This afternoon I moved a client’s WordPress installation to a new server and subsequently upgraded it to the latest version.

So when the upgrade failed with the message “Unable to locate wordpress root directory” I had visions of mis-configured servers, permissions gone wrong or IP addresses lurking in places they shouldn’t be.

However after a little researching online I found that the answer is as simple as it is random: This error can be caused by the wrong FTP  username being given (not an incorrect password – that is trapped nicely by wordpress – but the username).

I guess this isn’t something that is going to happen often – moving a server and so changing the FTP username – but I’m glad I thought to read around before spending hours diagnosing the server.

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘interruption marketing’, it refers to things like advertising and direct mail. Essentially, this is the kind of marketing that interrupts what you are doing to deliver sales messages that you didn’t request. This includes all those irrelevant TV ads and the stuff that comes through the letterbox and finds its way quickly into the recycling.

But to suggest that mailshots, cold calls  and advertising are outdated tools for people who just don’t understand the web? Experience shows that simply isn’t true!

So in the interests of balance, I’d like to put the case for including old-school promotions in your marketing mix:

• Social media can provide some great ways of engaging with your target audience, so long as enough of them use social media when they are thinking about your kinds of products and services. So although millions of people connect with friends on Facebook, you have to ask yourself whether they would really want to build online relationships with a supplier of industrial chemicals (or security software or whatever). What’s more, there are many, many more people – including a large proportion of business decision makers and older more affluent consumers – who just don’t use social media; they prefer to keep their social activities offline.
• Search engine marketing is great when your target audience is actively searching for information about a particular issue. For a start, people who know they have a problem and want a solution are the best kind of sales prospect. But what about people who don’t yet know they have a problem? Or those who never look for a solution because they believe none exists? Or those who are ignoring an issue because they have more pressing day-to-day priorities? If you don’t interrupt these people with your sales messages, they will most likely never get to hear them.
• If your business is focused on a narrow geographical area, you can tell search engines about that, so most of your search results will come from the right people. But if your market niche is more specialised – and one which people are unlikely to refer to in a Google, Bing or Yahoo search – you may find it easier to narrow-in on your audience through specialist/trade publications and mailing lists that are built up from company or lifestyle data.

For me personally, the timing of this announcement was a little ironic. You see, I’ve just finished developing a ‘virtual showroom’ for a client, which is updating an almost indentical bit of functionality off their old web site.

The disadvantage of creating it in HTML and CSS rather than Flash is that we had to do a lot more testing – on different computers and in different browsers. But that aside, it’s great to see the finished product on my PC and Android phone, Mark’s Mac and his iPhone, all the same, all working perfectly.

You can check it out on the new miniQ web site – click the ‘view the range’ button.

Later versions of Internet Explorer were made progressively better until the current version, Internet Explorer 8, was as good as any other browser in terms of rendering web pages as it should. Which is great news. Or at least it would be if everybody who was using IE6 took advantage of the free upgrade to the latest, faster and more secure version of the browser.

There are many reasons why people don’t, some less laudable than others. But for a web marketer you have to accept that while a sizeable proportion of your client’s customer-base is using IE6, you cannot ignore it completely.

So how bad is the problem today? How many people are still using IE6 at the tail end of 2010? I’ve used Google Analytics to check what browsers visitors are using across a variety of different businesses. And the bad news is…

Depending on your market, you are likely to have somewhere between 3% and 9% of your visitors  using Internet Explorer 6.

So there you have it. A bad browser that just won’t go away. Please do your bit by reminding anyone you see using IE6 that the UK government advises that it is not secure and that an upgrade is quick, causes no disruption to your favourites and settings and is just as easy to use.

So hats off to local, global manufacturer of Carwash Controllers, PSD Codax.  Look out for their classic carwash controller about 15 seconds in to this ad, that aired just before the News at 10 on BBC1 (note: volume is quite high on this video)

See the PSD Codax web site at www.psdcodax.com (available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch).