Posted by: Andy on April 17th, 2008
Category: General eBusiness, e-Business Basics
Viewed: 907 times
Having a website created is as not as simple as hiring the first Web Development Company that you find in the phonebook. Getting a website requires much more than a phone call. Here are 10 things you need before your website is created.
1 .You Need to Educate Yourself
The web development industry is unregulated and anyone can profess to be a web developer. You need to educate yourself in matters of usability, aesthetics, search engine marketing, ecommerce, regulations, and taxation in order to ensure you are hiring a qualified and competent person to create your website
2. You Need to Hire Professionals
Ask yourself, “what is the best use of my time, building my website or building my business?” The cost-savings of the do-it-yourself option may be outweighed by the time required to design and build your own site. Hire professionals to do the job right, on budget and on time.
3. You Need to Check Their References
Ask to see previous work: This is the best way to assess their skills. But don't let yourself be fooled by appearances. In the Web world, looks can be deceiving. The user-friendliness of a site is often more important than its design.
4. You Need a Legal Contract
So who owns your website, including the code and the graphics? According to Maria Holman, Lawyer and Trademark Agent for Lindsay Kenney LLP (http://www.lklaw.ca) “ The general rule of copyright is that the creator of a work, whether the work is programming, written content, graphics, etc, is the owner of the work ”. Without a legal contract the owner of the website is the person who created it.
5. You Need to Identify Your Visitor
Everyone is not a potential customer. A 55 year old man is probably not going to purchase maternity clothes, but may be very likely to purchase golf clubs. To be effective, the design, navigation, and content of your website must target a specific audience.
6. You Need to Understand the Importance of Professional Design
The overwhelming factor for determining the credibility of a website is the professionalism of its design. A Stanford University study found that web users evaluate the design as a determining factor of website credibility. “ If it fails on this criterion, Web users are likely to abandon the site and seek other sources of information and services .”
7. You Need to Understand the Importance of Content
The number 1 activity on the web is reading, and so the importance of content on your website can not be overstated. Content is the thing that attracts customers and retains their attention. It is the one and only means that turn leads into sales.
8. You Need Content
You are the only person capable and qualified to write about your company. Although it is often necessary to employ the services of a professional web copy writer, such as webcopyplus.com, only you know your business, its strengths, capabilities, history, and accomplishments.
9. You Need to Talk To your Visitors
Successful websites talk to the visitor – unsuccessful websites talk about themselves. How would you feel if you walked into a business and they didn't acknowledge you, didn't address you, and didn't inquire about your needs? The customer is the most important thing to your business – make sure your website talks to them.
10. You Need to Think About Search Engines
The time to think about search engines is before the site is designed and created. The content, navigation, filenames, and design factors, such as the use of Flash, all impact the “search engine friendliness” of your website.
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Posted by: Andy on April 7th, 2008
Category: General eBusiness, e-Mail Marketing
Viewed: 1,482 times
On opening my email inbox this morning I was shocked to see over 100 emails from “System Administrator” with a subject line similar to “Undeliverable: Returned mail: see transcript for details”; Looks like my email address has been hijacked by spammers.
Spam is a multibillion dollar industry. According to Paul Judge of CipherTrust Inc “Spam, or unsolicited e-mail, has become a tremendous problem in recent years, evolving from being a minor nuisance as late as year 2000 to today comprising on average over 80% of all enterprise e-mail traffic and costing billions of dollars in lost productivity worldwide.” According to Barracuda Networks 2007 Spam Report, 95% of all email was spam. “The study, based on an analysis of more than one billion daily email messages sent to its more than 50,000 customers worldwide, found that 90 to 95 percent of all email sent in 2007 was spam, increasing from an estimated 85 to 90 percent of email in 2006.”
Barracuda Central displays real time statistics on email threats. Here are their top 10 spam categories:
- Replica Products
- Online Pharmacies
- Casino and Gaming
- Other Spam
- Software Sales
- Illegal Advertising
- Penny Stocks
- Credit and Debt Relief
- Virus Phishing
- Bank Phishing
Spammers face a number of challenges in getting their advertisements to unsuspecting recipients. First and foremost they have to make their messages appear as though they are being sent from a “sterile” email – so they use a false reply-to address. They do this for three reasons, first in some countries sending out spam is illegal, and so the spammer would be pretty stupid if they sent email out with their own reply-to address. Secondly, if they used the same reply-to address then it would be very easy for system administrators to set up filters that deleted all email coming from that address. Finally, the spammer uses a “real” domain name in the hopes that it will lend some legitimacy to the email.
According to spamnation.info, this type of email that I received is called backscatter, which is “the name given to messages that are generated when a spammer uses your mail address or an invented mail address at a domain that you own in the 'From:' line of their messages. If the spammer's message can't be delivered for any reason, the receiving host will send back a non-delivery report to the address in the 'From:' line.”
Spam forgery can do a lot of damage to a company’s reputation, infrastructure, and mail server load. To most businesses however, it’s just a nuisance because there isn’t anything they can do to stop it. According to Spam Hunter Rob Vaessen “email forgery is simple and commonplace. Forgery of email header data makes it nearly impossible for the average email recipient to complain about or report spam effectively. If you can't figure out who really sent you the spam, you can't get them shut down.”
Vaessen offers these tips for anyone who is a victim of spam forgery:
- Notify your web and mail hosts. You don’t want your website shut down because of complaints from people who didn't realize that the spammer was forging your domain/email address.
- Put up an explanation page, describing the circumstances surrounding the incident. That way annoyed spam recipients that come to your website will understand what happened, and that you aren’t responsible for the spam message(s) he/she received.
- Collect evidence (printed and electronic copies of complete emails, including all headers) in case it becomes necessary to either pursue the spammer through the courts or convince a skeptic that you didn't send the spam.
So who is buying from spammers? “Fact is, spammers wouldn't send out junk e-mail if nobody — absolutely nobody — ever clicked through to buy anything”, according to USA Today Tech Columnist Kevin Maney, “spammers only send out spam because it is successful. They send oceans of it because e-mail costs almost nothing, and if one person in a million responds, that's good enough.” The simple fact is that spam works and all it needs to keep working is one sale, “purchasing just one product from a spammer bankrolls them with enough money to spam another million people”, says spamdontbuyit.org’s founder, Mike Adams. “Money you spend on products from spammers is reinvested in sending more spam” says Adams.
Who is buying from spammers? We all are, especially when spammers are mainstream well-known companies. Spamnation has a list of companies that use spam to advertise, see if you recognize any:
- Avon
- Bennetton
- Blockbuster
- Bowflex
- Dell
- Disney Online
- Marks & Spencer
- Pitney Bows
- Snapfish
- Vonage
- Xerox
So if Avon, Dell, Vonage, and Xerox are spamming us, then it’s no wonder we are buying from less credible companies.
In the meantime I’m up to my elbows in bounced emails that used my forged email address, and so I set up filters in Outlook to move messages that contain the following to my junk folder:
- From contains Mailer-Daemon
- From contains postmaster@
- Body contains Status: 5.1.1
- Subject contains Returned mail
- Subject starts with Delivery Status Notification
- Subject starts with Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
- Subject contains failure notice
Now I have to check my Junk folder every-so-often to ensure I’m not missing anything important, and my inbox is looking a little less cluttered.
Tags: backscatter, email spam
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Posted by: Andy on April 4th, 2008
Category: General eBusiness, e-Business Basics
Viewed: 747 times
It’s April, and as we look forward to warmer weather and time spent outdoors we also think of the yearly ritual of Spring Cleaning. For many small business owners, the occasion of cleaning the office is prompted only by an impending visit from a client, and often the cleaning is accomplished by neatly stacking up the accumulation of papers, notes, journals, and other assorted gatherings into the nearest storage box or desk drawer. For some companies, the yearly cleaning necessitates the closing of the office for the day, the ordering in of communal pizza, and the occasional surprised exclamation of “hey, I’ve been looking for this piece of paper for months!”
The day begins with staff arriving early, dressed in jeans appropriate for “under the desk work”, and equipped with large green garbage bags, Windex, and paper towels, commence into the task of cleaning the office. Personally, I volunteer to climb under all the desks rather than face the inevitable science-experiment-gone-horribly-wrong that lurks in the staffroom refrigerator. The hidden piles of papers are found, desks are cleaned out, and what remains are several bags of paper, destined for the recycler or the garbage bin.
Without realizing it, companies often dispose sensitive personal and financial documents in this fashion, putting employees and corporate identities at risk of being stolen. “When people think of ID theft they almost immediately focus on hackers and online security,” says Lynda Pasacreta, BBB President and CEO serving Mainland BC. “But one of the most common ways ID theft happens is when people have failed to secure or properly destroy important financial information including paper documents, IDs, and credit cards.”
In a fantastic article on Spring Cleaning and Identity Theft, the Better Business Bureau of Vancouver offers the following list of documents that should be shredded prior to recycling or putting in the trash:
- Documents that include Social Insurance Numbers, birthdates, PIN numbers or passwords
- Banking documents and other financial information
- Leases, contracts or letters that include signatures
- Pre-approved credit card applications
- Medical or dental bills
- Travel itineraries
- Used airline tickets
Remember, identity theft doesn’t just happen online. Even if you run an eBusiness, properly dispose of sensitive documents when cleaning out your office.
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