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.

Tagged under: Websites

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.

Tagged under: Legals ECommerce

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.

Tagged under: Websites

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.

Tagged under: Email

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.

Tagged under: Legals

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.

Tagged under: Legals

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*.

Tagged under: SEO Websites

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...

Tagged under: Webhosting

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.

Tagged under: Domain Names

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).

Tagged under: Domain Names

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!

Tagged under: SEO

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!

Tagged under: Webhosting

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.

Tagged under: SEO

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.

Tagged under: Domain Names

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.

Tagged under: Webhosting

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).

Tagged under: Domain Names

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.

Tagged under: Webhosting

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.

Tagged under: SEO

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.

Tagged under: Domain Names

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.

Tagged under: Domain Names

Last updated: 15 Apr 2020