Web Merchant Resource Center

While no good web site is ever quite finished as we’re always focused on what current and new content is on it, handling what’s NOT on your site is also crucial.

A web site is a fluid medium, which makes it the ideal information bridge between a business and its audience. Content can be changed and updated constantly with new information, and the organization of the information can be restructured easily as things evolve. If you’ve been online for many years, you’ve probably made changes to the organization of your site and possibly even the platform it runs on (and if you haven’t yet, you will eventually). What’s more, there is nothing that search engines love so much as new content, and honestly, constantly creating new content is just the sort of thing that will keep people coming back to your site.

This puts a high premium on what content you have on your web site – possibly to the point that you forget what is NOT, or more accurately, is no longer on, your site. That is, as your site evolves, content and navigation changes, it’s redesigned and possibly even completely reengineered on a new platform, you are inevitably going to leave some folks facing the dreaded 404 Error: Page Not Found experience. There’s no avoiding it really; it’s going to happen.

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If you run a small business with any Internet interaction, I’m sure you have experienced fatigue with too many logins to remember. User name and password combinations abound: a login for your domain registrar, a login for your hosting control panel, another for your online banking. There just seems to be no end of logins to remember.

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A couple of months ago, in an article titled “Are social networks worth the effort?”, Chris Crawford raised the question: “Are you bombarded with requests to join Linkedin.com, Facebook.com, MySpace.com, Twitter.com

…? If [not], are you at least curious as to what these things are …?”

Social networks, blogs, and all manner of “Web 2.0” options have rapidly transformed how people interact with each other online.

Chris focused on LinkedIn, a social network that focuses more on business networking. Meanwhile, Daria Topousis has contributed several articles about Twitter.  These and all the past Tech Beat articles are archived on the Redwood Technology Consortium website at www.redwoodtech.org. I’d like to now move on to discuss Facebook and MySpace.

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Do you accept payment under either the Visa & MasterCard logos? If so, are you certified as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant?

If you don’t know what PCI DSS is, join the crowd. While we believe Visa & MasterCard really haven’t raised enough attention with this yet, this is changing swiftly. If you are accepting credit or debit cards, then you are required to be PCI DSS compliant once you accept the first transaction; however, you may not have been required to certify that you were compliant.

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The Internet has exploded as a medium for organizations and small businesses to find audiences for their services and products in the past several years. Searching the Internet is as likely a way for audience to find you as any other means – IF you have an online presence.
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