2021 Review

2021 Review

December 19, 2021 by Team Phaeria

Looking back at 2021

 

Although 2021 started with uncertainty, our team grew by 20%. We also continued to learn new technologies, which helped on reducing clients’ billing costs. This will continue all throughout 2022, providing better solutions and more solutions to our clients.

A massive Thank you for our clients and team’s support! 

AWS

Solutions Architect
certified

5 min.

Automate Platform
deployment

2025

Carbon-neutral 2022
Climate Positive by 2025

Amazon AWS certified

 

Our team continues to learn and gain their AWS certifications. This validates the quality of services that we provide and ensures our clients that the services we offer dramatically reduce costs of operation, as well as increase their system responsiveness.

 

Check out our cloud solutions…

5 min. deploy

 

We are not only automating our client’s process, we do it with our internal processes too. Next year we’ll be launching our Clients Dashboard and also plan to automate all client’s deployment. It only takes about 5 minutes for any change to be deployed to live platforms. Most important of all, we can easily revert to a previously stable version, if needed. This helps us focus more on developing the best solutions for you.

 

Our Digital Transformation guides…

Carbon-Neutral

 

As a business, our Carbon footprint is quite small. The major impact is the energy used by our computers and systems we are using. This is one of the reasons we are dedicated to continuing our AWS Partner journey. Amazon’s company-wide goal is to use 100% renewable energy by 2025 (AWS is already 88% energy-efficient).

Next year will continue to reduce our carbon emissions, but also help our clients to optimise and automate their processes to help become Carbon-Neutral. Platforms we build are cutting down paperwork usage, automating processes, and decreasing material wastage – it helps our clients to become Carbon Neutral, and our aim on become Climate Positive before 2025.

 

Check out our MVP steps…

Looking forward to 2022

 

In 2022 we plan on becoming an AWS Select Partner which will enable us to offer you even better services and reduced costs of operation proving once again we’re all about exceeding expectations. We also plan on automating the deployment of all our projects which enables a more controlled and less prone to errors deployment of your products to live servers. It will also reduce time delivery in which a change is available on the platform.

Thank You for choosing us and being part of our team. Stay tuned to see what exciting new things are coming next year.


2020 Review

2020 Review

December 11, 2020 by Team Phaeria

Looking back at 2020

 

It’s been a challenging year for everyone. Looking on the positive side, we have helped our clients to transition smoothly over the lockdown period. Focusing on Cloud infrastructure and digital transformation we have automated various processes, optimising costs and performance.

We’ll continue our efforts to exceed expectations. We have ambitious plans for 2021 and we are ready for the new normal. Before all that, we’d like to remember some of the things we accomplished together this year.

became

AWS
Partner

increased our

Tech
Stack

We became AWS Partners

 

The start of 2020 has changed the entire world. When Covid-19 was a big unknown, we had to enforce our Contingency plan. In a matter of 2 days, before any national lockdown, we had all our developers working remotely. Then all our efforts went to assist our clients preparing for remote work.
It was in our plans to focus on Cloud Computing, but the new economic situation and the AWS focus on Cost Optimisation and Well-Architecture Framework seemed the perfect solution. We have started to migrate clients into AWS, optimising their infrastructure, reducing costs up to 50-70% from previous Service Providers.
We have become AWS Partner and our plan for next year is to have all our developers AWS certified.

 

Check out our cloud solutions…

Focused on Digital Transformation

 

During the Summer period, once WFH/Zoom/pandemic became the new normal we have continued the Digital Transformation for our clients. On our website, we added a special section providing Guides and examples of how any business can benefit from Digital Transformation. We believe that any business can automate processes. Starting with the most boring tasks can increase any team’s performance.
This year had an impact on anyone’s Budget, Resources and future plans. We believe in 2021 the focus on Digital Transformation will continue and we have new ideas for automating our client’s processes, increasing their performance and ROI. Check our guides and hopefully, you’ll find some ideas to inspire from.

 

Our Digital Transformation guides…

Increased our Tech Stack

 

Every year we are aiming to learn something new, increase our technical abilities so we can be prepared for everything that our clients may need. This year we have surpassed ourselves. Using AWS cloud we had to improve and use various services within AWS ecosystem to lower the client’s billing costs. We have built projects using new and modern Frameworks, increasing speeds and performance.
Every year we investigate 1-2 new tech stacks, this year we had 6 new tech stacks added to our list.

 

Check out our MVP steps…

Even though 2020 was a particular year for everyone, we continued to strive, offering our services and support. We can’t say it was business as usual, but we focused on the positives and all our clients had an experience close to normal.
We are extremely grateful that all our clients had a smooth sailing through 2020 and ready to thrive in the new year. We were fortunate to keep all our team busy throughout the year and Covid-free.

A massive Thank you for our clients and team support! 

Our 8 year anniversary!

 

On 10th December it was our 8 year anniversary and we couldn’t be happier. We haven’t had too much time to celebrate, we’ll have plenty of time next year to do so. It will be a year that no one will forget, as usual, we’ll focus on the positives and we have plenty of good things to remember.

Every experience it’s preparing us for the future. We’ll be ready for it, waiting for the next challenges and exceeding our expectations!

Looking forward to 2021

 

In 2021 we have BIG plans. We are preparing the launch of our Partnership with fingersnap.it. Some of our clients are aware of it, fingersnap.it is a new Platform-as-a-Service, helping to personalise customer’s experience and automate data behaviour.

We are going to continue our focus on AWS Partner, continuing to improve the cost performance and security of our client’s infrastructure.

One of the biggest changes in our tech stack this year is that we have stopped building websites using Wordpress CMS. It is a big decision, we have our valid reasons for it. Therefore, we are preparing to offer a Free Wordpress Migration into a Headless Optimised website, included in our Maintenance Plan. If you are someone that has a Wordpress website and are intrigued by it, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to assist.

Thank You for choosing us and being part of our team. Stay tuned to see what exciting new things are coming next year.


Google Updates SEO Starter Guide

Google announced that the old version of the SEO Starter Guide released in 2008 will be replaced by the new, updated SEO Starter Guide to help marketers and webmasters create search-engine friendly websites.

Abhas Tripathi, search quality strategist at Google, said that the updated SEO Starter Guide will replace both the old Starter Guide and the Webmaster Academy, which supports information and tools to teach webmasters how to create a site and have it found in Google Search.

“The updated version builds on top of the previously available document and has additional sections on the need for search engine optimisation, adding structured data markup and building mobile-friendly websites” he added.

Google SEO Starter Guide outlines the best practices that will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content. Here is a brief description of SEO Starter Guide, giving you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website:

  • Help Google (and users) understand your content - let Google see your page the same way a user does (create unique, accurate page titles but descriptive at the same time; use heading tags to emphasise important text; add structured data markup in order to describe your content to search engines). This way you can attract just the right kind of customers for your business.
  • Manage your appearance in Google Search Results – understand how search engines use URLs to be able to crawl and index the content and to refer users to it; the navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they need; plan your navigation based on your homepage (consider the “root” page as the starting point for the other pages of your website containing more specific information); also try and make it simple for the visitor to navigate around the pages of the website, creating a naturally flowing hierarchy and maybe including a simple navigational page for your entire site; also try to create your URL as simple as possible for Google to find.
  • Optimise your content – creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any other factors. Users like good content when they see it and they will direct other users to it (it can be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums or other means). Word-of-mouth is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, but it needs a quality content. (easy-to-read text, clear topics, fresh and unique content, always optimise your content for your users, not search engines).
  • Make your site mobile-friendly – As the world is mobile today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device, therefore your website should be mobile ready for the online presence.
  • Promote your website – Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject (know about social media sites - sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content; reach out to those in your site’s related community because it is usually very beneficial, and it could spark new ideas for content).
  • Analyse your search performance and user behaviour – Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters to analyse their performance in their search engine (e.g. Search Console); if you’ve improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this.

 

If you really want to improve your search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. There are also lots of linked-to resources that are worthy of your attention.

Each section of this guide is important to understanding the most effective practices of search engine optimisation.

Get in touch with us if you’d like to talk more about SEO for your organisation or about how we can help you build your next digital experience.


Happy 5th Anniversary to Phaeria team and clients!

We’re Celebrating 5 years in Business!

Phaeria celebrated a 5-year anniversary this month and we wanted to say thank you to everyone who supported us, worked with us, taken a chance on us and believed in us. Here’s to many, many more exciting years ahead!

Happy 5th Anniversary to Phaeria team and clients!


Celebrating 3 years in business

Celebrating 3 years in business

December 10, 2015 by Team Phaeria

Today, Phaeria is celebrating 3 years in business! All this period we’ve helped local businesses to improve their online presence. We’ve used all our experience and skills to deliver projects, platforms to amazing companies.

We love the people that we work with and we love what we do. A huge THANK YOU for all the support our clients have given.

We’ve decided to celebrate by doing what we do best: help businesses improve their online presence!
You and anyone you know may win one of the following prizes:

3 Website Audits
We’ll be honest, as usual, telling you what it works and what needs to be improved on your online presence.

2 Website Optimisations
The code behind the website can affect your website speed. We’ll aim to receive a 90% PageSpeed Score, just like our website performance report.

1 CMS Responsive Website
Every website should be responsive, we’ll build you a brand new mobile-friendly website.

To join our competition, all you have to do is like our Facebook page, follow us on twitter or contact us. If you know anyone that might be interested to win any of the prizes, feel free to share this.
If you’re not interested on any of our prizes but you would like other services we may provide, please contact us!

We are also thankful to everyone who is and was part of our team, families and friends who were supportive in the last 3 years. We’ve built great relationships already, and we’re looking forward to strengthening, waiting with joy the future filled with exciting projects and new clients.

 

happy3rd

The celebration has only just begun!


How CloudFlare increases speed and security of your site

How CloudFlare increases speed and security of your site

August 7, 2015 by Team Phaeria

We are excited to announce our partnership with CloudFlare, a web performance and security company! If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

Today, hundreds of thousands of websites—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments—use CloudFlare to make their sites faster and more secure. We power more than 65 billion monthly page views—more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined—and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.

Faster web performance
CloudFlare runs 42 data centers strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data center.

cloudflare Network Map - phaeria
cloudflare Network Map – phaeria

As your traffic passes through the data centers, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.

Broad web security
Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites.

CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.

In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.


35% off to support local business growth

We've recently been accepted to offer professional advice to local businesses. Through the New Markets Programme developed by Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) we can help businesses in areas of Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St. Helens and Wirral.

By using the New Markets Programme, eligible businesses can receive a 35% contribution to the cost for any of the following: Online Marketing, R&D, Product development.

To check if you are eligible please check the New Markets Programme.
To receive the first hour of consultation free of charge please go to www.advicefinder.co.uk choose Information Technology from the list and choose our profile. Or simply contact us.


Upgrading to Sage Pay Protocol v3.00

Recently, Sage pay had informed all businesses that are using their protocol to upgrade to the latest version 3.00. This upgrade is quite important, as from 31st July 2015 previous protocols will not be supported by Sage Pay.

We've been using several payment protocols like Paypal, Worldpay. One of the best features available in the new version is the mobile-friendliness.

If you have any questions on how to integrate the new protocol version, please contact us.

Microsoft IIS vulnerability (MS15-034)

Microsoft IIS vulnerability (MS15-034)

April 20, 2015 by Team Phaeria

Microsoft disclosed a critical vulnerability (MS15-034) on their WebServer IIS that allows for remote and unauthenticated Denial of Service and Remote Code Execution.

You can read more details about the versions affected Microsoft Security Bulletin. This security update is rated Critical for all supported editions of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2.

The exploit is critical as the attacker only needs to send a HTTP request with the right header.


Make your website mobile friendly

On 21st April, Google will start using mobile friendliness as a ranking signal in search result. Mobile friendly websites will have a immense boost, while other websites will significantly drop in ranking.

This change will have a huge impact even on the biggest brands, for example Daily Mail or Royal Birkdale Golf Club.

We are using Responsive layout as a standard in our process, making all the projects to "respond" accordingly to your device screen size, making the website mobile-friendly regardless of the device brand. But in case you are not sure if your website is mobile-friendly, you can test your site on Google's Mobile-Friendly test, simply enter your website URL and check it.

If it pass the test, it means your ranking won't be affected by this update, but you'll still need to check additional improvements for mobile friendliness, like image optimization, speed performance, minification and many more. Probably sooner or later Google will use all these on affecting the rankings.

If you have any questions or you want your website mobile friendly, contact us.