Top 5 Web Tips, Tricks & Digital Stories: April 2021 Edition

Welcome to the latest edition of our Top 5 Web Tips, Tricks & Digital Stories round-up for April 2021.

This month we’ve got a geeky April Fool, some high street woe (sorry to be a downer) and some eCommerce tips. Plus a fun fast-food advertising campaign that used the Covid pandemic to its advantage.

Let’s get started…

1 – The best Web Dev April Fool

Forgive us for starting with something a bit geeky, but I think we can safely say that after a full year of living under Covid’s shadow, we needed something to raise a smile at the start of the month. And since April Fool’s Day lands on April 1st, we thought we should make this silly little nugget our lead story.

Ladies & Gentlemen, may we present to you, The Key, from Stack Overflow!

Because why use a full-sized keyboard if all you do all day is copy and paste?

This pointless piece of tech was devised as a fun dig at web devs everywhere. Aiming to highlight how frequently web developers copy & paste code from Stack Overflow on a regular basis.

Apparently, there are a lot. They looked into it.

Thanks, Stack Overflow. You made your point loud and clear. Cheeky so-and-so’s.

2 – 2020’s eCommerce boom set to speed-up highstreet retail crisis

Sorry to bring you all back to reality so quickly, but we have some stark reading for retailers who have yet to embrace eCommerce.

According to a report released by UBS, CNBC is reporting that ‘Around 80,000 retail stores, or 9% of the total in the US, will close their doors by 2026 if e-commerce sales continue their upward trend, a new report from UBS projects.’

E-commerce sales have been on the increase for some time with steady year-on-year growth, but it seems that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this process.

The easing of lockdown will see a rise in high street sales, but once life starts to return to normal, many consumers will be embracing online shopping more than ever before.

Online grocery shopping was one of the sectors that saw a sharp increase in 2020, with many vowing never to go back to brick-and-mortar stores to get their weekly grocery shop.

In many instances, shopping online is just more convenient, takes less physical effort and saves time.

The report mentioned above was US-focused, but there are similar rumblings relating to the UK retail market, predicting high job losses in 2021.

UK retailers are challenged by the rapid growth of online competition. Combine this with high running costs of bricks-and-mortar stores and it’s easy to believe the reports.

Move from retail to eCommerce

Our advice to high street retailers who have yet to embrace online selling is to get your brand online as soon as possible.

You can start small and build up gradually. Balancing your offline presence with your new online store.

We wrote an article listing many of the key benefits of running an eCommerce website and also gave an overview of WordPress and Shopify as two possible solutions for your online store.

Feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss your options.

3 – Massive Facebook user data leak

Perhaps I missed it, but I would have thought that this would’ve made headlines across all on & offline outlets…

As reported by businessinsider.com, a staggering 533 million Facebook users’ phone numbers and other personal data was leaked in an online forum at the start of April.

A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that the data had been ‘scraped because of a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019.’

So, reading between the lines, the hack happened sometime in 2019, meaning that anyone who hasn’t updated their Facebook login details since then is still vulnerable to having their Facebook profiles and pages hijacked.

This data included 11 million Brits, so we think it might be time for you to update your Facebook password if you haven’t done so in a while. I certainly did!

How often should I update my social media passwords?

After the data leak, Our advice would be to not only update your Facebook password NOW but at regular intervals in future.

At the very least we would suggest that you update all of your social media passwords once per year, but once every 6 months would be better.

Our tip is to update your passwords now if you have not done so for some time. Then add a reminder in your calendar to do the same in a years time.

Set this reminder to recur every 6 or 12 months so that your phone or computer pings you a nice little alert to jog your memory.

4 – The Drum’s Digital Transform Festival 2021 is online now!

The Drum is a great source of news in the creative sectors, including design, marketing and advertising. If you haven’t already registered for their newsletter, you should do so now.

This year, as well as a ton of great creative stories, The Drum has brought us The Digital Transformation Festival 2021. And although presented with social distancing in mind, still aims to offer us some great insight into the world of eCommerce, MarTech and Data Privacy.

You can find a range of free video sessions right here.

5 – KFC: #UntilWeCanFingerLickAgain

The start of the pandemic reminded everyone how important it was to wash their hands.

If we wanted to maximise the possibility of avoiding coronavirus, we were all told to sanitise our hands where possible and to avoid touching our faces, especially the eyes and mouth.

Its a bit of a bummer if you’re a well known fried chicken brand such as KFC, whose ‘Finger licking’ good’ tagline is arguably one of the industries most recognised catchphrases.

So what do you do if your tagline goes against public health guidelines? Steal someone else’s!

On March 25th, KFC unleashed the not-so-short hashtag #UntilWeCanFingerLickAgain, and with a lighthearted message on its Twitter account, asked their loyal followers for suggestions on which brand slogans they could hijack.

Fried-chicken fans rose to the occasion, flooding KFC with suggestions including Specsavers ‘Should Have Gone to’, Red Bulls ‘Gives You Wings’ and Nike’s ‘Just Do It’.

KFC even went as far as placing a digital ad van outside of Nike’s Oxford Street store for that last one.

Brilliance.

Thanks for stopping by

We hope you found the above selection of tips, tricks & stories insightful, helpful and possibly even raised a smile.

We hope that you’ll visit us again for our Top 5 Web Tips, Tricks & Digital Stories: May 2021 Edition.

If you missed the March edition, including our reminder to use Google Trends for keyword research, you can find it here.

If you have questions about how to implement any of the tips mentioned in these articles on your website, or if you have been thinking of creating a new site for your brand, please feel free to get in touch. We’re always happy to discuss new collaborations.