many different visitors stopped by the site during the day.

Of course, where things get really interesting is not just looking at these numbers, but actually figuring out which pages are being viewed by who and what sources of referrals are sending visitors to your site.  Transposing advanced visitor analytics over basic hits, visitors, and unique visitor counts is where visitor tracking really begins to become quite helpful and revealing.

Having a good user-friendly content management system (CMS) installed as part of your next website project is a great idea.  After all, just think of all of those times when you’ve needed to make an update or add a new piece of content to your company or organization’s website—and had to call up your web designer to do it!

This doesn’t have to be the case any longer.  Having an easy-to-use CMS system built into your website makes it possible for an authorized user to log right in from practically any web connected device and make the changes required, no matter how small (or large) they happen to be.

The best part?  Well, besides instantaneous updates to your site, there’s also the fact that with CMS, you won’t need to pay an hourly web designer rate for basic content changes any longer.

So that’s the easy part, but there’s a little bit more to the story…

Once you’ve decided that adding CMS is right for your site, it’s time to consider the options.  For instance, there are very expensive commercial CMS systems that can be installed.  Better yet, there are a couple of fairly decent open-source CMS systems out there.  But the best option, for a multitude of reasons we’ll take a look at in just a second, is creating a custom-programmed CMS system that’s built specifically for your website and your unique content management needs.

Why should you seriously consider a custom built CMS?

At Sleepless Media, we build fully custom content management systems.  There are several clear benefits to going this route.  Here are just a few of them:

• With custom-built CMS, we’ll custom program the entire setup so it works exactly how you need your site to work. Your needs come first and the system is developed to match…not the other way around.

• Custom developed CMS is simply more secure. With scripts that can be purchased off-the-rack, as well as with open-source options, there’s a serious problem lurking just beneath the surface—practically everyone, including the “bad guys,” has access to the code (and therefore the ability to hack it).  This is not the case with rock-solid, securely built custom CMS.

• A surprise to many, it’s actually faster (and less expensive) for us to create a custom CMS solution from scratch. Think about it for a minute; by working with clear objectives from the very beginning, we’re able to program the solution from the ground up in a streamlined fashion.  Compare this to using an existing open source CMS, where we’d have to completely unbuild it, modify it to suit your needs, and then put it all back together again.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

The bottom line is that it’s easier for us, and much more straightforward, to develop a solution from the ground up instead of trying to reverse engineer and re-purpose applications that our programmers might not be all that familiar with.  Less training, less time, less cost, and a much more functional end product…choosing expertly custom developed content management systems is the way to go!

Making the decision between a dedicated server and a shared web hosting service to be the online home of your business or organization’s new website can be one of the most important choices you make in the process of launching the site!

Surprisingly enough, many providers recommend one option or the other based on incidental features like monthly transfer and storage space alone.  While these are important considerations, they should really come secondary to the dedicated vs. shared hosting decision.  Why so?

Well, there are major differences between shared and dedicated web hosting services that can significantly impact the performance of your website on multiple levels.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Using a dedicated web hosting server means that your site is the only site on an individual server and on an individual IP address.  It’s a common misconception that having a dedicated server means you’ll keep it and operate it at your own physical location—in reality, most dedicated web hosting plans are actually “managed” plans where you’re paying to use a server that’s professionally maintained in a secure hosting center.

There are substantial benefits to using dedicated web hosting.  Having a dedicated IP address of your very own means that there’s no chance of being banned or penalized by search engines for sharing an IP with another site that uses black hat SEO techniques, maintains illegal content, or is caught for sending spam.  Having bad neighbors on your IP address can really do serious damage to your own site!

Another benefit to having dedicated hosting is that you don’t have to share your server’s memory and processing power with another site that might be a heavy resource user.  Sites that run sophisticated scripts like chat rooms can literally bog the entire server down to a crawl—meaning your site becomes caught up in the traffic jam even if you’re not causing the problem when not using dedicated hosting.

The only real downfall to hosting your website on dedicated server is that it does tend to be a bit more expensive—but usually not prohibitively so if you’re running a growing business or organization that relies heavily on its website (or especially if you’re doing any type of e-commerce.)

Shared Web Hosting

Like the name suggests, shared web hosting is when your site is based on a server and IP address that’s shared with several other websites.  There are cost advantages to doing so.  When you research web hosting on the web, most of the time when you see budget plans under $10 a month or so, these are going to be of the shared hosting arrangement.

For basic brochure-type websites, shared hosting can be a bargain and not necessarily hold your site back in the performance department too much.  Here’s the thing—if you do choose shared web hosting, make sure you’re being hosted on a reputable server and that you’re surrounded by only the best neighbors.  We can help you do an IP search to see exactly what sites are all hosted on your shared server—many are shocked when they find out that they’re sharing their “house” with hundreds of other sites, many of which are less than upstanding net-citizens.

Which One Is Right For You?

In the end, it’s really up to your performance needs and budget.  On one hand, many good sites call shared web hosts their home.  But for growing websites and sites that receive a decent degree of traffic, it’s always worth giving the benefit of the doubt to the dedicated hosting option.  The additional costs are negligible when considering the pitfalls you could run into with a low quality shared service.

And above all, remember that choosing between dedicated and shared hosting is the most important primary part of the web hosting selection process—only consider storage space, traffic quotas, and other features once you’re sure that your site is at home on the right server first.