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.
The good news is that you can handle this gracefully. The 404 Error is the technical response a server provides a user’s web browser when the file requested cannot be found. It could be an image, a PDF or an entire web page. If this error is not handled, the end-user will get a sparse page with this “nasty” error code, a note that the file couldn’t be found and not many other real options. There’s a good chance that you’ve lost your prospective customer at this point, and that they will just move on to another site. This is the last thing you want to happen to someone looking to browse your business’s web site! Given that you are inevitably going to move things around on your site, you will want to be proactive about this.
Here’s what you can do … most likely your web host provides a hosting control panel, and most likely that control panel provides you an option to assign a custom page to handle this error. If you aren’t sure, contact your web host. Some site platforms, such as a WordPress blog, will automatically handle this part.
At this point, you may have at least done better than the server’s default 404 error page, but not much better. Once you’ve got your potential customer to a page you can control, what should you do?
There are some universal best practices to follow; the gist of all of which is to:
First of all, your custom 404 page should look just like the rest of your web site, including your company logo and all of the normal site navigation options you show on other pages. At the very least, your surfer will either recognize your site or appreciate that you have not lost control of it. They’ll also have something to identify with and somewhere to go. This is absolutely THE most fundamental best practice. The content of this page should let them know that the page or document could not be found as it may have been “renamed, moved or is no longer available.”
Next, make an apology. Many high profile sites have some fun with this, but at the very least show a bit of remorse that your visitor landed here and let them know that you recognize that this is NOT where they intended to land. It could be as simple as “Oops! . . .” (fill in the rest).
Now for the important part: give some options to find what they were looking for.
Having made this page look like the rest of your site, you have a head start here, but you should go further. After apologizing for having landed them here, offer some options:
There are many other aspects of handling this one simple issue. My next article will dive deeper.
]]>Social media is a broad umbrella arching over a variety of media that facilitate sharing of information and networking among friends and followers. Three of the best known and most popular nodes are Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. These are all media popular among widening demographics and as such offer powerful marketing opportunities to businesses with websites. That is, there are already networks of millions of people sharing all manner of content through these media . . . And you could be just one click away from them. Best of all, it’s free and easy.
Allow me to introduce you to AddThis. AddThis provides a free “widget” to boost traffic back to your site by making it easier for visitors to share your content with their friends and followers. Their tag line is “Your Content. Everywhere.” By adding AddThis to your site, you put your visitors a click away from broadcasting your content over a wide array of social networks.
For example, if you are reading this article on the Eureka Times Standard’s website, you will see an icon to “Bookmark”; mouse over this icon, and you’ll be presented with options to share on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Bookmark, and more. This is integrated into Times-Standard.com using the AddThis widget.
Recently my sister got a patent on a product she had been developing - a simple way to deal with messy diaper changes. I built her a rather simple website to promote and sell her product, and of course, I added AddThis to every page. I opted for the “Share” version of the icon, and a different set of options for sharing - including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, of course, but also other popular sharing locations such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon, as well as some “old school” options: “Add to Favorites”, “Email a Friend,” and Print. To see this example, visit www.BottomsUpBabbyGear.com.
You can add this functionality to your website too, quickly and easily - for free. Simply visit www.AddThis.com and follow the four simple steps. First, select a service (the integration will differ a bit depending on whether you are integrating into your existing website, a hosted blog, or MySpace; unfortunately, Facebook pages are not structured in such a way as to make it possible to add this). Next, select a button style from the options provided.
Step three is worth a note of explanation. You have the option to add a free analytics account enabling you to gather metrics on what pages your visitors are sharing and how they are sharing these pages. I highly recommend that you register an account for this option to track the performance of your AddThis button.
Finally, generate the code snippet you will insert into your website or blog.
This is the simple integration - the one the Time Standard has used, for example. Anyone can do it. However, there are more options for button styles and options to customize which share icons you show on the mouse over (out of nearly 300 options) that are also easy to add to your web site. For the more technically savvy, there are more advanced options for the integration of the display on your site and the share options you would like to provide. It’s the best of both worlds for those who just want a simple solution on the one hand, or those that are more particular about their site design and the specific options they want to provide their visitors.
If you have a website for your business and you do not have some option such as AddThis for your visitors to share your content, then I fear you are missing the boat on what Web 2.0 and social media networking are doing to transform the ways people are interacting with web locations and each other as we approach the second decade of the 21st century. With AddThis, it’s so simple and easy to add this connectivity to your website or blog, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t.
I plan to write a follow-up article on adding these sharing options to business websites for my next article, and I welcome your feedback on how using share options on your website has affected your business. If you add AddThis or another similar method to your website, please email me at AddThis@WMSMerchantServices.com and tell me your story. Meanwhile, keep following Tech Beat to learn about other ways Web 2.0 might affect your business.
(Please Note: AddThis is in no way affiliated with Web Merchant Services; it‘s simply a tool we recommend to our clients).
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“Social media is, at heart, social. It’s meant to connect people. We form and build relationships (whether in person or online) because it brings joy and meaning to our lives, so don’t let the business of doing business via social networking sites rob you of that. Take the time to invest in the lives of others, and the riches that you reap will be far greater than can be measured in balance sheets and ROI calculations.”
Read his article here:
http://www.famefoundry.com/646/the-no-duhs-of-social-media/
This is a must listen, even if it does only scrape the tip of the iceburge on using Social Media Marketing to build and promote your brand and then monitize that.
]]>If you have a business, then you should already know by now that you should at least have a small website for you business. Face it - some demographics don’t even know what a “phone book” is anymore, and others find it easier to Google your business than to thumb though a printed book. If all you have is a website for your business, however, you have not yet fully entered the 21st century. To do that, you need to understand how your business website is or could be networked with folks using the Internet.
Traditionally, promoting your site on the web would be just a matter of understanding how site design interfaces with organic/natural listings in the top search engines (with enough quality links back to your site to trump your competitors), and then maybe running some Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns on services such as Google AdWords, etc. That is, most of what you could do was to tweak your site copy and other aspects of site content such as meta title, description and keyword tags to compete with your competitors for “natural” listings and possibly pay for position via PPC advertising.
That may have suited your needs for online marketing in the past, but times have changed folks! There is now a new wave of marking that is much easier and more powerful than the old school optimization for search engines. It’s called social media marketing.
In a nutshell, social media marketing is the Internet version of “word of mouth advertising” — only with the power of the Internet, this “word of mouth” can go viral as people share among their social networks. For example, picture this … you have a WordPress(.com) blog on your site where you have created a post describing a fabulous new product. On the post you’ve embedded a YouTube video about it and you’ve placed social media icons to make it easy for visitors to share your post on their Facebook profile and/or share it on StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.
Then you send out a tweet on Twitter about it. A follower of yours on Twitter clicks through to your blog post, leaves a comment about how awesome this new product looks and then shares your post on their Facebook page; their friends see it and share it with their own friends on Facebook, on their Del.icio.us bookmarks, share it on their StumbleUpon profile and/or tweet about it to their own followers on Twitter.
Then their friends and followers spread it even further throughout their own networks. With just a blog post, a video and a tweet, your exciting new product is exponentially distributed throughout the net. And best of all, it’s all free!
Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of that kind of publicity?
To do it, you don’t have to get as involved as all of that, though. You may not want to keep up with a blog or make videos to post on YouTube, or even set up a Facebook Page. At the vary least, you take a moment out of your busy schedule to see how social media marketing could be just the form or marketing you need in a “down” economy and how you could make the best use of it for your businesses. A down economy is not the time to scale back on your marketing! It is the time to move aggressively on your marketing so that you might position yourself ahead of weaker competitors.
You just need to stay a nose ahead of your competitors – get the angle up on them. Start using social media marketing vectors to surpass them in their “old school” online marketing strategies. I don’t mean to suggest that you shouldn’t keep focus on solid copy writing for EVERY page on your site, pay attention to meta tags such as the Title of each page, the meta description of it, or the string of keywords you ascribe to your Keywords meta tags. This is a game that has been played for over a decade and while things change here daily, you still can and should play this game.
Promoting your business via social media marketing will be equally as powerful or even more powerful than traditional online marketing — as much of online marketing is moving to social media at this point. Creating the media to facilitate taking your product and service offerings viral on the Internet gives you an opportunity to get a “word of mouth” buzz that was never before possible.
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There are many ways we all cope with this issue. Some will just let our browser remember our passwords for us, but run into a variety of issues with that approach along with that nagging feeling that this might not be the most secure way to manage logins. Others will keep spreadsheets on logins, but still this too is inconvenient at best. And yes, some might admit to keeping logins on a sheet of paper for reference.
Another common approach against login fatigue is to work with a set of standard logins ranging from less to most secure depending on the nature of the application or service we are logging into. For example, we might use a relatively simple password for logging in to comment on blogs, a more secure password for logging into places we do business with that don’t retain any sensitive information about us, an even stronger password for logins that have to do with our business such as our hosting control panel for our web site, etc., and a very strong password for anything that has to do with our finances such as our online banking.
This approach has the advantage of keeping a wide array of logins rather simply limited to a small set of options assigned by the level of security desired; however, this strategy breaks down pretty quickly when confronted with logins that require rules for setting passwords that weren’t part of the way we created these security-tiered logins – or worse yet, when confronted with high security services which force a change of password periodically.
And of course, when we can’t quite get the login correct, we resort to stumbling through the “forgot password” and or “forgot username” functionality, if provided.
Some among us have discovered tools along the way that facilitate keeping track of all of these logins. There have been many available for almost as long as here have been browsers to surf the web. For example, back in 1997 I started with a little application called Gator. It was a free password manager. I really liked for a very long time. However, it was technically “spyware” as the cost of the free application was to report back certain aspects of my online activity. I honestly didn’t mind that, but eventually antivirus software started having fits about this “spyware” on my machine, so I decided to remove it for that reason alone.
This forced me to find a new solution as I have scores of logins to manage, and none of the approaches I mentioned above would suffice. I spent a couple of days of reviewing several such as SurfSecret KeyPad, TurboPasswords, and Password Manager XP. You can find a view of several at www.TopTenReviews.com; just search the site for “password management”.
I settled on RoboForm (www.roboform.com). It is free if you only need up to manage up to 30 logins; after that it requires a license for a nominal fee.
Once installed, it’s a login management dream come true. One of the handiest of its features is the ability to organize your logins rather like you would organize your “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” in your browser by creating folders and names for the various places you log into. And then the real convenience power of RoboForm kicks in as this saved location then becomes a “one click” login. For example, I have a location for my online banking. Rather than going to my browser’s Bookmarks, I can go in through RoboForm and click on that location. It will then take me there and log me in — all in one click.
RoboForm is also very user-friendly in that it allows you to edit and see what your passwords actually are for your logins. That is, rather than showing you a bunch of starred-out characters, you will see the actual password.
What’s more, it automatically plugs into both your Internet Explorer and FireFox browsers at the same time. So, if you establish a login on one browser, it will be there for you in the other.
There is just one catch – there is ONE password you will have to remember: the password to your login RoboForm vault.
There are many other amazing features of RoboForm this article doesn’t afford space for, but I encourage you to have a look at it and try it out if you are experiencing login fatigue. Download it and set up your “one click login” to your profile on the Redwood Technology Consortium’s website: www. redwoodtech.org
]]>…? 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.
Facebook and MySpace are social networking places where people can share all kinds of things about themselves online. The differences between these two networks are significant, though.
I interviewed everyone I know who uses both Facebook and MySpace. What I found, in a nutshell, is that folks consider MySpace a place they can express themselves more freely whereas they consider Facebook a place they can be more private amongst friends and family. The differences here have everything to do with how these two sites work.
Facebook is more private. There is very little the outside world can see about you without being part of your network. They can see a profile image of you (if you’ve created one), who your friends are, and what Facebook pages you are a “fan” of. Your friends can see all of the things you want to share about yourself – your photos, videos, links to things you find interesting, your thoughts (rather like Twitter), and your “notes” (rather like blog posts or “extended thoughts”). Meanwhile, you have tight control over what “friends of friends” are able to see about you.
MySpace can be much more public. The whole world could see just about everything you post here, if you choose to allow it. Again, you can share photos, videos, your interests, etc. but MySpace has more of an actual blog option. MySpace is much more “voyeuristic” – an adjective many interviewees used.
MySpace is a place where you can really express your personality. MySpace lets you have a lot of control over how you present yourself – including customizing just about everything about the look of your profile page. You can also very easily find some of your favorite music and post it right to your profile and have it play when your profile page loads. Facebook offers almost no options to personalize the look of your profile and has only just added some features to share your favorite music with your friends. What’s more, the friends I interviewed who were musicians unanimously pressed the point that MySpace was a much more effective network for them to promote their music.
The most significant difference between the two, though, is that Facebook is much more of a networking machine. MySpace is more of a place to present yourself. Part of your MySpace profile is a space where friends can leave you messages, but Facebook is almost completely focused on networking with your friends. Your Facebook home page shows you at a glance what your friends are sharing (MySpace is now doing something similar). Your profile page (or “wall”) shows what you are sharing; it’s essentially a dialog between you and your friends about your thoughts, your photos, your videos, your links, etc. You can even post events to your wall.
What’s more, Facebook is fairly effective in recommending people that you might want to “friend up” with, pages you may want to be come a fan of, or causes you may want to join. Your friends will also recommend these things to you. You can also send private messages to your friends, or even chat with them if they happen to be online and logged into Facebook at the same time. There is almost no end to the interactivity on Facebook. I also found that Facebook has a much wider age demographic than MySpace.
By way of illustration, I started my MySpace profile about three years ago, customized it to my personality, and have done very little with it since then. I only started a profile on Facebook this year, and am constantly involved with the goings on there. With Facebook “you get way more insight into your friends’ lives”, to quote one of the friends I interviewed.
Neither social network is better than the other; they are just different (though they are becoming more like each other). There is much more to say about these and other social marketing sites. I’ll be adding more to this conversation here as time and space allows, as I am sure other members of the Redwood Technology Consortium will do too.
]]>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.
This is causing confusion recently, especially with relatively smaller merchants – less than 20,000 transactions per month. Merchants in this tier are labeled as “Level 4”. However, few merchants at this level know anything about PCI DSS, that they are required to be compliant, or that they may even be required to be certified. Smaller businesses have enough immediate concerns to worry about before this.
Since these standards were developed, “Level 4” merchants have always been required to be compliant, but were never required to certify compliancy . . . so the vast majority never really gave it any thought whatsoever, and happily went on their way processing credit card payments using all manner of vulnerable applications, networks and processes. The same could be said for a lot of web hosting companies that support these smaller merchants online.
Blissful ignorance of PCI DSS is coming to a close quickly now, though. Visa is putting all of the responsibility for breaches of cardholder data for this level of merchant squarely on the shoulders of the acquiring banks – the providers merchants go to for their merchant accounts (such as their local bank, a local MSP/ISO such as Humboldt Merchant Services, or a global network such as Elavon or Card Services International). Visa is putting the responsibility of the costs of these breaches squarely in the laps of the acquiring banks, so processors are now much more motivated to prod their “Level 4” merchants to certify compliancy, lest they be left with the bill for the fines.
The big problem is when there is a breach: there are huge costs to pay – a minimum of $10,000 to $50,000 in fines alone, and most merchants at this level can’t afford this. So they go out of business leaving someone “up line” to foot the bill.
According to Visa Inc., “All entities (including merchants or service providers) that process store or transmit cardholder data need to be PCI DSS COMPLIANT at the time they handle cardholder data. For Level 4 merchants, the VALIDATION or PROOF of the PCI DSS compliance is at the individual acquirer’s discretion and may have deadlines set individually.”
That is, while any merchant accepting credit cards is required to be compliant, it is up to processors to prod merchants into certifying that they are compliant and to set deadlines for compliancy.
Processors such as Elavon (used to be NOVA) are moving swiftly. Local merchants might have an Elavon account if they set up their merchant account through Costco or a good number of other providers. Elavon has notified their merchants that they must certify compliancy by March 1, 2009 or be assessed a $20/month fee until they certify themselves as compliant. To add a carrot to the stick, they negotiated a “bulk rate” with TrustWave for all of their merchants – less than half of what certification services typically charge, and less than the $20/mo. penalty fee would cost them over a year.
Many other local merchants use Humboldt Merchant Services as their provider. However, HMS was not able to explain what there current policies are for PCI DSS certification after several inquiries because of their recent purchase by Moneris Solutions. If you have an account with HMS, you should call them to find out more.
Merchants of all stripes accepting card payments need to make sure they understand PCI DSS and what their responsibilities are for securing cardholder data. Larger merchants know this, but “Level 4” merchants are not as aware, though they will be getting a knock on their door soon.
If you are a merchant processing 20,000 transactions or less per month, you may not yet know much about PCI DSS, even though you are still required to be compliant. You should educate yourself on PCI DSS and find a Qualified Security Assessor (such as TrustWave) to certify you soon. And if you are a merchant selling online, you should be both more concerned and more dedicated to making online shopping safer for everyone.
For more information on PCI DSS, please see:
https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/
There are two fundamental aspects to establishing a presence online: a domain name, and web site hosting. The first is simple but beyond the scope here (for more info on this, see http://www.wmsmerchantservices.com/eCommerce/domain-registration.asp). For the second, your domain name must point at a host — a network of services and files that make a web site available on the Internet.
While there are many variations, here are the most common options:
Shared Hosting:
In a shared hosting environment, a hosting provider puts your site on a server with a large number of other sites. It’s inexpensive, but the server may not be managed ideally for such a variety of clients, and it’s typically somewhat restrictive.
That is, shared hosting is prone to issues with folks on that shared server who may not well know what they are doing and can therefore sometimes cause issues for all sites on that server. There are ways for hosts to mitigate against this, but ultimately, a shared hosting environment be not be ideal for your business.
What’s more, there may be some options you would like to have for your business that the host cannot just allow for everyone on that shared server.
This option is usually the appropriate solution for the majority of very small businesses and organizations as it typically covers all of the bases; if you need something more, you will need to contact your hosting provider and negotiate your options.
Virtual Private Servers:
Like shared hosting, you do share a server, but with only 2-3 other companies. This option provides more resources and flexibility and is less expensive than a dedicated server, but it is more expensive than — and doesn’t typically provide the flexibility of — a dedicated server.
This option is not as widely available simply because relatively few businesses need this tier of support and because hosting providers need to put a lot up front to fund them and then wait for enough clients at this level to subscribe to them – and that time waiting could well go beyond the Return on Investment (ROI) for this sort of hosting arrangement.
That is, it’s typically too much of an investment with too much time to return on investment for any but the very large hosting providers to afford, but then the large hosting providers are much less likely to support your individual needs.
Bottom line is that usually VPS is not a good arraignment for either the host or the business.
Managed Dedicated Servers:
In a managed dedicated server environment, the entire server is dedicated to a single client.
There is no competition for server resources, it’s completely flexible to your needs, and you don’t need to know anything about managing servers. What’s more, the hosting provider typically leases all of the hardware and software (saving you money up front).
The down side is that it’s more expensive than managing your own server.
This is a good option for the large “small business” or small corporation that need dedicated resources — but doesn’t want to manage servers themselves. It’s also a good option for the development house that wants to start hosting clients in an environment they have considerable control over and can keep their clients safely — for example, a developer could use a managed dedi server as a shared server for their own clients.
This is exactly how we started out many years ago when we saw that shared hosting was going to be a nightmare in out support of our clients; our first step was to isolate all client sites within managed dedicated server environments.
Unmanaged Dedicated Servers:
Moving on up to an unmanaged dedicated server environment requires much more expertise.
The hosting provider typically supplies only the hardware, network infrastructure, and core fundamentals such as security, power, bandwidth and IP addresses.
The benefit is that you have total control over the server; can have it set up however you like; can install and run any software components you like; and it’s less expensive monthly than a managed server. The downside is that it is more expensive upfront and it puts the management responsibility on your shoulders (though support is typically available for a fee).
This is a good option for a company that needs the full use of a server’s resources and has the talent to manage their servers – though not the capacity to manage the hardware and network.
It’s also a good option for the development house that has enough experience managing servers, as they can affordably offer all of the above options to their clients.
Colocation/Rack Space:
This is the highest rung of the ladder, short of building one’s own data center.
The data center provides only the core fundamentals: security to the building, power and bandwidth — and very minor support.
The client is responsible for everything else — all of the hardware for the entire network including DNS, mail, database, and site servers, backup systems, firewalls, etc.; all of the software; the installation and configuration of the entire network; and the support for and maintenance of the network.
The benefit is that it offers complete control over the network, and that the monthly expenses are minor. The downside is that it’s very expensive on the front end; and that one needs to have the expertise to configure and maintain the entire network.
Rack Space is a good option for the smaller hosting company or large development house that has the monetary & human capital to support it, and that wants total control over their network for the benefit of their clients.
There are nuances to these typical types of hosting options, and a wide variety of solutions available. Having some knowledge of the typical tiers should help you negotiate the best solution best suited to your organization or business.
What’s more, while there are an overwhelming number of providers for these services, it is often the case that the more specific your requirements are, the better you would be to find a smaller, competent provider for those services — as you will almost always find the level of personal attention you will want and will ultimately need.
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