I was recently awarded the “Webmaster of the Year Award” by international skills marketplace PeoplePerHour.
They interviewed me about running my own business, and using their platform.
Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56
Over the past week I’ve seen more than my fair share of emails from Google regarding “Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56″.
It’s a big change, but not exactly a surprising one.
Google has been pushing to make the web more secure for a long time. Seeing HTTPS and green padlocks all over the web has been a key direction for them – they’ve even given secure sites a ranking boost as part of their algorithms. This new change is really an extension of their general SEO ethos.
So anyone running the latest version of Google’s Chrome Browser (version 56) will see a warning when browsing any web page that asks for sensitive information. The examples they’ve given are passwords or credit card details but undoubtedly there’s other situations a user would be presented with a warning too.
I’ve been recommending web owners migrate to HTTPS for a few years, but now it’s become really important especially if you have any page users can log in through (including I expect WordPress Dashboard login pages like wp-login.php) or e-commerce.
These things may well be frustrating when they first crop up, requiring immediate changes to your website. But bear in mind Google has been open about their general desires for the web (that it be easy to find useful information, that it be secure, mobile friendly and fast) for a long time. So as long as you apply those same concepts to your own site as soon as you can then changes like this will actually put you ahead of the curve.
In case you know this impacts you but haven’t yet had the email from Google about it (or don’t use Google Search Console in which case you’d never get one) here is the text of their message:
Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56 for http://www.domain.com/
To: owner of http://www.domain.com/
Beginning in January 2017, Chrome (version 56 and later) will mark pages that collect passwords or credit card details as “Not Secure” unless the pages are served over HTTPS.
The following URLs include input fields for passwords or credit card details that will trigger the new Chrome warning. Review these examples to see where these warnings will appear, and so you can take action to help protect users’ data. The list is not exhaustive.
{examples are given here}
The new warning is the first stage of a long-term plan to mark all pages served over the non-encrypted HTTP protocol as “Not Secure”.
SEO’s walking dead, and their house of cards
However, this post isn’t commenting on piracy as a topic, rather Ann’s own comment that a Google search for Netflix’s House of Cards (another very popular TV program) doesn’t even bring up the official site in the top 50 results.
On the surface, she’s saying “look at all the piracy sites that come before the proper one!”, but behind that is the idea that by default, the official site for anything should come top. The problem is, Netflix’s site for House of Cards has terrible SEO, that’s why it performs so poorly.
There’s not nearly enough textual content, and the meta tags are actually about Netflix, not the show, and therefore they score very poorly for relevancy (how many words in the tags also appear on the page) which is likely to have them penalised by Google, not shoved higher up the rankings.
This serves as an excellent cautionary tale. Just because you feel you deserve to be in the top spot, doesn’t mean you will be. If other people are writing about your industry, product or service, and do it better than you do—they will beat you in the rankings.
If you care about your position, invest in some proper, industry-leading SEO—and get where you want to be.
Rearranging my menu, dropping the “Home” link
As part of the process I’ve dropped my “Welcome” link, which went back to the homepage. Users can still return there by clicking the main site title—but I’m interested to see what happens if I “squeeze” my menu to just the most important bits.
What’s the point of having a link back to the home page anyway? In my case it’s an overview, and I want people to get to the nitty-gritty, and become clients.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
New site: Essex Wedding Photographers
David Burnett from Image Control Photography wanted an update for his site, which was based on a very well-known (but it turns out not cross-browser compatible) WordPress theme. He works in the hotly contested wedding photography market, and needed to stand out from the crowd.
I made one myself that is a lot more dependable than the one he bought off-the-shelf.
Obviously, I’m more of a red and black person and the colour scheme might not be to my personal tastes—but everything is well laid out, easy to read, fully responsive (even on Windows Mobile IE) and has a good mix of high quality photography with text.
I’m going to have a glass of wine to celebrate this one.
New website design
It’s updated to be fully responsive and looks great on portable devices like mobiles and tablets, and I like to think it’s well laid out and easy to use.
It’s actually been up for a few days as a trial, and within 24 hours I had a compliment from someone who had just come across my site for the first time, and said they found it easy to use and navigate.
What do you think?
(Oh yes, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that I can make you a site just as awesome—ask me how.)
