Category: Blog

After 20 years based in the Tamar Valley in Cornwall, we have relocated to Pembrokeshire. Mark and Victoria both grew up in Wales, and with the growth of the Shop on the Borderlands, our other business, during the past few years, and with the sad impact of the pandemic on so many of our tourism… Continue reading A Move to Pembrokeshire

WordPress as a Content Management System with Woocommerce to drive an online shop are two very powerful and useful tools.  We have built and run a number of Woocommerce shops, and we love the power and ease of use it offers. However, there are some situations where there might actually be just TOO much functionality. … Continue reading Too many requests : blocking access to unused Woocommerce features

Without any fanfare, Google is in the process of making the biggest change to its desktop (i.e. non-mobile) search results pages in years. Here’s what a search for the phrase ‘plymouth plumbers’ used to look like: …and here’s what the same search looks like when I run it now: The map with local results for… Continue reading It’s The Biggest Change to Search Results Pages in Years – Here’s What You Need To Know (And DO)

We love WordPress, it’s grown from the blogging platform we started using way back in 2005 into a really powerful content management system which can be extended in all sorts of exciting ways: either with plugins and themes from the great WordPress community, or by creating custom code. But occasionally you can see its roots… Continue reading Hiding All WordPress notifications from those who don’t need to be bothered with them.

If you have Analytics installed on your website (and if you don’t why not?), then one of the more interesting reports for most people will be Referrals. It’s only natural to want to know which other websites are sending you traffic, and how much. And for a lot of websites, referral traffic will be a… Continue reading Arrrgh – My Google Analytics Referrals Stats Are Full Of Meaningless Spam!

For the last nine years, I’ve been helping to run a competition called “You’re Hired!”. (Short explanation – it’s like ‘The Apprentice’, except instead of Lord Sugar, Baroness Brady etc you get me and a bunch of other local employers, and instead of fifteen or so sometimes clueless or otherwise annoying adults, you get keen… Continue reading Clare Associates Recognised in Responsible Business Awards South West

If you’ve got an AdWords account, you may have come across this helpful suggestion from Google: Click on the suggestion, and Google will suggest that you should “Add new keywords to get your ads in front of more potential customers”. Everyone wants that, right? Google is even so helpful that it sorts these suggested keywords into the right… Continue reading Should you “Add new keywords to get your ads in front of more potential customers”?

This post is just a quick THANK YOU to all our lovely customers for supporting Clare Associates, and letting us support one of my favorite charities. The Oldies Club is a charity  that helps old dogs (aged 7 or older) that have become homeless, both by taking them in and rehoming them, and also by working… Continue reading Thank you to all our customers for helping us support Oldies Club dog rescue

More and more businesses are getting Facebook pages.  This is a great trend.  Facebook is designed for everyone and their gran to use, and so it’s quick to learn and generally pretty easy to learn. But it’s not the whole web, and shouldn’t be.   Facebook funds its vast infrastructure of servers and ever-developing programming by… Continue reading Ways your website is different to Facebook

Most smaller businesses don’t think much about where their website lives on the internet. Often that’s left for the website designer to sort out. Sometimes people buy hosting because someone saw an ad with a big cheap price tag prominently displayed,  and thought “that’s cheap, it will do”. In general I find people spend way… Continue reading When website hosting goes bad