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Have you found yourself struggling to adapt to working from home following the effects of the Corona Virus?

At Clikk, we’re experts at working from home and have been doing it long before COVID-19 but we get that for many of you it can be daunting. Not everyone is as experienced as us and that’s totally fine – we’re here to help!

1. Don’t Be Hard on Yourself

First and foremost, give yourself a break! We’re in a crazy time and working from home may be a whole new ball game for you. Just remember, it’s completely fine to be nervous, distracted and a little less productive than usual (but only a little). Take it day by day, hour by hour and you’ll get through it.

2. Set Up a Working Environment

Whether you have a dedicated study or your new office is your dining room table, make it a space that you can associate with working. Find out what works best for you. Maybe the whole family is working from home? Great! Set up workstations at the dining room table and ta-da – you have a shared workplace! Or why not try hot desking? Put on some music and work away surrounded by other workers, just like you’re at the office! This will also prevent you from feeling lonely and isolated. If that isn’t your cup of tea and you prefer working in solitude, set up a designated area of the house (just not your bed) to get you in the zone and pop on some headphones to block out the noise.

3. Stick to a Timeline

Keep your working hours the same as your office hours so you feel some sense of normality and routine. This will prevent you from overworking and burning out. Set your boundaries and switch off after. Close your work laptop when it’s time to ‘head home’ to the couch and don’t check your emails before bed. This will keep you sane – we promise.

4. Take Regular Breaks

Staying ‘switched on’ the whole time is hard for us all. Make sure you take all the breaks you usually would at the office and stretch your legs every hour. When you’re eating lunch, walk away from the laptop unless you’re watching funny cat videos on YouTube. Try eating lunch or having a coffee via video call with your colleagues, family or friends. Walk yourself over to your kettle and give your body a quick stretch while it boils. Do laps around the dining table to get your steps in. These little moments keep your sanity in check and your body from breaking down.

5. Create a Schedule

We swear by to-do lists! Start your work morning by setting your daily tasks, giving yourself a sense of direction for the day (this can be hard if you just wing it when you’re at home as that’s when you start washing clothes or online shopping). Whether it’s physically writing down your tasks and priorities or using a project management tool to check the tasks your bosses have virtually assigned to you, starting your day like this allows you to feel accomplished at the end of the day while making your work day more manageable. As an extra bonus, if you break your work down into smaller tasks, you’ll give yourself a major confidence boost when you see them all being ticked off!

6. Create Work-Life Balance

Just like when you go into work and finally come home to kick your feet up, recreate that same feeling of ‘home’ and ‘work’ that helps get you through the week. When you’re done for the day, spend some time with your family, go for a stroll or do an at home pilates class on YouTube. Whatever that may be for you, make time for it. Another pro tip, use the time you’d usually travel to work in the morning to sit and enjoy your coffee, do some yoga or watch an episode of your favourite show – that way you really reap the benefits of working from home.

We hope these little tips help you become masters at working at home. The most important thing is to enjoy all the benefits that come with it! Although we don’t recommend making it a habit to work in your pjs and from the comfort of your bed, the beauty of working from home is that you have those options if you’re having an off day and let’s be honest, we could all use one of those days every once in a while. So make the most of it, be productive, stay calm and try to enjoy this time. Soon enough, you’ll want to work from home all the time!

Website down? 404 error?

Domain management?

What is all this Gobbledygook!!!

I’m sure everyone has heard of someone who lost control of their website. They decided to get someone else to build their website who said “Hey! You need to do XYZ or there might be problems!” or they didn’t update their websites security and someone hacked it or perhaps someone left the company and forgot to hand over the keys.

I covered a lot of the worst-case scenario here in our blog which highlights the risks of losing control of your digital marketing.

This blog post is about something that I’m fixing for people more and more as things get more and more complex.

Domains, DNS, Caching, Name Servers and all that jazz.

This is going to get technical, but I’m going to try and explain it as simply as I can.

Your Domain

Everyone has a domain, it’s probably the name of your company or a version of it. Our company is Clikk, our domain is Clikk.com.au. You might have purchased more domains like Clikk.com or Clikk.melbourne from companies like Crazy Domains or GoDaddy. You pay these companies for what could be considered a yearly lease for that name. A registrant is assigned as you purchase the domain, which is the person who is effectively in control of your domain.

Imagine you own a multi-million dollar business called ABC Stuff. Your marketing manager buys a domain called ABCStuff.com. Your business triples in size through online sales and your spending $50,000/month in digital marketing which all goes to ABCStuff.com.

One day your marketing manager leaves and no one thinks anything of it until the website goes down. Emails stop working and there’s a big black hole in the internet where your business used to be.

Eventually, someone figures out that the domain lease has expired but it was registered to the personal email of the ex marketing manager. No one can reach them and your business is losing $1000’s a day and your reputation is getting damaged.

You can’t change your domain to ABC-Stuff2.com as all your marketing relies on ABCStuff.com and all your emails rely on ABCStuff.com too. Unless you can get the domain working again, you will lose money and your company is going to struggle to function.

Then, the final nail in the coffin, someone else leases ABCStuff.com before you can recover it, your business now has to rebrand whilst it tries to legally reobtain its domain, your I.T. team are going insane and your clients are looking elsewhere.

RIP ABCStuff.com.

Okay, this is a little dramatic, but all of these scenarios can and have happened over the years. There are more safeguards in place than before but it is still possible to have outages which can damage your business.

Domains are the absolute top of the tree and it’s imperative that you know:

Who you bought the domain from
Who has access to the logins
Who is your domain registrant

This is Clikk’s domain information. AUDA.org.au has a tool for checking your domain ownership information here which we use to help business rescue their domains.

Clikk’s Domain information from AUDA.org.au

Best practise:

Keep a secure document which tracks where your domain is purchased from (you should get invoices from them).
Ensure that the Domain Registrant is someone high up in your business, NOT your digital marketing company, NOT an employee.
Make the email address for the registrant generic like [email protected] to make sure anyone important in the business can access it.
DO NOT leave your domain in control of an external digital marketing team or website designer. Even with their best intentions, it’s safer in your control.

If you have done a check of your domain using the link above and you DON’T have control of your domain, feel free to contact us at [email protected] for advice or to get details on our domain recovery service.

A Survival Guide to Working From Home