Web Site Design Blog

The other day one of our larger sites had what they thought was a security breech and jumped out of their seats rushing to conclusions about site security. Their first conclusion went public and set off a bad series of events that could lead to legal ramifications. Now site owners should know that before you rush to judgment about what is going on in your forum, your first step is to stop and investigate. As this larger site may have learned, tossing out allegations of site breach and hacking are not a good idea without contacting a professional to find out what is really going on.

Since we do lots of forums for larger groups, we thought it would be a good idea to set out some guidelines for site owners. Now let’ say you are sitting in your private forum and suddenly you see another member in there that is not allowed. Oh my God, what to do. Well first of all don’t jump to conclusions about your security system, feeling you’re being hacked or worry that there is anything amiss. The best thing to do in any business is to first, take a breath, investigate and then proceed. Hopefully you have all your wits about you, and are not too stressed, sleep deprived or overly paranoid before you go jumping around concluding things that may not be true. You don’t want to start harassing site visitors and announcing that they are hackers when this might all be just a misunderstanding on your part, and geez, worse yet – don’t tell anyone you are going to file criminal charges for something they had nothing to do with. In the legal world I’m not sure how the courts will view this, but likely they will feel that you did not do your due diligence before making the accusations and this could lead to a big legal action against you. You don’t want that now, do you?

Most professionals have two sets of IT eyes on things to ensure they are not making rash decisions when it comes to forum security. It’s likely part of your obligation as a provider of services and you might consider it an important aspect of business especially if you are a large company with possible legal exposure.

Now, Can people access a private forum? A little googling will answer that for you. Not really but yes they can “appear” to be there. Anyone who is wandering around with time on their hands can put your url into the browser and start switching around numbers to see what is out there. A hidden forum or a private forum might appear, but likely they will only see a login or an error message. While you, sitting in the forum will see them browsing simply because the call to show who is browsing is higher on the list than the error message or login form. Fear not. You are safe. All those wild thoughts about hackers and site violators can be put to rest. Nothing is amiss except the subtle reminder that you need a qualified professional to explain to you what is going on, and possibly a lawyer if you’ve already banned members and jumped to conclusions, pointed fingers and made wild accusations about someone trying to find out what you’ve been thinking or worse yet, accused anyone of trying to take down your website. If you’ve already gone that far my advise now is put a nice apology in writing and last but not least get a lawyer.

If things haven’t deteriorated to this point and you need more help and don’t have a Phpbb forum site admin or web designer, check out our services or ask your host for more help.

Any questions?

According to Matt Cutts blog, Google has penalized sites that used the service traffic power to optimize and seo their sites:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index. 

Ouch! That means that if you were an innocent site owner hiring and SEO and they used some trickery to get traffic to you, it’s your fault for being that stupid and not investigating their tactics. That makes sense. (no sarcasm here).

Meanwhile, we noticed some pagerank drops in sites and pages being pulled down in rank completely since last week - although still indexed, their ranking is gone. Why? The most obvious reason floating around is purchased text links, but in this case the only payment involved in the links on the pages I’ve noted are cj.com links, which relate directly to the site promoting a related product, and links to other related sites. This makes one huge reason to have a single website that handles EVERY aspect of your company as Google’s robot can not seem to differentiate between your other companies, your revenue production and pure spam out there. Linking between your various sites can give the impression of spamming text links to the index. The best recourse is therefore to only list those “resources” on a single page not related to any other content on your site, lest you find your entire site gets caught up in the mix.

Well, here we are, we’re a web design and development company, yet we are asked daily to do things for next to nothing. Unfortunately, we have to eat dinner just like the next guy so we really can not do it. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to inform those of you who want to do your own sites, how to do it on the cheap. We would otherwise not divulge this information but at this point in our game, it’s all good, we have plenty of sites that pay us a fair price to develop for them.

So here are our best tips on making a cheap website:

1. Most people don’t know it but you can get a premade template for only about $50. and have it installed to your website, or install it yourself.

2. You can get cheap domain names and web hosting for as little as $4.95 per month that can handle these things.

3. Look for web hosts that carry “cpanel” which is a great little utility that will install programs on your website in a matter of minutes. You could start a blog in about 10 minutes using this utility. You can also install a complete shopping cart system with a click of a button.
4. Once you’ve installed a blog or shopping cart you’ll want to customize it.  Use your template (above) and install the header portion into the header section of the blog or cart system that you’ve installed.

5. you’ll need to put in products into your store, that is usually done via an import of an excel file, or it can be done over time manually.

6. Once you’ve got yourself a website, you’ll need to promote it. The changes of you getting natural search are slim to nill. Don’t just think that you can put up a site and people will come to you. You have to go out and let them know you are there. You need to submit the site to google, yahoo, msn and others and you also need to go out and get listed in as many directories as you can. Establishing a presence on ebay can help you as well. If you use your userid on ebay as your domain name you really can’t lose on this count. Make sure to link your website from your ebay about me page.

7. Enroll yourself in all the online shopping portals and put up feeds as much as you can afford to gain some traffic, maximize your efforts by determining when customers are most likely to purchase, seasonally, you can do a pretty nice business without going broke. However, seasonal times are also more costly so go for items and keywords that are less expensive and targeted directly to the product that you have in stock. Don’t try to hit the main keyword on a budget.
8. Start a mailing list on your website, you don’t want to miss a single customer without having that online. You can easily create buttons for your website mailing list using a program such as aSending for an  email marketing program. These types of programs provide the buttons and you just paste the code in the right place on your website.
9. If you need a merchant account check here for a quick cheap solution or use paypal.

10. You’ll need an ssl certication and can use the ones here for only $26.00 dollars a year. Why pay more, believe me, there is no reason.

11. If you don’t have the patience for all of the above, give us a call, we make great websites at reasonable prices.

There are many many other ways to make a web site yourself and make it work for you, but in general the theory is that if you have the money have a professional do it. It saves time, money and mistakes, but if you have the time you can learn, learn, learn and get quite far doing it yourself.

Check out the ebay and do it yourself directory for more

Any questions?

We get this question quite a bit and we don’t mind it as we have a presense on elance as well as other bidding sites for html developers. The problem is not with elance or any of the other sites like it. The problem is with prequalifying the workers.

Do they actually have experience in the field that you want? How would you know?

We have seen many web designers, or should I say so-called web designers who have work online and all looks good. But when given a simple assignment, they fail. Why? We are presuming that it is due to either having taken something over on another website or touted a site they didn’t even make. There are a few issues here. First and foremost is that many designers create for a single size and when expanded, usually because a customer adds a large image into a template, the entire page shifts and the design breaks. This is why we use nested tables to accomplish most of what we do on ebay. There is no guarantee that design shifts won’t happen with templated designs.

On elance and other sites with freelancers, we’ve noticed that many so-called designers simply turn out cookie cutter designs and then attempt to fit them to our requirements which is not custom work. We now hire all our staff in house.

It simply doesn’t work for us to use the freelancers, but for many people it seems to work. The main thing about hiring talent on such sites is to ask them to draft something quickly to show their skill instantly with something YOU asked for, not just something that they have. This will tell you a few things. 1. if they can follow directions, 2. if they can design, and 3. if they are interested in your project. 4. if they are hungry.

Hiring a designer that is not hungry can be problematic. We try to find people who are committed, hungry and thirsting for more. If not you end up with mediocre web design.