Boldacious Digital Consultant
Late last week Facebook was attacked – this exposed nearly 50 million user accounts.
Make your account more secure now.
You should change your password as a good security measure anyway, but also set up two-factor authentication.
Google Authenticator works on Android and iPhones.
It is also essential to add a backup – just follow the prompts after two-factor authentication is turned on.
Passwords are an ongoing nightmare for most people: we have so many, and the paradox is – if you can remember them they are not secure enough, and if they are secure enough you can’t remember them!
Do you:
Password managers to the rescue!
With a password manager you remember ONE password (or pass-phrase), then let the password manager generate new random 40 or so character passwords for you.
They are extremely easy to setup and use.
I use, as my main pass-phrase, a few made-up words from my childhood. It’s over 20 characters but very easy for me to remember.
I use Roboform (affiliate link) for various reasons. It is very similar to most of the others, I just like it best.
One of my favourite features is that it can fill in most forms with one click – this is an amazing time-saver.
Making video calls and sharing screens is extremely handy. Luckily there are plenty of apps that can do that for you.
The original software was Skype, but that has been overtaken by other better software.
The best known is Zoom:
My favourite for small groups and ease of use is Appear.in
If you already use Slack, it has great video and screen-sharing capabilities. I talk about slack here
Another product in this area is UseLoom. This is one of my all time favourites.
Basically with this extension in your Chrome browser, you can make a screen-sharing video and send it to someone quicker than you can type the same information.
I use it often if I have a problem with a program and am having trouble convincing the tech person that my problems exists!
So I just record with Loom exactly what my issue is, then send the loom video to them.
I also use it for short training videos, for example, in a WordPress website there are some tasks you only do every couple of months, and, of course, everyone forgets after that amount of time. So I do a quick personalised loom video of that exact task; then it’s there for my client to access each time they need to do this task.
Wellness Wanderers was great fun to build, but challenging to design – the clients (Katie Callaghan and Tony Annesley) are healers commencing on a journey around Australia (and beyond!).
They had so many plans and ideas that I found it difficult to get them focused and I was unsure of the best way to help them prioritise all their amazing ideas.
They also have many different offerings in their business (travel, gardening, cooking, food and several modalities of alternative healing), so the challenge was to have the website as multi-faceted as Tony and Katie are.
In cases like this, I work closely with the excellent Business Growth Coach, Val Cozens
After a few sessions with Val, they came back to me much more focused and totally clear on their goals, which made it much easier for Katie, Tony and I to visualise the website.
We went through numerous iterations before they and I were satisfied with the website.
Like a lot of business owners, they weren’t particularly internet-literate, so part of the journey included training in, not only the use of WordPress website administration but also in Evernote, LastPass, Trello and Google Docs.
We have included a photo gallery which is fed directly from their Instagram account.
This means they just take a photo and text in Instagram, and … magically the photo appears on their website.
Station Hoppers is a very successful website for campers and travellers interested in Australian remote stations which have some sort of camping facilities.
It started with a Facebook closed group which now has over 40,000 members. The Facebook group is unique in that there are no other sites specifically specialising in camping on remote stations.
The website needs to be able to handle quite large numbers of visitors, around 2.5k per month.
It also needs to handle large spikes in hits eg 2.4k on 20th Jan
We hosted the site on Boldacious cloud servers to be able to handle these sorts of visits and server load. The cloud servers upgrade resources immediately where necessary so Station Hoppers never suffers from an embarrassing server failure. The site would have broken on 20th Jan with the 2.4k hits for the day.
Station Hoppers has a free members-only area (with over 5,000 members) which has details of most remote stations (about 150 so far).
Members can view by the stations, by state (or all) list or by interactive google map.
The website was built on no budget and needed some way of allowing easy updates of stations by remote team members so Airtable has been used as a backend to the WordPress website.
Airtable is one of Boldacious’ favourite business apps and has almost unlimited uses.
We used Airtable and had a remote team member update the airtable database without having to go into the backend of WordPress.
It is also very easy and intuitive to use, and updates immediately on the website.
Boldacious designed the website very much for mobiles and tablets as almost 90% of this website’s audience use mobiles and tablets to view and login to the website.
Seamus, the Digital Magician, can setup and train and consult you in all these products, and also can connect all the programs seamlessly where needed.
Using a product called Zapier he can make magic happen in the background.
Stop any double-handling of data, stop copying and pasting data from one program to another.
“Feel organized without the effort
Evernote helps you capture and prioritize ideas, projects, and to-do lists, so nothing falls through the cracks.”
Evernote is your second brain – I put anything I need to remember, anything I may use some time in the future, anything I might use for an idea… I put them all in Evernote.
Google Docs is the best collaborative tool for creating and editing documents currently available. It’s quite magical to be editing a document, and to see your teammate also editing the document in real time. You each can either edit directly, make comments, or make suggestions. The documents auto-save and you can track the history of changes.
Slack is the ultimate team communication tool. You can chat with your teammates; video chat; screenshare; share images; search efficiently, and much much more.
Slack has made a virtue of “playing well with others” and integrates with other apps and services.
Slack is a collaborative cloud-based team communications software/app.
It replaces emails for teams; much more efficient and effective than email.
Why
Slack means
It replaces email as your primary method of communication within organisations
Within Slack, you can text, phone, video chat, screenshare, swap files, share images – and find anything very quickly and easily.
It’s available on all devices
It’s all organised into channels (or projects) and private direct messages – so you can talk to your whole team or just to a single person privately.
Plus slack integrates with a host of other apps/software so you can manage your entire workflow through one platform.
The most efficient team communication app