BlueTree and BlueTree CMS FAQs

No. It's very easy to update your website. What's more, you only need a web browser to update your website, so you can do it, any time you want, from anywhere in the world. Check this movie.

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Yes. Choosing a domain name isn't straightforward. It depends on your business, your market and the advice keeps changing. Best discuss it with us before committing yourself. If you've already chosen one, don't worry.

It costs very little to register a .co.uk domain, sometimes as little as £1 for the first year. Subsequent years will cost more but only £10-£12+VAT.

We don't charge extra for helping clients choose and register their domains.

TIP: if you get someone else to register your website, make sure you have access to the Registrar account and that your business is the "Registrant". Explanation here.

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Custom means "adapted from a template", as in "custom Ford Mustang". You'll see plenty of other Mustangs, and possibly, though less likely, one the same as yours. The design start with a template, and is tweaked to make it look special for you. Often driven by technology changes, website designs vary with current fashion, which is why we get to redesign them from time to time. It's not surprising then, that we develop a set of start-points to save time and keep costs down.

Bespoke, means "designed uniquely for you", as in "bespoke tailored suit". It'll fit you like a glove but the chances of it fitting anyone else as well are negligible. For us it means, "We'll start from a blank sheet of paper and we won't make another one that's similar to yours."

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Yes, as many as you want. And it’s easy to include them in your menus.

We make branded, empty page templates for you. Chose the one that best suits your new page. You control the content, the template ensures your new page matches the others on your website.

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We don’t limit the number of extra pages you can add to your website. We operate a fair usage policy. Our largest client site has over 80 pages, though it does depend on the number of big images you have.

Images are usually the biggest consumer of web space.

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We don’t limit the number of images you can add to your website. We do operate a fair usage policy, but nobody has yet built a website big enough to invoke it.

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Yes, and it's very easy. You'll need a YouTube or Vimeo account and we'll give you a short "handle" to type to make your movies play within your web pages.

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Web users are impatient; they'll leave a page if it doesn't load fast, often in under five seconds. We build BlueTree websites to load efficiently and display properly on all devices, including those with high-definition screens. Check your home page load speed by following these instructions on our blog.

Your home page and landing pages, particularly, should load fast. In the unlikely event that they load too slowly, let us know and we'll look into it.

It's less important for other pages, as you will already have grabbed your viewer's interest by the time they reach one, so they'll be willing to wait a little longer.

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Your monthly payments contribute to our costs involved in running your website. These include,

• Your contribution to the cost of the resources your website uses:
  • rent for the disc space your website occupies
  • computer time used to process visitors to your site
  • our server's high-bandwidth Internet connection to the worldwide web
  • the software required to keep your website up and running: operating system, web server, database and management tools
• We also do things behind the scenes:
  • uptime and response time monitoring: if your website goes down (it can happen), we'll get it back up for you
  • supporting underlying software running and keeping it up to date
  • system and website backup and recovery when necessary
• 24/7 access to BlueTree CMS, so you can update the website, which includes:
  • upgrades and improvements we make from time to time
  • email or telephone help if you get stuck
  • odd little jobs if you get snowed under (though we do operate a "fair usage" policy)
• If we provide your email service, it also covers running costs and support for that, too

Sadly, if your monthly payments stop, your website would disappear from the Internet. If we host your emails too, then you'd have to make other arrangements to send and receive them. If you really want to stop doing business with us, please check "Termination" on our Terms of Business page.

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The short answer is, "Yes!"

A high quality photo can contain many pixels, the little dots that form the image. This makes image files very large, and large files take a long time to load. Photographic quality isn’t needed so much on the Internet, so we can get away with smaller files.

BlueTree CMS optimises images when you upload them to your image library. It resizes them when you add them into your web pages. You may resize them again by choosing a suitable format afterwards. You can also help by:

1. making sure your images are the correct size for the space on your page
2. optimising them before uploading; use a free online tool like Kraken - choose "Try Free Web Interface".

We like Kraken because it works well, and you don't have to leave your email address :o)

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'Fraid not. Your website must reside on the same server as our cloud-based CMS software.

On the plus side, your website resides on ultra-fast servers connected directly to the Internet backbone. They're housed in a terrorist-proof bunker, somewhere in the UK, and we check their up-time every five minutes, to make sure your website is always online.

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All BueTree websites have a private "Information" page where we put important stuff like image sizes, how to plug in a movie, protect your name, address and phone number from spammers, and things like that.

Only you can see it, and search engines won't find it. You can update that page yourself, too, if there's something you particularly want to remember.

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Sometimes you don't actually know where your website is hosted. There are several reasons for a UK business to host its website within these shores.

1. Whilst the Internet works at the speed of light, it can still take a while for data to travel from another country; search engines reward speed, so we try very hard to make sure your pages load fast
2. US government agencies monitor and share all traffic across the Atlantic; that may not worry you, but they do make mistakes, and it's easier to resolve disputes with somebody in the UK
3. No UK Government organisation will do business with you if there's any risk that their data will go outside these shores
4. Search engines reward consistency: if your market's in the UK, then use a .uk domain, register it with a UK ISP and host your website here

Global corporations host duplicates of their websites in each country for these reasons.

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Whilst users can see your email address and phone number, they’re hidden from crawlers. Web crawlers are programs hunt the web looking for people's contact details.

BlueTree CMS uses "NAT variables", short codes you can type anywhere on your website. The CMS will display your Name, Address or Telephone number wherever it encounters one of the NAT codes. This means that only human spammers can collect your contact information.

You may get some spam, but not a lot.

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Yes. When your BlueTree website is finished, we'll build an "XML sitemap" and submit it to the major search engines. This is a page on your website that you don't see, coded specifically for search engines. It lists every page on your site, so they can reach them all easily.

Then, as you add, delete or rename pages, BlueTree CMS updates your XML sitemap for you.

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You don't need to pay extra for an SEO pack, it's all built into BlueTree CMS.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. When Google wasn't quite so clever, people could con it into thinking web sites were useful, so it would list them high in search results. You can't really do this anymore, but there are things you can - and should - do to help it understand your website better.

There's "on-page" and "off-page" SEO. BlueTree CMS either handles the on-page things automatically, or guides you through what you need to do. Our BlueTree website contains resource pages that help with off-page SEO.

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A "Top Level Domain", or TLD, email address is one that matches your website address. Like jo@mywebsite.co.uk, for example. We include (optionally) a TLD email address in our website packages because:

• it looks professional and adds credibility to your business
• it separates your business and personal emails
• some business directories (and they can be an essential part of your online presence) insist on it

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Meta-tags are under-the-hood fields that search engines read. They’re (mostly) not intended for human readers. You update them on your BlueTree website when you create a new page using the Page Properties dialogue.

They are important because they help search engines catalogue the content of your web pages. The better they "understand" your pages, the more reliably they can deliver them in search results.

Search engines can't decipher images, so they need a description field to understand them. Web page readers use it for visually impaired people. In BlueTree CMS, you update it when you upload images, and, if necessary, again when you use them on different pages.

Meta-tags offer an opportunity to emphasise the keywords and phrases you've chosen for each web page.

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Contribute was great for small business owners with little desire to learn lots of tech skills and even less time to do it.

Sadly, Adobe has “sun-setted” Contribute. This means they no longer develop it. Instead they encourage you to convert to a new product with an expensive monthly subscription. Adobe has probably the best on-line authoring tools in the business, but they’re expensive and aimed at big companies with a global reach.

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We like WordPress: it's great, and it can be free. In fact, we grew our business on it, partly.

WordPress fine if you lean towards the tech side, and have time to spare. Small business owners tend not to have the time to cope with its foibles, so many end up paying somebody else to maintain their sites. We have looked after quite a few WordPress sites over the years. This experience led us to build our own, simple CMS, so our clients can update their own sites.

BlueTree CMS suffers from NONE of the issues I've listed below. In many cases, a person new to the Internet won't even know about many of them.

• Themes: to build a WordPress site you need to choose a "Theme"; your theme dictates your website's design and functionality and means there will be other sites around that look like yours; BlueTree websites are custom designed, especially for you:
  • how would you choose one WordPress theme from the thousands available?
  • if you get a web designer to do it for you, he or she will probably use one they've used before, rather than one you choose
• Auto-updates: WordPress often updates itself, very occasionally leaving websites broken: since we're providing a service, we always need to check each update
• Hackers: WordPress's share of the CMS market is about 60%, world-wide. If you were a hacker, which one would you target? Not BlueTree CMS, that's for sure. One of our WordPress clients was hacked last year, and 100s of pornographic pages appeared on their site. Whilst we can install a plug-in that alerts us when code changes, this was embarrassing of them and a nuisance to us as we had to get rid of them before Google black-listed the site.
• End-of-life: occasionally, WordPress upgrades a feature, like Graph API (social media poster) in February 2017, that requires a code change: you might have to pay your web designer to do this
• Complexity: WordPress is highly functional and very flexible: it'll do pretty much anything you want; this makes it complex, difficult to learn, and hard to pick up again if there's a long time between your updates
• Web Page Editor: WordPress 5 introduced a completely new editor called Gutenberg. Far from making it easier to use, most reviewers find it more confusing than before. BlueTree CMS is designed to be simple, doing everything you need to keep your website up to date yourself without additional complexity
• Plug-ins: additions you often need to add to WordPress; some cost money, all add complexity; every time you want to use one, you'll find a plethora of options – which is best for you? BlueTree CMS doesn't use plug-ins
• Compatibility: plug-ins don't always keep up with WordPress updates, leading to broken websites that need fixing: again, you always have to check
• You need to code HTML: sometimes WordPress will require you to update a page's HTML, to add a jump within a page for example; easy for techies, nerve-racking for most of us: a great opportunity to screw up your page - no need in BlueTree CMS
• NAT protection: BlueTree CMS hides your Name, Address and Telephone number (NAT) from web crawlers that collect your details to sell to spammers and hackers: WordPress needs yet another plug-in
• Meta-tags: these are fields on your web pages that search engines use to better understand the content; WordPress needs another plug-in but BlueTree CMS gives you access directly
• XML sitemap: search engines use this to help read your website; WordPress needs a plug-in to maintain your XML sitemap, which is a shame, as BlueTree CMS does it without a plug-in
• Social media integration: BlueTree CMS comes with links to your social media pages, as well as share buttons so your visitors can tell their friends about you. Oh dear, another WordPress plug-in.
  

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