Website How To Guides
Webmentor How to Guides and articles are written in plain english for non-technical business folk who want to get a website or manage a small business website more effectively.
The Great Big Image Problem
Your website is getting bigger and bigger. It's taking forever to backup. Ever wonder why? Chances are you're suffering from the Great Big Image Problem.
Last updated: 19 Feb 2021
Distance Selling Regulations in Ireland
Before you set up an online shop you'll need to acquaint yourself with the Distance Selling Acts. The article will focus on websites that sell goods/services online.
Last updated: 04 Jun 2020
How much should a website cost?
The number 1 question I get asked is: How much does a website cost?
Sometimes the people who ask this question have been told by the boss to ring around for the best quote. They have no idea about websites and can't understand why I don't have a one-size-fits-all figure on hand.
Last updated: 19 Sep 2022
Dealing with Email Spoofing
Email Spoofing is when a spammer forges your email address and uses it to send out emails FROM YOU that you didn’t send. This article deals with how you can stop that from happening.
Last updated: 23 May 2018
Cookies and the Law
Cookies, or any technology that can be used to store data on a user's device, is subject to the European GDPR Regulation and EPrivacy Directive. This article explains the various technologies used and your responsibilities under current Irish and European law.
Last updated: 13 Oct 2020
How to Construct a Website Privacy Statement
A Data privacy statement is required by all websites hosted or doing business in Europe and is regulated by the General Data Privacy Rules (GDPR). This article deals with constructing a GDPR compliant Data Privacy statement.
Last updated: 15 Jul 2020
How Fast is Your Website?
A couple of years ago, Google made it known that site speed would be a factor in search engine page rankings. But is it? And is it worth investing a few bob to see your website loading faster? The short answer is that if speed tests put you into the "80% slower than all tested websites" category, then you will almost certainly benefit from a ranking boost, more visitors and a reduction in bounce rates*.
Last updated: 10 Apr 2019
What is Web Hosting?
A Web Host, or webhost, is a company that provides space on their computers for you to put your website files onto. If you're thinking hard right now, you might just be wondering well heck, why don't I just put my website files onto my own computer? Well you could, but it just wouldn't work...
Last updated: 02 Apr 2021
What is a Domain Name?
The domain name is the website address, minus the www, like webmentor.ie - in this article we talk about what is a domain name and whether or not you should add the www. in front of it for your website's url.
Last updated: 14 Apr 2020
What is a TLD?
A TLD or Top Level Domain is the technical term for a domain name ending, such as .com or .ie. There are lots of them and they fall into 2 categories - generic (gTLDs) and country code (ccTLDs).
Last updated: 14 Apr 2020
Will SEO increase my ranking? How is a Paid Listing different?
SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
The purpose of SEO is to make your website rank highly with Search Engines for your chosen keywords. If you're not sure what this means, read on and you'll see it's simpler than it sounds!
Last updated: 23 May 2018
What is Shared Web Hosting?
Shared web hosting is the cheapest form of hosting available. In a nutshell, the web host decides how many "tenants" can comfortably "share" the space on a single physical server*. And just like people sharing an apartment block, life and resources can get stressed!
Last updated: 13 Jan 2021
Set up a Google Account BEFORE you Outsource SEO and Adwords
I wrote the original article for this 3 years ago, and yet it still holds true:
Irish website owners frequently outsource their SEO and advertising needs to third party companies without retaining any control of their Google Account and the data generated.
Last updated: 06 Nov 2019
What is a Domain Registrar?
A Domain Registrar is an accredited company that will allow you to register and pay for a domain name. A Registrar may be licensed to sell one or more TLDs. A Registrar can also license 'resellers' - usually web hosting or web design firms - to sell domain names on their behalf.
Last updated: 14 Apr 2020
What is a Virtual Private Server (VPS)?
In webhosting terms - a Virtual Private Server, or VPS, is a level up from a shared web hosting service. One reason why many people upgrade to a VPS is because their sites are getting popular and they're regularly exceeding the monthly bandwidth* cap on their shared web hosting server.
Last updated: 23 May 2021
Registering a Domain Name. Part 1. Decide the Ending First!
The very first thing to do with a domain name is to decide on the domain name ending FIRST. The most popular choices in Ireland are .ie, .com and .co.uk - the domain name ending (shown in red below) is more correctly known as the TLD (or Top Level Domain).
Last updated: 14 Apr 2020
What to look for in a good web host
If you want to get straight to it, you can compare the features and prices of Irish business web hosting packages in Webmentor's Irish Web Hosting Table. All the packages listed are Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP ("LAMP") shared server offerings with at least 1 MySQL database.
Last updated: 01 Nov 2021
How to use the Google Keyword tool
Knowing which keywords are best suited on your webpages is the first step to optimising your website.
You need to have an Adwords account to use the Keyword tool. You can use it when you set up a new campaign, or to optimise an existing one.
Last updated: 23 May 2018
Registering a Domain Name. Part 2. Choose a Good Name
In the first article in this series, you learned about choosing the TLD (the .ie, .com, .net part). In this article I'll discuss a few points about picking a good name to go with it.
Last updated: 15 Apr 2020
Registering a Domain Name. Part 3. Is it Available?
In the previous article in this series, we learned the ins and outs of choosing a good domain name. In this article, we'll learn how to use the WHOIS service to find out it the domain name you've chosen is available. Most webhosting companies provide this service on their websites but the ones we look at will give you a lot more information like who it's registered to, for how long and nameserver details of the webhost.
Last updated: 15 Apr 2020