If you are running WordPress CMS and your site gets the following error message in firefox:

Firefox Error

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete

you may find that you have not set permalinks correctly or someone else with access to your site has incorrectly modified them.

Log into your WordPress dashboard and in the left margin menu, under ‘Settings’ click on ‘Permalinks’.

You may find that custom structure has been selected but no custom structure has been entered.

Select one of the presets for permalinks, (Default, Day and name, Month and Name or Numeric) or if you use custom structure you could try something like this:  /%category%/%postname%/.

We recommend the custom structure for SEO.

We had this issue with a client’s site that they had played around with.  Googling the problem didn’t really help as it was heavily weighted to answers for site visitors over site owners/administrators.  Even Mozilla’s support page only gave options of clearing cookies or reporting a ‘broken site’ to Firefox.

So using a little detective work we worked out that the Permalink setting had been changed and that was causing the problem.

We don’t profess to fully understand why this was the case, but we adjusted the permalink settings and the problem was resolved.

So  if you are a WordPress site owner or administrator and encounter “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete”, we hope this helps you out!

We were recently updating a client’s website running the Thesis Theme.  The client had asked to change his site to a much darker background (almost black) from the previous white background.  Out of habit from doing this for so many Thesis sites in the past, we simply coded the new background into the custom.css file.

We changed the background and individually altered the font colors of various text throughout the site, but the text in Mike Challis’ excellent plugin ‘Fast Secure Contact Form’ was camouflaged against our new dark background.

We searched for a quick, effective solution but even the Thesis DIYThemes forums and several of Mike Challis’ own posts didn’t have an answer that addressed the problem in Thesis.  Probably because with Thesis 1.7 or later, the solution is mind-numbingly simple!

Grabbing Occam’s Razor, we simply went back to the Thesis Design Options Menu and changed the primary text color to white (hex #FFFFFF).

Which reminded us that we could easily change the background here as well instead of coding it into custom.css.

Especially as we were unable to find a solution on search engines and forums at 3 am when no amount of coffee is making us think better, we decided to post this in case anyone else makes this simple (but potentially frustrating) choice as well!

Change Fast Secure Contact Form font color in Thesis

If you are using XSitePro and you have trouble with your images showing on your site, you may find that you have exceeded your account file size.

When you publish, the XSitePro ftp progress window tells you that everything has published OK but when you go to the live site, some or all of your images are missing.

One of our clients has a preference for XSitePro and when we recently went to add some images to her site, we experienced this problem.

It wasn’t until we logged into CPanel (to try manually loading the images) that we found the account size warning.

(About an hour after we solved this problem we got an e-mail warning from our CPanel that we had exceeded our account size setting!)

One common mistake that we see with people ordering websites to be built is that they focus only on the look of the site and ignore its role in generating traffic, enquiries and sales for their business.  As a result, they may order a site that they get built and then just leave static.  The site never gets updated or modified.  As a result, the site’s growth and traffic-generating abilities are crippled.

As an example, late last year I built a site for Derek, a small franchise business owner.  As part of the package Derek ordered, I add researched content and links to the site every month.

Within the first month his site was ranking well and from a brand new site, he got customers in the first two weeks and now gets an average of two new customers a week from his website.

Aaron, another longer-established franchisee who works in the same area saw all these customers that the new franchisee Derek was getting and asked how it was happening.  Derek happily told Aaron about our services and gave Aaron our contact details.   We didn’t hear from Aaron and Derek subsequently discovered that Aaron had ‘found a guy’ who could ‘do a website’ for only $1500 without monthly maintenance.   Three months later, Aaron has not had a single customer from his site, while Derek gets several every week.

From the outside, Aaron’s site looks OK, but it has none of the powerful background structure that attracts traffic and visitors, and no maintenance (which may be redundant on a badly designed site anyway).  He has now resorted to paying to advertise his website in conventional media (newspapers and magazines).  This is like him buying a beautiful new sports car without an engine to save money on petrol each month and then hiring people to push him around in it – it is more expensive, ridiculously ineffective and doesn’t do what it was supposed to do in the first place.

Derek’s site is making him money and has paid for itself many times over – it’s a profit-generating asset.  Aaron’s site is a loss-making liability.  It’s a simple mistake that all starts with mindset and a clear idea about why you have a website in the first place.

Contact us to build your website with optimised maintenance.

Don't make hard work of your website!