So what is GDPR and how can you make your business compliant?

In this article, you’ll learn how to be GDPR compliant without having to read the dry EU data protection directive. We’ll help you understand what GDPR is and tell you what steps you need to take to make your site GDPR compliant.

What Is GDPR?

GDPR is a data protection directive in the European Union designed to protect the online privacy of EU citizens. It regulates the way personal data is used and what type of data websites can collect about you. Despite being an EU regulation, GDPR applies to all websites accessed by users from the EU. As a result, websites and businesses have to be GDPR compliant or block EU traffic.

With that in mind, here are the key aspects of GDPR that might affect your business:

• Your site has to clearly inform the visitors that their personal data is being collected.
• You also need to disclose how and why their data is collected and stored.
• If users ask you to delete personal data you collected, you must comply with the request in most cases.
• Users can also request a copy of all the personal information you store.
• If one of your business’s main activities is to gather and store personal data, you need to hire a data protection officer.
• If your website is breached and the personal information of your users leaks out, you have 72 hours to report the breach.
• Breaking the GDPR regulation can lead to fines of up to €20 million (~$24 million) or 4% of your company’s annual turnover.

The main purpose of GDPR is to protect people and their personal information from data breaches. Now the question is, what types of data fall under GDPR?

Types of Data Regulated by GDPR

Whether you built your website from scratch or used a WordPress theme, your site gathers different types of data. Websites collect information in different ways, including through analytics, WordPress forms, subscription forms, contact forms, and email marketing campaigns.

In short, all personal data falls under GDPR, but we can break it down into the following types:

• Genetic and health information.
• Biometric data.
• Political and/or religious views.
• Race, ethnicity, and gender.
• Web data such as your IP address and cookie data

As long as your business stores any of the aforementioned data of EU citizens, your site needs to be GDPR compliant. Remember that this applies even if you don’t have a presence within the European Union’s borders.

Steps Required To be GDPR Compliant

When you read about your responsibilities as a website owner you might feel overwhelmed and decide it’s easier to block all incoming EU traffic. Don’t let GDPR discourage you. Below are the main steps you need to take to be GDPR compliant.

1. Improve Your Privacy Policy

Be transparent with collecting, storing, and sharing data. Your website should contain a detailed privacy policy that clearly explains data collection practices, data protection, the usage of cookies, and data sharing. A good privacy policy should at least include the following points:

• You don’t sell your users’ private data.
• You don’t share private data unless the law obligates you.
• The types of data you collect.
• The reasons why you collect data and how you use it.
• How you protect user data.
• How your plugins collect and use data.

Be as clear as possible by using simple language that doesn’t leave any room for interpretation and you’ll have a clear-cut transparent privacy policy.

2. Create a Cookie Collection Notice

According to the GDPR, cookies count as personal data, so you need to ask your users for consent before using cookie data. Place an explicit cookie collection notice on your website and make sure you allow users access to your website even if they don’t give consent. Your users should also have an easy way of withdrawing their consent at any time.

3. Display Notices On All Website Forms

It’s standard practice to collect some user data through various types of submission forms. If you want to continue collecting email addresses and other details, post a data collection notice. Don’t gather any data before that point and without the user’s acknowledgment. Otherwise, your business could receive a hefty fine for breaking GDPR.

Be as clear as possible with your wording and offer all the important details about collecting data. You should also avoid using pre-checked tick boxes. The user needs to understand that data collection is optional and that it requires their consent.

4. Make Sure All Plugins Are GDPR Compliant

If you’re using third-party plugins that collect data, like Google Analytics, you need to make the data anonymous. This can be challenging to do manually, but you can find GDPR-compliant plugins that handle this process for you. Just search for a tool with GDPR compliance settings.

5. Use the Double Opt-in

GDPR doesn’t make double opt-ins obligatory, but it’s highly recommended to use them. A double opt-in means you’re asking the user twice to acknowledge that they’re giving consent for data collection. This is particularly important for email list subscriptions. 

To add a double opt-in, you need to first request consent through the website’s subscription form. Then the user should consent a second time by clicking a link they receive through email.

Using the double opt-in shows that you’re dedicated to data protection and privacy, and it also gives the authorities further proof that your site is GDPR-compliant.

6. Add Unsubscribe Links

Include easy-to-read unsubscribe links with every communication you send to your subscribers. Unsubscribing from your mailing list should be an easy process and instant.

7. Delete Personal Data on Request

GDPR gives users the right to be forgotten. This means they can request at all times for their data to be deleted. Always do as requested. This includes removing your users from mailing lists, deleting their accounts, and wiping any personal information you have about them. Even blog posts and forum comments count as personal data and should be removed if requested.

8. Don’t Buy Mailing Lists

Buying mailing lists isn’t recommended because you might be in violation of GDPR. In most cases, you can’t be sure whether those email addresses were collected with the users’ consent.

That said if you’re still determined to buy a mailing list, make sure you at least include unsubscribe links with every email you send.

Being GDPR Compliant Is Worth It

Open your website and business to EU citizens by following all the steps above. Being GDPR compliant might sound challenging at first, but it’s not that hard. It mostly involves being transparent about collecting data and asking for consent. As a bonus, non-EU users will see that your business cares about privacy and data protection and they’ll be more likely to trust you.

The post 8 Steps To Be GDPR Compliant With Your Website first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

So what’s a “custom” domain? If you purchase a domain name that you can define yourself, that’s called a custom domain. The opposite of this might be a domain you receive from a service like WordPress.com or Blogger.com. 

Online publishing services that provide you with a domain name typically provide you with a “subdomain” underneath their own parent domain. For example, WordPress.com gives you a blog with the URL “yoursite.home.blog”. 

In this case, home.blog is the parent domain, and “yoursite” is your subdomain.

How to Set Up a Custom Domain

Before you can configure a domain name to point to your website, you need to buy one. 

The cheapest way to buy your own custom domain is to find one that isn’t taken yet. All domain registrars where you can buy a custom domain name provide a search feature for you to do this.

The most popular and well-known domain registrars where you can search for and purchase a domain name include:

• Domain.com
• GoDaddy
• Namecheap
• BuyDomains

You can also usually purchase a custom domain from your web hosting provider as well, so that may be a good first place to check.

Expect to pay about $9.99 to $24.99 per year for an available domain name. If you don’t want people looking up domain ownership from a service like ICANN or Whois Lookup, you can purchase what’s known as Ownership Protection or Domain Privacy.

This is available for a small annual fee (usually from $2.99 to $7.99), and provides you peace of mind knowing that spammers or others won’t be able to obtain your email address or phone number.

How to Configure Your New Custom Domain

Once you’ve purchased your own custom domain, you still need to point it to the web server where your actual website is hosted.

To do this, log into the account where you purchased your domain and find the Manage DNS settings for that domain. This will take you to an area where you can change the “custom nameservers” for your domain.

Nameservers are the servers (typically provided by your web hosting company) that the domain registrar will refer web browsers to whenever anyone types your custom domain into their web browser.

The web host’s name servers handle redirecting traffic to the correct server that hosts your website. How do you find the correct name servers for your web host? You can find them by logging into your web hosting account and navigating to your admin panel where “Site Information” is provided.

Just look for the IP and Name Servers section and you should see the names of your web host’s two name servers.

Make a note of these two name servers, then return to your domain registrar account and type those into the fields for your domain’s custom nameservers.

Just Save the changes, and you’re done. 

Name server changes don’t usually take effect immediately. In fact, it can take up to 24 hours before the changes propagate across the internet. You can use a service like whatsmydns.net to check whether your domain’s IP address and DNS record information has propagated across the internet.

Once this process is done, any time anyone types your new custom domain into their browser’s URL field, the browser will be directed to your web server where your website is hosted.

How and Why to Redirect a Custom Domain

Redirecting a domain means telling the web host you’ve pointed the domain to, to redirect incoming traffic for that custom domain to a different one. There are important reasons you may want to redirect a custom domain.

The most common reason for doing this is if you want to register slightly alternative spellings of your domain name so you can point them all to your main domain. This can help you recapture potentially lost traffic due to misspellings.

For example, if you type “googel.com” into your web browser’s URL field, you’ll notice that the URL automatically changes to “google.com” and takes you to Google’s search engine. This is because Google redirects “googel.com” to “google.com”.

To do this, register the custom domain with the alternative spellings, and follow the same steps above to point that custom domain to your web server using the correct name servers.

Then, log into your web hosting account and find the menu option for Redirects.

You’ll see a window where you can select the original (typically misspelled) custom domain you registered. Then in the Redirects to field, you can specify what URL you want the web host to redirect that custom domain’s traffic to.

Keep in mind that you can type any URL at all, even if you don’t own it. For example, you could redirect your custom domain to “google.com” if you wanted to. There wouldn’t be much sense to it, but this is how redirects work.

You’re not redirecting directly to the web server location where your website files are. Instead, you’re sending incoming visitors to the URL, which will then deliver them ultimately to the web host location.

Other Uses for a Custom Domain

Another useful benefit of registering and redirecting a custom domain is that you can also create your own email address that contains that custom domain.

For example, if you create a custom domain for a profile website using a domain with your own name, you can then create an email address with your own name. To set up such an email, you first need to redirect the custom domain to your web host using the steps above.

Then, log into your web host account and select Accounts in the Email menu (the menu itself might be slightly different).

Here you can create any email account you like. For example, with my registered domain name of ryandube.com, I can create the email account, ryan@ryandube.com.

A custom domain name lets you create your own email accounts using your own domain ending to the email. For many people, this is enough benefit to register a custom domain, even if they don’t host a website to redirect it to.

Whatever your reason for registering a custom domain, as you can see it’s easy to do and useful to have.

The post What Is a Custom Domain and How to Set One Up first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Those services can be web services like Facebook or Spotify, or they can be devices that are part of the Internet of Things—like home automation devices connected to Google Home or Amazon Alexa. 

For example, you could set up an applet that automatically turns certain lights on in your home as soon as your smart phone connects to your home WiFi network.

Free Vs. Ready-Made IFTTT Applets

Users can choose between using ready-made applets created by the IFTTT community or creating custom applets from scratch. 

Until recently, IFTTT has always been free to users, but now the company has come under fire for implementing a limited freemium model along with a subscription-based version called IFTTT Pro. Pro subscribers pay $3.99/month, and in return they can enjoy unlimited custom applet creation, more complex applets with multiple steps, queries, and conditional logic, and customer support. 

The free plan allows users to turn on an unlimited number of ready-made applets, but users can only create three custom applets of their own. 

But don’t fret, even if you don’t want to pay for the Pro account, you can still choose from thousands of ready-made applets. 

13 Best IFTTT Applets for Online Automation

See the list below for the best IFTTT applets that will help you automate your online life on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram. If you’re more interested in IFTTT applets to control all your smart home automation devices, we’ve got you covered there, too.

1. Add songs to your Spotify playlist using Google Assistant 

Spotify users with Android devices can say, “Hey Google” or “OK Google, add to playlist, [Artist Name], [Song].” 

Here’s an example: “OK Google, add to playlist, The Beatles, Here Comes the Sun.” This applet turns the multi-step process of adding a song to a Spotify playlist into a single step. 

2. Add songs from videos you like on YouTube to a Spotify playlist

Any time you hear a song you like onin a YouTube video, just give the video a thumbs up on YouTube, and this applet will search for the song on Spotify. If the song is available, it will be added to the playlist you designate.

3. Automatically upload your Instagrams to a Facebook page album

If you have both an Instagram account and a Facebook page for your small business or hobby, then this applet is for you. It will save you the extra steps of posting new images to Instagram and Facebook by automatically uploading your Instagrams to whichever Facebook page you designate.

4. Tweet your Instagrams as native photos

Similarly, you can have IFTTT automatically tweet your Instagram photos to your Twitter feed. This one’s great because it tweets the actual photo instead of just an Instagram link.

5. Automatically change your Twitter profile pic when you update your Facebook photo

Some people like to standardize their online profile photos so they’re more recognizable across social media platforms. When you change your Facebook profile photo, this applet will automatically update your Twitter profile pic to the same photo.

6. Save new photos you’re tagged in on Facebook to Dropbox

Part of maintaining your online reputation is keeping an eye on what photos of you are available on the internet. This applet monitors Facebook for any photos you’re tagged in and automatically downloads them and saves them to your Dropbox.

If you don’t like what you see, you can ask your friend to either delete the photo or untag you. Plus, it’s nice to have your own copies of photos your friends and family take of you. 

7. OK, Google, call my device

Can’t find your iPad? You can’t have an online life if you can’t find your device! This applet is super handy for tracking down missing devices.

8. Create a note in Evernote by telling it to Google Assistant

Evernote users have got it good with this applet. Just say “Hey Google” followed by a phrase you can choose in the applet’s settings, and then your note (like “Hey Google, send to Evernote, check out the new restaurant on Fifth Street.”) 

9. Save Receipts to Evernote

Do you have a Health Savings Account (HSA) or incur reimbursable expenses at work?  If you need to keep track of receipts for any reason, get this applet. Not only will it save the photos you take of your receipts to Evernote, it also allows you to search for them later. Never forget to get paid back again!

10. Send me an email when Netflix updates their new releases

Do you feel like you’ve already watched everything there is to watch on Netflix? Are you constantly on the lookout for new movies and TV shows to binge on? This applet will email you when Netflix updates their new releases.

11. Update Your Android wallpaper with NASA’s image of the day

Sometimes we all need a break from this Earth. Every day this applet will update your Android device’s wallpaper to NASA’s image of the day. Start the day off right with a photo from the beautiful and cold vacuum of space!

12. Automatically set your Android wallpaper to Wikipedia’s picture of the day

If space isn’t your thing, use this applet to set your Android wallpaper to Wikipedia’s picture of the day. You’ll learn about things you never knew existed!

13. Set your Android wallpaper to the album cover of your most recently saved Spotify track

Give those album cover artists some love! This applet sets your Android wallpaper to the album cover of your most recently saved Spotify track.

Automation means more quality time for you

IFTTT is all about being kind to your future self. The more you automate, the more time you will have for the things that really matter to you. 

The post 13 Best IFTTT Applets (Formerly Recipes) to Automate Your Online Life first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

With so much content and products on the internet, how can you even get your site noticed? It’s like trying to get a single grain of sand noticed on a beach that’s miles long.

Thankfully, there are proven methods to stand out, and then increase website traffic rapidly once people realize your site exists.

1. Establish Your Authority

The first place people will look to learn about you when they visit your website is your About page. 

About Page and Author Bio

That’s where you want to solidify the visitor’s trust in you as an expert in the field you’re publishing content about.

It’s also a good idea to include a small profile bio at the bottom of each article. This allows visitors to see your relevant expertise without having to click anywhere else on the site.

How does this help to increase website traffic? Several ways.

First, when visitors see that you’re actually an expert in the field, they’re more likely to share your post on social media and help draw in more traffic there. Secondly, one of the many signals Google uses in its search algorithm (for where your web pages will rank) is author reputation.

Author Credentials

While their earlier authorship initiative using Google+ was phased out, the reality is that the authority and credibility of an author makes sense as a signal for the value of any article. So we can be sure that Google uses author authority and credibility to adjust the value of any web page. 

So include your credentials and experience relative to the page content anywhere and everywhere you can.

Social Media Presence

There is nothing quite as powerful at increasing website traffic quickly than getting a post to go viral on social media.

The best way to make this happen is to create an official Twitter presence for your site, and an official Facebook page as well.

If you have the time and resources to invest in it, you might also consider taking advantage of Pinterest, Instagram, and any other social networks you know well.

Once you’ve established your presence there, remember to engage, engage, and then engage some more. There is no better way to establish authority on a topic than being fully-engaged in that relevant community.

Don’t only post your blog posts or web pages whenever you publish something new. Remember to interact with other users. Follow people in your field. Reply to their comments. Retweet or repost what other people share.

Sometimes social media only provides a trickle of traffic to your site, but other times when you’ve posted something especially unique or interesting, it can easily go viral. That will send swarms of visitors to your site very quickly.

Offer Free Classes or Webinars

There are countless free platforms out there to create your own online courses or webinars. Take advantage of these and prove that you really are an expert in your field.

You can link to these courses on your website, and share them from social media. Make sure to include a link, at least in your course profile, to your website so people know where to find you.

Choose course topics to create that mirror the sorts of things you publish on your website. This way you could actually use examples or reading material from your site to bolster the course content.

Post on Quora

Quora is the site where you can find experts to answer any question you might have. Quora gets over 100 million monthly visitors. And the great thing about those visitors is that they’re highly interested in the kind of topics you publish on your site.

So this gives you two benefits. By posting answers on Quora as an expert, you gain credibility on those topics. At the same time, you can include your website in your profile, which can increase website traffic.

Again, this is another resource that does require time and effort on your part to take advantage of. So if you take this route, make sure you schedule time every week to visit the site and post responses to questions or comments.

2. Implement Common Sense SEO

Obviously, a big component of your traffic will come from Google Search. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to do a good job here, but you do need to follow basic SEO optimization tips to make sure you aren’t hurting your site’s chances of ranking well.

Here are a few of the most important items to take care of to optimize your site’s SEO.

• Choose a good domain name, preferably as short as possible and easy to remember.
• Set up the Title and Description for your site. WordPress provides fields for these.
• Configure your post slugs (URLs) to use the category and the title of the post. If you don’t use categories, then just include the title to make the URL as short and simple as possible.
• Create unique, quality content. Use SEO tools like WordTracker or SEMRush to find topics that a lot of people are searching for but have low competition (few sites on the web cover it).

• Use an SEO plugin if you use WordPress. These make sure the basic things like sitemaps and other technical issues are set up properly for the best site SEO.
• Hire experts to write content for you who have proven expertise and credentials on those topics. Make sure to include their profiles with the content.
• Install a CDN service like CloudFlare or Stackpath. These services store and cache some of your site’s content on servers local to your visitors, so things like pictures or scripts will download to their browsers more quickly.
• Install an SSL certificate on your site so that your URL starts with “HTTPS”. Google ranks secure sites higher than others.

If you implement all of these tips, you can be confident you’re doing everything you can to optimize your site for the best SEO. This will increase website traffic significantly.

3. Create YouTube Tutorials

YouTube has a tremendous audience. So, why not take advantage of that and drive some of that audience to your site by creating YouTube tutorials?

Once you’ve created these, include them in your website content for visitors who prefer to watch videos rather than read content to learn things.

Include a link to your site content in the YouTube video description, as well as a link to your site in your YouTube profile.

4. Write Medium Articles

Medium, the crowd-sourced article website, gets nearly 200 million visitors a month. It may seem counterintuitive to publish content on a site other than your own. However, publishing articles here establishes you as an expert.

You can mention the site or sites you run in your profile, and also sparingly link to your own site as a resource anywhere in your content.

Like Quora and YouTube, posting here builds up your reputation, has the potential to increase website traffic via links, and it also provides your site with backlinks from a highly ranked, authoritative domain.

5. Constantly Update Old Content

Outdated content just doesn’t usually rank as well as freshly published content. The key word here is “usually”. This will typically be the case if the content of the article itself is outdated and no longer accurate.

However, it’s not the case when that article is still accurate, and remains one of the best sources of information about the topic on the internet. To determine whether you should update old content to increase your website traffic, consider:

• Does the content accurately answer the query, and offer the most recent information?
• Is the formatting well optimized for SEO (good headers throughout, easily readable).
• Is there any new information missing from the original article?
• How well does the article already rank in Google Search results?

The bottom line is that if you’re already listed in the top spot in Google Search results, you probably don’t have to do much to the original article, unless the content is outdated.

6. Conduct Online Surveys on Hot Topics

If you really want to drive a Twitter or Facebook post viral, create a poll or a survey on a controversial topic.

Here’s the great thing about polls. They get people forwarding the poll to friends in order to achieve the final results they want. People come back to check results. 

You can do this the easy way on Twitter by creating a new Tweet and then selecting the bar chart Poll icon. 

Just enter the poll question, choices, and other details. Then Tweet it and wait for the responses. You can embed the Twitter poll on your website to further drive traffic to it (and responses).

The hope here is that people will also check your profile and learn about your site. However, if you want to drive more traffic, create your own custom poll and then post it to Twitter. Direct people to your site to view results. This will encourage people to bookmark your site so they can check it later.

7. Conduct Influencer Interviews

A final way to drive a great deal of traffic to your site is by reaching out to influencers on Twitter in the same field you publish content about. Reach out and ask about doing an interview. 

When you publish an interview with an influencer who has a very large social media following, it helps both the influencer and your website.

What does the influencer get out of the interview?

• More credibility as an expert in their field
• Pride from having their interview published online
• Proof to their followers that they are in fact influential
• Free publicity

What does your site get out of the interview?

• Search traffic whenever anyone searches their name on Google
• Social traffic when the influencer shares a link to the interview
• Potentially more followers on your own official social media account

Interviews are a fantastic way to engage with the community and also get your site a much needed boost in traffic.

The post 7 Proven Ways to Increase Website Traffic first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

WordPress has a market share of 35% of the websites on the internet, according to W3Techs. That’s over a third of all websites—crazy, right? That being said, for content-oriented websites, why even consider another option?

This is where Drupal comes in. But what is Drupal? As the web’s leading content management framework, it provides a level of modularity that you won’t find in a CMS such as WordPress. A CMS is a web application used primarily for managing content, but a framework such as Drupal lays the foundation for a content-heavy website that is able to be customized in very robust ways.

Drupal vs. WordPress

The best way for the average user to appreciate what Drupal is, is to compare it to a much popular open-source content system, WordPress. WordPress’s core functionality is to provide users with a system that allows them to manage both static and dynamic pages of their website. WordPress supports a plugin architecture and template system, both of which have received massive contributions from its community.

When you navigate to a WordPress website, it’s often easy to see that it’s powered by WordPress. WordPress websites generally have the same structure, same URL and file naming convention, and other key giveaways. However, you’ve probably been to dozens of websites powered by Drupal without ever knowing it. This is due to how customizable and flexible Drupal is.

Drupal is more of an enterprise solution for creating dynamic websites. It sets a robust codebase that developers can customize and build upon to do much more than create blogs or news sites. 

While WordPress is modular in the sense that you can always install third-party plugins and integrations, Drupal is modular at its very core—it’s meant to be customized, extensively so that you can shape Drupal into an e-commerce site, intranet, forum, social networking site, and much more.

How Drupal Was Built

Drupal incorporates a lot of popular web technologies, but the majority of its code is in PHP, with MySQL powering the database side. Drupal is completely open-source, so you can feel free to check out all of the code behind it whenever you want.

Drupal incorporates elements of HTML5, YAML, Twig, jQuery, Backbone.js, and more. The more of these technologies you’re familiar with, the better you’ll be at building Drupal into a customized solution. 

However, Drupal only requires you to know the basics of HTML to begin building dynamic pages and creating a functional website.

Drupal Hooks Explained

Like WordPress, Drupal supports modularization for adding more to it than what you get out of the box. To fully understand and appreciate how this works, you’ll need to understand Drupal’s hooks system.

In Drupal, think of a module as a collection of PHP files that enable extended functionality not available in Drupal’s core. Hooks are a way for these modules to interact with other modules or the core. Drupal’s core ships with a long list of supported hooks that you can read more about here.

Without getting into the confusing technical jargon behind hooks, you can think of them as simple event listeners that alter Drupal’s core behavior. Invoking a hook effectively allows you to “borrow” the functionality from another module, or Drupal’s core, and add it to your own module.

So, while WordPress plugins offer the instant plug-and-play gratification of enabling a new and complete feature, Drupal’s hooks are more developmental and designed for use across one or many other modules.

How to Get Drupal

Drupal’s latest version, Drupal 8, can be downloaded at the official Drupal website. On this same page, you’re able to get a list of all modules, themes, distributions, and translations. Other recommended versions can be found here.

While the official site’s Evaluator Guide will show you how to deploy a temporary local demo of Drupal 8, there are several web-based solutions for achieving this. OpenSourceCMS.com is our favorite, and it will allow you to use a public, self-resetting Drupal demo or even request your own instance with a lifetime of 24 hours.

While Drupal is completely free to download, it’s not entirely “free” in the sense that it’s going to require quite a lot of development. WordPress is much more community-driven than Drupal, and within a day you can probably set up a WordPress site using a custom theme and suite of plugins.

Drupal, as a framework, requires much more work under the hood. If you yourself aren’t a web developer, expect to hire someone with experience coding and designing on the platform.

So, in summary, what is Drupal? It’s one of the most powerful and robust content management frameworks, allowing developers to create fully customizable websites that can powerfully deliver content but don’t have to revolve entirely around content—an important difference from WordPress.

Did you learn anything new about Drupal or have a question that this article didn’t address? Drop us a comment below and let us know!

The post OTT Explains: What Is Drupal? first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Online dating scammers rely on our need for companionship, love and the avoidance of painful loneliness. Everyone deserves to find someone special, but that doesn’t mean you need to be completely uncritical when looking for love online. 

We’re going to look at how online dating scammers work, what the warning signs are and how you can deal with each one.

How Online Dating Scammers Work

There are two main types of online dating scammers. The first is motivated by pure profit. The idea is to build a relationship with you. Then emotionally manipulate you into parting with your valuables. 

The second type of scam is more insidious, since most of the time, there’s no monetary gain. This is known as “catfishing” and is a form of internet trolling. The aim is to humiliate or otherwise emotionally harm you as a cruel prank. 

While catfishing doesn’t generally fleece you of money (although it may move in that direction) many of the signs are still shared between both types of online dating scammers. Here are some of the most common red flags.

Things Move WAY Too Fast

The scammer needs to make a profit, which means they are on the clock. While you may be in no rush and just want to enjoy the early stages of getting all lovey-dovey, the real person behind the fake profile wants dollars and they want them now. 

This means you’ll definitely sense a certain lack of hesitation from the other side of the screen. Your online “date” wants to go from 0-60 in no time flat. So if things are getting hot and heavy at an insincere speed, you should definitely take a step back without those rose-tinted love glasses.

What To Do About It

You need to take control over the pace of commitment. Ask them detailed questions about their lives. Take a real interest. Let them know you’re interested in getting to know them before getting serious. 

This isn’t foolproof. Some online dating scammer outfits are willing to work their marks for months or years, but most are in it for a quick buck and putting the brakes on makes you unprofitable.

Things Don’t Add Up

Online dating scammers have to build multiple fake online personas. Yes, even the scammer has to play the field. They might tell you that there are no other victims, but the truth is being an online dating scammer is a bit like being a battery farm chicken. You’re stuffed into a box and expected to produce, produce, produce.

The good news is that this means most of these fake online profiles are paper thin. Just a casual read through their social media profiles should highlight details that don’t match up.

What To Do About It

Do your research just as you would with any other stranger on the web. It’s almost impossible for people to keep their lives off the net these days. So look beyond the channels your prospective online date has used to contact you. 

Do a reverse image search on their profile picture. See if they interact with family members. Do they have a LinkedIn page? Do the details about their lives add up? Are they the same between profiles?

They Ask For Money

The hallmark of an online dating scammer is that pretty quickly after hooking you, the requests for money will come. There are many different tacks that can be taken here, but the central issue is the request for money in the first place.

What To Do About It

It may be difficult, but you need to absolutely refuse any form of monetary payments. If you already made a payment, it’s still not too late to stop. Even if the person isn’t a scammer, it’s still predatory and highly inappropriate to ask someone you’ve only known for a few days or weeks for money. 

Ask yourself if you would have been comfortable giving a person you’ve never met in real life money? Even best friends don’t ask for financial help lightly. More importantly, this is the age of crowdfunding. If someone has a genuine emergency and wants money from strangers, they’d be better off starting a GoFundMe page.

Poor English Or Overall Language Use

This can be a touchy one. Having a poor command of the English language doesn’t automatically mean you are dealing with an online dating scammer. The web makes it possible for people from any background to meet. So it’s entirely possible that the person you are legitimately starting a romantic journey with just doesn’t speak or write English well.

The actual red flag is when there’s no reason to expect bad English from the person they are pretending to be. If the person claims to be an English speaker, college educated or a native of an Anglophone country, then it’s a major red flag when their English is broken and of poor quality. 

The same principle applies if you are communicating in a language other than English, of which you are a competent speaker.

What To Do About It

The only thing you can really do is be wary if the person’s language use is poor, inconsistent or otherwise suspicious. Raising the issue with someone who isn’t a scammer could still be highly offensive. 

However, you can ask questions related to the issue that might clear things up. Questions such as “How many languages do you speak?” or “Is English your first language? You have an interesting way of writing.”

Elaborate Sob Stories

Another common feature of online dating scammers is the elaborate sob story. It just so happens that you’ve come into this person’s life just as everything was about to go wrong. Their dog is sick, their mom needs cancer treatment, they’re about to be evicted and so on.

Typically these stories are convoluted and the more you question them, the more details are added to muddy the waters further. This is all underscored by desperation and heart-wrenching pleas for help. They really do love you, if you love them you’ll help them out. 

You can bet the request for ever-escalating amounts of money will soon follow.

What To Do About It

Most people with a healthy nonsense-detector will smell something fishy when the stories of melodramatic tragedy start rolling in. Whether the story is true or not, it’s not your responsibility to fix it. 

You can sympathise, you can offer advice, but never offer money. It’s especially nasty if there’s an implication of quid pro quo, but that’s a matter for your own moral compass.

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

You can bet that online dating scammers are no strangers to being interrogated. Most of their marks smell something fishy pretty quickly, so they have a playbook of excuses to string you along for as long as possible, just in order to get a few more dollars or (with catfishing) a few more laughs.

Since they aren’t a real person, anything you ask for that would be trivial for a real person to do is something they have to avoid. Want to have a video call? They’ll find a reason why they can’t. Want to fly out to meet them to call their bluff? They probably won’t agree unless they’ve already fleeced enough from you for the scam to end. 

As much as possible, the scammer will want to keep you at a distance they can control. This makes it easy to hold up the facade.

What To Do About It

A few reasonable excuses are one thing, but if it turns out that your request for a real life meeting or a simple Skype call are met with an iron curtain of reasons they can’t happen, then it’s best to end things. Even if it was never a scam. 

Relationships are meant to open up gradually over time, someone who is red-hot in texts, but won’t get on camera is a major red flag.

Escalating Desperation

Online dating scammers are no stranger to people resisting the call for money. That’s where they really begin to ply their trade. First they get a foot in the door with the opening gambit of the sob story. Then, when you aren’t forthcoming with the cash, things get worse. 

Eventually you’ll have the other person begging you for help, questioning your self-image as a good person. They will not shy away from hurting you emotionally for a few bucks. In fact, the more distraught they can make you through your empathy the less likely you’ll be to stop and think. 

What To Do About It

This can be a tough one, especially if the scammer has spent a long time grooming you for this moment. The best thing to do is put time and distance between yourself and these please. 

Go for a walk, take a deep breath and look at what’s being said outside of the influence of strong emotion. Time pressure and heightened emotions are tools that manipulators use to force you into making decisions without thinking. 

Forcing You To a Different Service

One common tactic used by these scammers is to quickly move you from a mainstream platform like Facebook or Twitter, to somewhere only they control. This can be simple text messaging, WhatsApp or something obscure. They don’t want to be reported and they don’t want you bringing other people into the conversation. 

It’s critical that they control as many of the variables in your conversation as possible. If the person is strangely insistent that you move away from the platform where you met, be suspicious.

What To Do About It

Refuse. There’s no good reason to move you away from the platform you trust and are already using. Don’t cede control over the terms of the conversation to the other person. If they won’t meet you halfway, then you don’t have any reason to keep talking.

Dodgy Link Sharing

While online dating scammers (apart from catfishers) are interested in making money, they might not go about it in a direct way. Online dating scammers may build trust with you to get you to click on scam links. 

We all love sharing memes and good content with our friends, so you are much more likely to click on something a “trusted” person sends you without stopping to think. It could be a phishing link, a malware download or anything really. If your online beau really wants you to click on a link, be very wary.

What To Do About It

The standard cybersecurity rules apple. Don’t click on the links you don’t know and trust. Don’t download and run files you don’t know the provenance of. If you really must, run antivirus scans on any downloads and only open suspicious links using a browser sandbox. Never type sensitive or personal information into any forms found through these links.

Supermodel Photos

OK, it’s not impossible that your online date actually is an incredibly attractive professional model. However, the vast majority of people don’t have profile photos that seem to have been ripped from a magazine. So it’s a red flag for sure.

Of course, scammers are getting wise to this. So they might simply steal the profile picture of another person. They might also steal other photos from that person’s profile to make their own seem more legitimate.

What To Do About It

The easiest thing to do is simply run a reverse image search on the photo in question and see if it comes up somewhere else.

Thinking With Your Head, Not Your Heart

Humans tend to reason emotionally. People in marketing know this, which is why adverts focus on feelings. They want to make you hot under the collar with the “sex sells” strategy or make you feel sad and sympathetic so you’ll buy a product or donate to a cause. 

Scammers are using the same playbook, but don’t even offer something in return for your cash, time and emotional investment. Which is why you should always maintain some degree of distance between yourself and your feelings when it comes to online relationships. 

Until you’re physically present together, the relationship isn’t concrete. Plenty of people are finding love online, but you need to be the one hooking a good catch, not the one getting hooked by a criminal. 

The post Online Dating Scammers: 10 Red Flags To Spot & Avoid Them first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Making your very own Wikipedia-like website can seem like a large undertaking, and to be honest, it is. It will take a lot of time, foresight, and research to get yourself on the right track.

Once you understand what it takes to make a wiki successful, you will need to know where to begin once the site is created. This will include how to create pages and add text, images, and videos to them, the differences between page editors, and how to enable collaboration on the site.

How To Make Your Own Wiki Page

Before you can create a wiki site, you’ll need to choose how you want it hosted. There are plenty of options out there depending on how much you’re willing to put into it. Free options include Windows SharePoint, MediaWiki, and Wikia, which allow you to create your very own wiki site from scratch.

If you’ve got the capital, paid services like Same Page will offer you tools and a few templates to help get you started. TikiWiki is a great software option for anyone who wants to host a private wiki on a business or personal server.

As a wiki is just an ever-evolving site where colleagues and strangers can collaborate on a primary focus, Google Sites, and even WordPress, are also potential hosts.

You’ll want to make your choice based on why you need the wiki, how many people are going to be involved in the project, and how much time you have to dedicate to the setup and maintenance of the site. Security is also a concern for anyone with a website, especially when self-hosted.

Moving forward in this article, we’ll be using Wikia, also referred to as FANDOM, for our walkthroughs.

Let’s Create a Wiki Page

FANDOM is generally seen as a collection of wikis on topics primarily comprised of media and entertainment. It’s also incredibly user-friendly for beginners.

Here, you’re more likely to find wikis based on trending movies, a favored comic book character, and videogames than you are historical events and things with political leanings. However, a wiki is a wiki and you should be able to craft one that suits your needs.

To begin:

• Scroll over the WIKIS tab and click the START A WIKI button.

• Decide on a wiki name, domain name, and preferred language for your wiki. Click NEXT when finished.

• At this point, you’ll need to sign in to your account if you haven’t already. For those who need an account, you have the option to create one via social media account or fill out a standard registry form.

• Next, you’ll need to add a description for your wiki letting readers know what it’s about. Select what hub it fits into and any additional categories you feel are necessary, before clicking CREATE MY WIKI.

• Here is where you can choose a quick theme for your wiki. There are a few different choices, primarily changing the color of the page background, text boxes, and fonts.
  

• You’ll be able to change this at any time so your selection is not set in stone.
• Once a theme has been selected, click SHOW ME MY WIKI.
• You’ll be greeted with a small congratulatory window that will ask if you’d like to begin creating new pages. We’ll skip this for now and focus on the main page instead.

• Click the ‘x’ in the top right corner of the window to close it out.

I’m On The Home Page, Now What?

At this point, you’re either super excited to get things started or more confused than ever. Or both. The main page of your wiki has a menu bar with a few different tabs you’ll want to get acquainted with before moving on.

The menu bar contains three important sections that we’ve color-coded to make it easier for you.

Red Section

This portion of the menu is less important in the earlier stages of your wiki’s development. It will grow more important once things have been added, your community grows, and as the wiki expands.

• Popular Pages – This tab will show you what pages are being visited most often on your wiki.
• Community – Displays the conversations happening within your wiki’s community and the most recent blogs that have been written.
• Explore – You can jump to a random page within your wiki, take a look at what’s been happening on your wiki, and check out at all images and videos that have been posted.
• Main Page – A quick link that will bring you back to the main page.

Green Section

More important at all stages of development, this menu provides helpful options to the continued growth of your wiki.

• (1) Add new page – The bread and butter of any wiki is the ability to continuously add new pages. Every new page provides new information to your readers about the topic. You’ll be clicking on this icon a lot.
• (2) Wiki Activity – Clicking this icon will send you to a page for recent wiki activity. This can be anything from additional information added to an existing page, a newly created page, or comments from the community.
• (3) Admin Dashboard – Anything you need to know about or have access to when it comes to your wiki can be found here.

• The General tab provides access to everything from a theme designer and CSS options to a full user list with provided rights to basic content additions for edits and the like. The Advanced tab is more of the same only broken down into smaller, specified links for quicker access.
• (4) More Menu – Add new images and videos to the wiki gallery and look up any recent changes that have taken place.

You’ll notice a page counter to the left of this section. This will keep track of the number of pages your wiki currently has publicly displayed.

Yellow Section

The yellow section contains the links specific to whichever page you’re currently working on within your wikipedia site.

• Edit – Should be rather self-explanatory. This button will allow you to edit the current page. By default, you’re provided with a visual editor version of the text editor. More on this later.

• Dropdown Menu – This menu houses a few different links that can prove very important in moving forward. Here, you can rename the page, protect the page (and specific sections) from further edits, delete the page, and even edit the visuals for how it will look for mobile devices. There is also an option to use the Classic editor, which is the source editor, instead of the default visual editor.

Main Page First Steps

The main page should contain content that is relevant to the topic of your wiki. This includes adding a short paragraph, detailing to your readers what your community is about and what they can expect to find within it.

To get started with some edits, click the EDIT button found in the yellow section previously discussed. Your page should look something like the image below.

We’ll get into the differences between visual and source editors later. For now, we’ll continue with the visual editor as it’s the more beginner-friendly option.

Aside from the visual editor menu bar, you’ll also notice something above the intro title at the top left section of the page. It reads as <mainpage-leftcolumn-start />. Anyone familiar with web design will recognize it as a tag similar to <div> which indicates the beginning of a section or column on a page.

Scroll further down and you’ll see similar text <mainpage-leftcolumn-end /> which indicates the end of a section or column on a wiki page. Everything written within this section will be situated in the left-most column of the main page.

To understand my meaning, by default, the pages on FANDOM are divided into two columns –a left and a right– in a ⅔ x ⅓ split. So, your left column will contain the bulk of the information on a page while the right side is generally reserved for quick links and statistical information.

Do yourself a favor and keep these tags intact. Their removal could cause issues with how the design appears on all devices and browsers. Remember that an ugly main page is likely to result in less viewership.

Everything within these tags is fair game. You can change any of the default information and save it to have the edits reflected on the actual page for all to see. This includes images and videos added by clicking the appropriate icon in the visual editor menu bar.

Visual Editor vs Source Editor

The use of the visual editor allows for easy mode content that can be set within the given parameters of the editor. This means that you only have as much control over how you edit content as the editor allows. It’s very minimal but for a beginner, it can be your best friend.

To use the source editor, knowledge of wikitext is encouraged to make good use of all that it offers. Using the source editor will provide you with far more control over the look and feel of your pages and the content placed on them than is capable of the visual editor.

This is the key difference when it comes to choosing one over the other. Are you okay with playing within a limited sandbox or does the ambition for your wiki require more control?

Regardless of whichever you choose to begin with, the source editor, and wikitext, is something that every wiki editor should strive to learn and understand. Wikitext, also referred to as “markup”, is not only used on FANDOM sites, but with practically every wiki host site available.

You can find a complete list of markup text formatting on FANDOM in the help subdomain.

Templates

Another tally to add to the column of source editor would be the ability to create and save custom templates. These templates can then be used to create page consistency across your entire wiki without the need to redo each page over again from scratch.

To learn more about templates, FANDOM help has provided a comprehensive walkthrough that should help get you started.

User Management

Adding multiple contributors to your wiki is what it will take in order to have it grow and flourish. Once you’ve put together a team, you can add them individually to your wiki, providing them specific user rights.

To do this:

• Navigate to the Admin Dashboard and click User Rights located in the Community section.
  

• Enter in the user’s name that you want to add to the wiki, and click Edit user groups.
  • The team member you intend to add will have to have previously registered for an account prior to being added.
• Place a check in the box(es) of the group(s) you would like to add the user to, provide a reason for this change (optional), and then click Save user groups.

The post How To Make Your Own Wiki Site first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

The only question now is, how do you set up an e-commerce store in the quickest and easiest way possible?

What It Takes To Open An E-Commerce Store

Before you begin building your online store, you’ll need to choose which website builder you’ll use. There are many to choose from, but for the sake of this article, we’ll use Shopify. 

Here’s a quick look of the steps you’ll have to take beforehand:

1. Find the type of products you want to sell (a niche is preferred — i.e., beauty products, health supplements, baby toys).
2. Select a store name (which will ultimately be your domain name).
3. Purchase your domain name (you can buy one for cheap at Namecheap or you can buy it through Shopify).
4. Find a dropshipper or manufacturer for the products you want to sell.
5. Perform market research to see who else sells your products and determine your price point (only go cheaper if it won’t hurt your profitability).
6. Find photographers (and models) for shoots with your products.
7. Determine who will store your products — a dropshipper or order fulfillment. 

Setting Up Your Shopify Website

• Now, it’s time to start your free trial with Shopify (or purchase if you’re sure you want to stick with it). Once you’re on Shopify.com, select Start free trial.

• Then fill out your email address, password, and store name. Don’t worry if you don’t know your store name — you can change this later. 

• Next, it’ll walk you through setting up your profile, which includes submitting your address, where you are in the business, and your expected revenue range. 
• After completing the two steps, Shopify will take you to your dashboard.

Selecting a Store Theme

• On the left side of your dashboard, click Online store. This will drop down a menu of options. 

• Next, click Themes and then you’ll see the option to either customize your current theme or to choose from free or paid Shopify themes. 

• To keep things cheap, you can click Explore free themes. There aren’t many options, but you can customize them to your liking. 

We’re going to select the Supply theme. When you click on each theme, it’ll list the features it comes with. The Supply theme comes with:

• Large catalogs
• Collection filter in the sidebar
• Slideshow
• Featured collections (shows on the home page)

Then you have two styles to choose from — light or blue. It also shows how your site will look on a mobile device. 

• Once you’re ready, click Add to theme library.
• You’ll see an area show up with your theme — select customize to get started making the design your own. 

From here, you’ll be able to add things to your website like:

• Slideshows
• Collection lists
• Featured collections
• Rich text
• Footer/Header

You’ll find this in the Sections tab at the top. You can see how the site layout changes as you add each section. 

Then when you click the Theme settings tab, you’ll be able to tweak the:

• Colors
• Typography
• Favicon
• Cart
• Social Media
• Price format
• Checkout

What’s great about Shopify is that you can have a fully functional website created without knowing any coding knowledge. 

Selecting a Payment Processor

You don’t want to publish your online store without a way to accept digital payments. Lucky for you, there are several platforms to choose from. 

One of the most prominent is PayPal, which connects with your store cart. You can then accept PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, and e-checks. PayPal also allows you to extend credit to your customers so they can finance your products. This is ideal if you’re selling high-ticket items. 

Here is a list of the top payment processors:

• PayPal
• Stripe
• Authorize.net
• WePay
• Dwolla
• Braintree
• 2Checkout

Expect to pay fees per transaction. For instance, with PayPal (and most others), there is a 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. However, there are no setup fees to worry about. 

Where To Purchase Inventory

The key is to find a supplier for the products you want to sell. One of the most popular is Alibaba. Here, you can find thousands of manufacturers and suppliers who will not only sell you items in bulk — but they’ll also customize your product. 

For example, if you want to sell UV protection glasses, you can make your product unique by including a case and a microfiber cleaning cloth. This will help to set your product apart from others on the market so customers are more likely to buy from you. 

Another option is to go with a dropshipper. These companies will supply and ship products for you. Some also offer customizations for products. One example of a dropshipper is Chinabrands. 

How To Get Products To Your Customers

When you’re first starting out, you may not have space to store large amounts of inventory.

There are two main ways e-commerce sellers maintain their inventory — dropshipping and fulfillment services.  

If you decide to go with dropshipping, you’re entering into a relationship with the manufacturer. They manage the storage of the items and will ship to your customers for you. There’s no need to buy anything in bulk, since items are shipped as they’re purchased. You then split the costs with the manufacturer. 

Order fulfillment services, on the other hand, require you to buy items in advance and ship it to the fulfillment warehouse. They will then create a SKU and ship the items for you. This is ideal if you have a good relationship with a manufacturer, but need someone to handle the warehousing and shipments. 

The costs for the two vary, but you can expect to spend more upfront with order fulfillment since you need to buy bulk products in advance.

Also, keep in mind the location of your customers. You’ll need to find dropshippers and fulfillment service providers in the regions you plan to sell to. 

Set Up Your E-Commerce Store In No Time

If you play your cards right, you can have your online store published and ready to go within weeks. Dropshipping is the best option if you’re trying to get started as soon as possible. 

However, if you want to spend more time searching for manufacturers and perfecting your product, then order fulfillment may be the way to go. Don’t forget to invest in quality photos and product demo videos to help sell your goods. 

The post How to Set Up an E-Commerce Store Quickly and Easily first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

If you’re not careful, you could end up with a site that’s sluggish and unstable. Slow websites alone are costing businesses $500 million per year. Just a single second delay can also reduce your conversion rates by 7%. 

The best way around this is to find a top-tier web host. So let’s take a look at some of the lesser-known, but equally reliable web hosting providers. 

HostPapa

We all heard of GoDaddy, but what do you know about HostPapa? This isn’t a new kid on the block — the web host has been around since 1998. 

It’s also not a slouch — it comes equipped with multiple GigE fiber connections, fully-redundant Liebert HVAC cooling systems, and a diesel generator. In other words, it has all the geek tech needed to ensure it stays operational. 

It also means you get maximum uptime and speed for your website. You can choose between several plans, but one that may catch your eye is one that offers SSD performance. 

If you’re looking for shared hosting, you’ll spend under $4/month (starting price). Then for VPS hosting, the price starts at $45/month. Plus, it’s available to Linux and Windows users. 

So what’s the downside? There’s no uptime monitoring. However, it does offer backup through its numerous dashboards, and you’re allowed to build scripts to automate backups. 

Just make sure to request malware scans, since this isn’t performed automatically. 

InMotion Hosting

Maybe you’re looking for something with more tech support and hosting options. If so, InMotion Hosting offers hosting for WordPress and businesses. Plus, you get access to web design services and excellent tech support. 

Familiar with cPanel and Softaculous? It comes with that as well. Then to top it off, you get some handy extras bundled into the packages that other web hosting providers charge extra for. This includes protection from malware and DDoS attacks, spam emails, and data loss using basic backups. 

The overall performance of the service is above average, which means faster load times. However, some complain that the shared hosting speeds are subpar. 

The plans begin at $4/month for basic, and then InMotion pro is $14/month. There’s also a 90-day money-back guarantee. 

A2Hosting

Did the shared hosting speeds turn you off from InMotion Hosting? Then here’s an alternative. A2 hosting offers the quickest speeds for shared web hosting (somewhere around 336ms). 

It comes with free site migration for those who are considering switching web hosting providers. Then if you need tech support, you’ll find it offers quick and efficient services to members. Plus it’s compatible with popular content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. 

Then for the environmentally-aware out there, you’ll be happy to know that using A2Hosting also means you’re reducing your carbon footprint. It operates in an environmentally-friendly manner, all without disrupting your site’s uptime (around 99.92%). 

The downside is that there are restrictions for its cheapest plans, which start at $3/month. For instance, you have limitations like:

• Hosting for one website.
• Five databases.
• Add-on domains excluded.
• Limits to WordPress caches.

However, it does come with unlimited SSD storage and transfers, 25 email accounts, and an anytime money-back guarantee. 

iPage

Now let’s say you have a website without a blog. In this case, you may only have a handful of web pages to host. If so, then you can go lightweight with iPage. 

It has an impressive uptime rate of 99.97%. Plus, it comes with enhanced security scans using SiteLock (for free). When you need help, you can use its live chat service, which is available 24/7. 

When you sign up, you pay only $2/month for the first three years, then it rises to $8/month. If you’re just starting out, you can use its free website builder. Also, there are thousands of templates to choose from, and you get a free email address. 

You can also use this if you’re hosting an eCommerce website. It even has analytics tools so you can keep an eye on your website’s performance. 

Ready for the downside? If you need a domain, you’ll have to pay $17/year and $150 per site transfer. The speeds also aren’t the greatest (787ms). 

However, if you have a small website, then you may not have to worry too much about this. On the other hand, if you’re not satisfied within the first 30 days, you can get your money back. 

GreenGeeks

Here’s another one for you, eco-conscious consumers. GreenGeeks isn’t your typical gas-guzzling infrastructure. The company buys 3x the energy it uses, transferring the remainder into wind energy credits. You can look at it as recirculating energy back into the economy. The idea is to help fuel the green energy economy. 

Now, here’s what you’ve been waiting for — is it an overpriced powerhouse? Yes and no. 

Yes, it’s a powerhouse offering SSD infrastructure and 24/7 phone support. Then no, it’s an affordable option, starting at $3/month (lite) for shared and WordPress hosting. VPS hosting starts at $5/month. 

The price resets to its typical $10/month for the lite shared hosting package. You also get nightly backups, proactive server monitoring, and real-time security scanning. 

GlowHost

The web is a diverse platform. So what do you do when you need a host for more than a website? Maybe you’re running a podcast, for example?

GlowHost is an exceptional choice — it offers FFmpeg, podcast, and SHOUTcast hosting. They pride themselves on being a VPS hosting alternative. It also boasts having a user-friendly platform (similar to shared hosting plans) with robust performance (like VPS hosting offers). 

Most plans come with a cPanel option, and all members get access to 24/7/365 phone support. The added bonus is that it operates using wind power. 

The prices start at $5/month for shared hosting and can go as high as $50 for cloud VPS hosting. GlowHost offers a 91-day money-back guarantee, so it wouldn’t hurt to try it out.

Give Your Website The Hosting It Needs

As a webmaster, you will want to ensure your site is up and running at full-speed every second of the day. While this is impossible to guarantee, you can decrease the odds of your website going down repetitively by choosing a reputable web hosting provider.

Now that you’re equipped with this list, you can begin your hunt with some of the top hosting providers out there. At the end of the day, it’s about getting the best bang for your buck.

The post Cheap and Reliable Website Hosting for Small Businesses first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

One of the many benefits of using the WordPress platform is the ability to use plugins. They extend functionality and add needed features to help you grow your small business. 

In this article, we will discuss ten plugins every small business website needs:

• Yoast SEO
• WordFence
• Social Warfare
• Akismet
• Broken Link Checker
• W3 Total Cache
• Smush Image Optimization, Compressions, and Lazy Load
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Simple Author Box
• Google Analytics Dashboard

Yoast SEO

Get more visitors to your website and increase your search engine rankings with Yoast SEO. 

With millions of users worldwide, this SEO plugin for WordPress offers the toolset you need to please search engines and users.

Below are some of the powerful features of the free version of SEO Yoast.

• Create an XML sitemap.
• Avoid duplicate content by setting canonical URLs.
• Add title and meta descriptions to improve branding.
• Take control over site breadcrumbs by setting primary categories and determine taxonomies.

• Write SEO-friendly text, including focus keyphrases and SEO snippet.

• Get SEO analysis and actionable suggested results.
• See a snippet preview of how your post or page will look in search results.

• Optimize your site structure with internal linking and content features.
• Control access to different sections of the plugin for teams or colleagues.
• Use the bulk editor to make large-scale edits.

SEO Yoast offers a premium version with even more capabilities.  They also offer paid training. Anyone can read the helpful tips on their blog.

If your target audience can’t find you online, they can’t purchase your products or services. SEO Yoast helps your potential customers find you.

WordFence

WordFence makes it harder for someone to hack your WordPress site and protects it from potential hacking, brute force attacks, and other security vulnerabilities. WordFence will scan your site, track, and alert you of suspicious or malicious behavior. 

See an overview in the dashboard of the security of your website, including status features, notifications, and attack statistics.

Some of the features of the free version include:

• Blocks and identifies malicious traffic with the web application firewall.
• Limits login attempts to protect from brute force attacks.
• Protects your website at the endpoint.
• Checks core files, plugins, themes, backdoors, bad URLs, malicious redirects, SEO spam, and code injections with the malware scanner.
• Alerts you to known potential security issues and security vulnerabilities.
• Scans your files, comments, and posts for suspicious content and dangerous URLs.
• Blocks administrator logins when passwords have been compromised.

There is also a premium version with more security options and resources.

Social Warfare

Social Warfare is a fast and visually appealing social sharing plugin. Unlike other sharing plugins that may slow down your website, Social Warfare doesn’t.

It isn’t bloated with unnecessary code and loads faster.

The plugin is easy to set up and enables users to customize the share buttons.

If you move or change your domain name, there is no need to worry about losing existing social shares.Social Warfare’s Share Recovery feature protects your social proof and saves your share counts.

The free version of Social Warfare comes with:

• Social sharing buttons for the major social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
• Share counts.
• Click-to-tweet.
• Button placement locations.
• Content-protection.
• Popular posts widget.
• Shortcodes.

The free version can be downloaded from the WordPress repository. There is also a premium version if you want expanded capabilities.

Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet automatically checks all the comments on your site to filter out spam. Site owners can see which ones were caught as spam in the comments section of the administrative dashboard.

Akismet comes pre-installed in WordPress but must be activated to use. You will need to get an Akismet API key to use the plugin. Keys are free for personal use. Commercial and business sites must get a paid subscription.

Why do you need Akismet? You want to prevent hackers from creating new user accounts on your small business website. If they add spam hyperlinks, you can get penalized by Google. This also includes spam comments. 

See overall stats in the settings of your activated plugin. Click on Detailed Stats to see a breakdown by month.

Broken Link Checker

Broken links will hurt your search engine rankings. Broken Link Checker will monitor your site for broken links and missing images. It will notify you if any are found.

With Broken Link Checker, you can:

• See broken links in content differently than other links if selected in settings.
• Monitor links in comments, posts, and pages.
• Edit broken links from the plugin page.

Broken Link Checker is highly customizable. Change the settings in the plugin dashboard. 

Fixing broken links can create a better user experience, reduce bounce rates, and increase page views.

W3 Total Cache

Website speed and user experience are essential ranking factors for SEO. Webpages that take too long to load will reduce your search engine rankings. They will also create negative experiences for your users who don’t want to wait.

W3 Total Cache increases your site performance by increasing load speed. It creates cached HTML files so that visitors don’t have to wait for all your site’s functions to load every time they land on a page.

Smush Image Optimization, Compression, & Lazy Load

Large, unoptimized images take up a lot of space on your website, slow down site speed, and harm your search engine rankings.

Some of the many features and benefits of Smush include:

• Optimize your images while preserving the quality.
• Automate the image optimization process.
• Detect incorrect image sizes.
• Compress any image in any directory.

Increase your rankings by using Smush to help your small business website load faster.

Google XML Sitemaps

Every website needs a sitemap to tell the search engines which pages and posts on your site to crawl. 

If you are running Yoast SEO, you don’t need a separate plugin for this. Google’s XML Sitemap Generator helps you create and upload one without coding or using HTML.

With this sitemap, it is easier for the search engine crawlers to see the structure of your site and retrieve it. 

Also, every time you create a new post or page, the search engines will be notified. The plugin is free for personal and commercial use.

Simple Author Box

For sites that have multiple bloggers, Simple Author Box is a must-have. Easily add a mobile responsive box at the bottom of your blog posts.

The main features enable you to:

• Customize options to match your brand design.
• Show author name, website, gravatar, description, and social icons.
• Insert the author box at the end of each post automatically.

With Simple Author Box you can clearly differentiate between different authors on your site. The plugin is free, but if you want additional features, you can upgrade to Simple Author Box Pro.

Google Analytics Dashboard

Knowing how visitors are getting to your small business website, how long they stay, and which pages they are landing on is essential to small business owners.

Rather than having to log into your Google Analytics account, track your stats and get in-depth posts and pages reports inside your WP installation with Google Analytics Dashboard.

Some of the robust features include the ability to:

• Track events easily.
• Customize dimensions to track.
• Use Google Tag Manager as an alternative tracking code.
• See your analytics in real-time right inside your WP dashboard.

The Google Analytic Dashboard is compatible with multisite network installations.

One of the many reasons people choose to use WordPress for their website is the ability to enhance and customize it using plugins. Consider the plugins listed above to help your small business grow.

The post 10 Essential WordPress Plugins For a Small Business Website first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Both web design tools are designed to be user-friendly, but there are a few key differences in how each one approaches website layout and design, as well as in their pricing tiers. This guide will break down what each service has to offer and help you decide which of the two—if either—is the best option for you. 

At the end of this Wix vs Squarespace guide, we have recommended a few other website builders that you might consider if you feel like neither Wix or Squarespace meets your needs.

Pricing

If you’re new to building websites, you don’t want to invest a lot of money into something you aren’t sure will work for you. In this case, Wix has the upper hand. Wix offers a free tier of web design, while Squarespace only has paid tiers. Both fall a bit short on pricing, however.

Both Wix and Squarespace advertise a monthly price, but the actual price is paid upfront all at once. The advertised monthly price is just the annual price divided by twelve. Squarespace makes the customer aware of this (albeit in smaller font), while Wix does not.

There are multiple tiers for each service. To make it easier to see, we’ve created the following chart.

Wix offers four more tiers not shown here for business and ecommerce customers that are $23, $27, $49, and $500 per month, respectively—but at those price points, you are better off hiring a professional to design a site rather than paying a monthly subscription to a DIY web builder.

Wix Vs Squarespace: The Better Editor

The primary difference between Wix and Squarespace is in how websites are built and designed.

Wix provides users with far more freedom in how they design their sites. Their editor has dozens of elements to choose from, but the sheer number of options can be overwhelming to an inexperienced designer.

The benefit to this amount of creative control is that you can drag an element pretty much anywhere on the page and arrange your site how you want. The downside is that elements do not auto-correct themselves.

For example, if you create a column of different elements but move something above them, they will automatically move down to make room. However, if you delete that element, the others won’t move to fill in the space—you’ll have to do that manually.

Squarespace, on the other hand, does not provide users with as much creative freedom. Its web builder is more rigid. You choose a template to start from and make changes to that template. 

While it may frustrate someone that wants to design a website from scratch, Squarespace is ideal for someone that wants a good-looking website that they can essentially plug their own information into and hit the ground running.

Themes & Templates

If aesthetics are not your strong suit, a list of themes (sometimes called templates) can be a huge boon for designing a website. Just pick one and modify it to fit your needs. 

Themes are also one area where Wix and Squarespace differ dramatically.

Wix has more than 600 different themes to choose from in a variety of different categories, including Business, Restaurants & Food, and Creative Arts. Decide which category your site will fall into and search through those themes; only search the other categories if you find nothing to your liking. There are almost too many to choose from.

Squarespace does not have nearly as many themes—there are somewhere between 60 and 100 different options to choose from. However, each theme is carefully chosen and curated for inclusion in the web builder. Their themes have a modern, sophisticated feel and go hand-in-hand with Squarespace’s editing tools.

The Better Option

In truth, neither Wix or Squarespace is really better. While Wix does have a free option (versus Squarespace’s 14-day trial), the most powerful features are locked behind premium subscriptions. The decision really comes down to what your intended use for a website is and how comfortable you feel designing one.

Are you a small business owner that needs an attractive, inviting website but you have little to no web design experience? Then use Squarespace. The time you save with their simple, intuitive editor will balance out the higher costs you pay month-to-month to use the service.

Are you an experienced designer that wants to create a personal site or a portfolio page? Then go with Wix. Its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to layout a website, and the vast number of elements and themes give you the creative freedom you need to bring your vision to fruition. 

Alternatively, if neither of these services deliver quite what you’re looking for, consider these other options:

• WordPress.com
• Weebly
• Webs

The post Wix Vs Squarespace: Which is the Better Web Design Tool? first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

If you want to avoid the hassle of purchasing a domain name, setting up a hosting service, choosing an editing program, and all the other headaches that come with launching a website, you do have other options.

If you don’t want to make a whole website but you need to make a page or two available on the internet for other people to access, you can use one of the tools described below. They’re great for everything from a “Contact Me” page, shareable resume, help/info document, an ad for your product, a one-page website (or more), etc.

Tip: You can also host web pages from your own computer with IIS, or online with services like Wix.

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online word processing tool that you might have used before. It runs entirely in your browser and saves to your Google account as you write, but did you know that it also lets you publish web pages to the internet for free?

When you have a document open, go to File > Publish to the web, and select Publish from the Link tab. Copy the link that’s generated and share it with anyone that you want to have access to the page. If you use the File > Share menu instead, you can pick specific people to share it with.

We’ve placed Google Docs as the number one best way to publish web pages for free because you can un-publish at any time, make changes to your page as often as you want, and even share the page with specific people only instead of the entire internet.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a part of GitHub, which is used primarily for sharing code. However, you can also upload your website files to have it host your web page or entire site.

Step 1: Make a GiHub account.

Note: The username you choose will always be visible in a GitHub web page. Here’s an example of a page created with this service, where “jayfguest” is the username and “sample” is the name chosen for the site (which you’ll do below): https://jayfguest.github.io/sample/

Step 2: Select Continue on the page asking if you want a free or pro account (Free is selected by default, so ensure that it is before continuing).

Step 3: Select skip this step on the following page or optionally fill out the questionnaire.

Step 4: Verify your new account by selecting the Verify email address link in the email you received from GitHub.

Step 5: Open the Create a New Repository page and fill out the details for the site you want to create. The Repository name field will be visible in the URL. Also be sure to select Public.

Step 6: Choose Create repository.

Step 7: Select uploading an existing file to upload the contents of your website.

Step 8: Drag onto the page the files you want to form into a website, or click choose your files to browse for them.

Note: The home page needs to be named index.html.

Step 9: Select Commit changes.

Step 10: Go to Settings, scroll down to GitHub Pages, and change the Source to be master branch.

Notice the URL in the screenshot above. This is where your GitHub Pages URL will be after finishing this last step.

If you ever need to make changes to your web page, select it from your repository and use the edit button to launch the built-in editor. You’ll always need to commit the changes for them to be published, just like you did above in Step 9.

Tip: Learn the top 10 tips on getting the most out of GitHub.

Google Sites

Another product from Google that lets you make a quick website is aptly called Google Sites. It’s super easy to use, supports drag-and-drop, connects to your Google Drive account, supports multiple pages, and just generally makes publishing web content easy.

You can read all about how to use Google Sites here.

HTML Pasta

If you have a really small HTML file that’s less than 1 MB, you can use HTML Pasta.

When you host an HTML file on this site, you don’t get to preview it before submitting, you have no way to delete it once it’s published, and you can’t edit the URL. However, you don’t need a user account to put the file online, so it’s entirely anonymously, meaning that nobody can find out who published it.

All published pages are in this form:

https://<numbers and letters>.htmlpasta.com

Here’s an example of a simple web page made with HTML Pasta.

The post How to Create a Simple Web Page for Free first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

The best way to keep your brand or name secured with each of your photos is to watermark them with your company logo, your last name, or anything else that tells viewers who made the image.

There are dozens if not hundreds of free watermark utilities you can use, but not all of them are easy or free to use. Below is a list of our picks of the best ways to watermark your pictures.

Watermark.ws (Online)

The Watermark.ws website is by far the most helpful for one simple reason: you can import images from a huge variety of websites. It supports loading images from your computer but also Facebook, Google Drive, OneDrive, Google Photos, Evernote, Gmail, Instagram, Box, Amazon Cloud Drive, FTP, Imgur, and other places, including the web.

You can add both text and image watermarks to your photos with this tool. Lots of font types are supported and you can easily add the copyright or trademark symbol anywhere on your photos.

We also like this free online watermarking tool because it supports other useful image editing tasks, too, like cropping, rotating, resizing, flipping, borders, and more.

When you’re finished adding the watermark, you can export to JPG to save the image to your computer. You can upgrade and pay for premium features if you want extras like the option to save to Facebook and other sites, access to watermark templates, more fonts, or premium filters.

FotoJet (Online)

FotoJet is another online watermarking tool that’s completely free to use (for the basic features). It lets you load images from Facebook or your computer.

The watermarking function isn’t technically marketed as such since it’s just a text tool, but using FotoJet to watermark pictures is a better idea than alternative sites because it supports large file uploads and includes handy features like an opacity option, several font types, and layering. There are also glow and outline options for the text tool to make your watermark pop.

After watermarking your photos, you can share them with the built-in Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr sharing buttons. The other option is to download your watermarked picture in its original size, as a JPG or PNG image file.

Watermark.ink (Online)

If the online watermarking tools above weren’t what you were after, you might like Watermark.ink. It supports way more font types and adds the unique option to display a large X across the image. However, you can only upload photos from your computer, not other sites.

This website lets you add your company logo (or any other image) to the photo, too, to maximize your watermark’s presence.

Completed photos can be saved to your computer in the JPG or PNG format.

uMark (Windows & Mac)

A website that watermarks your pictures is appropriate if you don’t want to install watermarking software and you need the watermark on just a couple photos. However, a dedicated watermarking program is better for bulk jobs, like when you need to watermark more than one image at once. Or, maybe you’re just hesitant to upload your pictures to a website.

uMark is one watermarking tool that lets you import an entire folder of images to watermark all of them. You can even choose which image file types to import and whether to grab photos from subfolders, too.

There are several watermarking features in this program. You can make text, image, or QR code watermarks, add shapes and effects to the images, apply filters, and add copyright information to the file’s metadata.

Since uMark is a desktop app, the watermark text can be any text you have installed on your computer. There are also macros you can import as watermark text, including today’s date, the folder name, the creation date, the image width, and several other parameters.

Output formats include JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and PDF. Batch file renaming is also supported when it’s time to save the watermarked photos.

Some other desktop watermarking programs like uMark include Aoao Watermark, Add Watermark to Photo, Mass Watermark, Arclab Watermark Studio, TSR Watermark Image, and iWatermark Pro.

Add Watermark on Photos (Android)

If you need to add a watermark to an Android photo, you can do so with the app Add Watermark on Photos. We like this watermarking app because it supports lots of watermark templates that are easy to edit and apply to your pictures. Plus, batch watermarking is supported.

You can build a watermark with the large catalog of symbols and images built-in to the app, or you can pick from premade watermarks that came with the app. With the watermark templates, you can quickly edit the text and color, and even upload your images to use as the watermark.

When you apply the watermark, you can do a “freestyle” one where it’s just one watermark that you can drag and resize anywhere on the image, or you can use the “tile” function to make four watermarks all over the screen. The third option is “cross,” which puts the watermark in the center of the photo and creates a cross from each corner to further protect the image from being copied.

Some of the art in the app have a lock next to them because you have to pay for those, but there’s still a large variety of free watermark making tools available.

Watermark X (iPhone & iPad)

Watermark X is the perfect watermarking app for iPhone and iPad because it walks you through a simple step-by-step wizard to make the watermark and then save it back to your device. There aren’t any confusing or unnecessary settings along the way.

To watermark an image on your iPhone or iPad with this app, select the photo that needs the watermark and then optionally decide whether to resize it to fit various dimensions, such as 1:1, 3:4, or 4:3. Then, pick a watermark design to edit the colors, text, opacity, and position to make it perfect.

When finished, the watermarked photo is saved to your device, but you also have some sharing options to post it on Instagram, Flickr, Twitter, and other sites.

To remove ads, make all the designs available for use, and enable batch watermarking, you can pay a yearly fee to use the app.

The post How To Easily Add Watermarks To Your Online Images Before Uploading first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

A lot of people try their level best to avoid being online but truth be told, you end up online these days whether you like it or not. So if you are looking for someone, you just have to know the right online places to look.

Social Media

The first obvious port of call is obviously social media, in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Twitter is very limited in what they can tell you about a person (apart from their photo and location – if they enter that information). 

But Facebook and LinkedIn? Well, that’s a whole different ball-game because they are designed for people to reveal everything about themselves – and they do.

I have read books by former US Marshals involved in the Witness Protection Program who said that a lot of people in the program were eventually found by their enemies because they kept updating their social media pages!

Facebook

Whether or not the person you are looking for is on Facebook will depend on how old they are and how “into tech” they are. Generally speaking, those under 50 will most likely have a Facebook account. Anyone over 50….well, then it’s a tossup.

Finding the person will depend on things like :

• how unique the person’s name is. Zachary Zucker is more likely to show up clearly than John Smith.
• If they are still living in the same area where you saw them last. If they have a common name and have moved to the other side of the world, identifying them might be a problem.
• If they have information on their profile that makes it obvious it is them – photos, former schools, former employers, etc.

Another thing to try (if you know it) is to see if their former school has an alumni Facebook group. Most schools have Facebook groups set up by former students who upload old class photos and talk about the old days. You might find the person there.

LinkedIn

If you strike out on Facebook, try LinkedIn next. I have had an incredible amount of luck with LinkedIn because it has become the one-stop place for anyone wanting to build a career. This means there will be photos of the person, their entire work history, location, schools, etc.

It can also be incredibly satisfying to look up the former school bullies and discover they are flipping burgers in Burger King or cleaning toilets!

Search Engines

If the person is not on social media, the next step is the search engine which more or less means Google.

Google can throw up a huge amount of information about people. Newspaper articles can be indexed on Google so maybe the person did something noteworthy that got them into the news?

Or maybe they committed a crime and went to prison, in which case the trial would have been covered? Then there are the obituaries which told me a friend was dead when he suddenly dropped off the radar one day. Finally, see if the person has their own website.

Here are some specialist search engines you could also try. Most will give you basic information with a nominal fee required to access more advanced information. But the basic information will cover things like names, addresses, relatives, and maybe phone numbers. 

The slightly annoying thing though is that many of these websites cover the US only.

• AnyWho White Pages
• ZabaSearch
• Pipl
• Death Indexes
• Find a Grave
• PeekYou
• Persopo

Phone Books

Many countries now publish their phone directories online, making the days of getting bulky print books a relic of the past. A Google search of “phone book” + “your country” will bring up the directories. But when checking for this article, the site for US numbers was down. The British equivalents are BT and 192 Directory Enquiries.

Prison Databases

If you discover from Google that they have gone to prison, or you just want to tick prison off the list, the next step is to look on the right databases.

In the UK, there is no actual database. Instead, you must email the Prison Service and request that they look for you. Then the prisoner has to consent to their location being given

However, in the US, forget about prisoner privacy! The Federal Bureau of Prisons maintains a database for federal inmates. And this website links to prisoner locator tools for every state in the US.

Local Newspaper Archives

One other thing you could try are local newspaper archives. Some newspapers allow search engines to index their stories, but many do not. Instead, they put their archives behind paywalls. Newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post are notorious for this, as well as many smaller local community newspapers.

So see if newspapers in the region have archives, pay the nominal fee, and have a look around for the person you’re looking for. I have had success before so it’s worth it.

If All Else Fails – Follow The Friends & Relatives

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean in a creepy stalker-ish way, hiding in the bushes with a long-range camera lens. What I mean is that if the person you seeking is not showing up – and you know their friends and relatives – look for them. If they are in touch with the person, you could find them that way.

This is probably the best bet if someone has changed their name due to marriage and you don’t know the new name. Look in the friends and relatives’ friends lists on social media – see if the person is there under a new name.

If you don’t know the relatives, go to ancestry.com . Enter the person you’re looking for then it will tell you their relatives’ details. It’s all public record so you’re not doing anything wrong.

The post How To Track Someone Down Using Online Sources first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Lots of online scam artists and identity thieves steal peoples photos and pass them off as themselves. So that good looking blonde woman you’re admiring on Tinder could actually be a big fat Russian guy in St Petersburg, hoping to get your bank account details. In this day and age, it pays to be safe, and there are a few online services to help you with it.

Google Images

Google is not the only mainstream search engine to offer reverse image search. Bing and Yandex both offer it too. But obviously, everybody’s first stop is going to be with the big G.

Let’s say you were swiping around on Tinder and you came across this rather dashing gentleman.

He claims his name is Luigi and is a billionaire Italian entrepreneur. But wait, doesn’t he look familiar? Didn’t you see him in a movie once? Or maybe he is the local pizza delivery guy?

Google Images has a feature where you can upload photos and see if you get any hits. Go to Google Images and click on the camera icon.

You then get two options – paste in the direct URL to the photo if it is online. Or if it is on your computer or mobile device, you can upload it directly to Google.

I clicked “Upload an image”, navigated to the photo in Windows Explorer, and it started uploading.

Right away, Google has identified “Luigi the billionaire Italian entrepreneur” as some lowlife fraud called “Hugh Jackman”, who is some kind of “actor”. Whew, close escape there! We all know what these actor types are like.

TinEye

TinEye is also another reverse image search engine and has a good reputation for getting the job done. For a price, they also scan images you give them and send you email alerts if those images appear online suddenly somewhere else. 

However, one big difference with TinEye is that they are not very good with peoples faces, even if those people are high up in Google search results, like Hugh the actor. Instead, TinEye focuses more on more general images such as artwork, proprietary images such as photography and designs, that kind of thing. If you are an artist looking to protect your work from online plagiarists, this may be your best solution.

Let’s say someone offered me this “unique just-painted” painting for sale but I have a sneaking suspicion it has not just been painted and might have been around for a while.

How well can TinEye do with this one? Let’s find out.

Right away, TinEye brings back over 13,000 results identifying it as “American Gothic”. A quick web search says it is by Grant Wood, and it is hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago. So another close call averted there.

Closing Thoughts

Reverse image search is not perfect. There are so many variables which can change a picture such as change of hair color, adding or subtracting glasses or facial hair, changing the tone of the picture quality, and so on. There are pictures of me online but reverse image search didn’t find a lot of them.

Police, lawyers, and private investigators will have better reverse image search tools available to them. But for ordinary Joe Public, we have to make do with what we have but this is something that is only going to improve with time.

The post What Reverse Image Search Is & How To Use It first appeared on Online Tech Tips.