Internet scammers are becoming smarter, ever more complex ways to steal your information are commonplace and making safety and security online is paramount. Last week Facebook launched a new security guide for parents, teens and teachers – the “Guide to Facebook Security”.

The downloadable handbook written by internet security experts Linda McCarthy, Keith Watson and Denise Weldon-Siviy and covers topics such as choosing the best password to make your Facebook account secure; taking back control of a hacked account and avoiding phishing (a way of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication).

The team at Facebook say “If you’re not using one-time passwords, secure browsing, or even tracking your account activity, this guide shows you how. It even explains why account thieves and malware pushers want your account.”

Top Tips for Staying Secure on Facebook;

• Only Friend people you know.
• Create a good password and use it only for Facebook.
• Don’t share your password.
• Change your password on a regular basis.
• Share your personal information only with people and companies that need it.
• Log into Facebook only ONCE each session. If it looks like Facebook is asking you to log in a second time, skip the links and  directly type www.facebook.com into your browser address bar.
• Use a one-time password when using someone else’s computer. •  Log out of Facebook after using someone else’s computer. •  Use secure browsing whenever possible.  •  Only download Apps from sites you trust.
• Keep your anti-virus software updated.
• Keep your browser and other applications up to date.
• Don’t paste script (code) in your browser address bar.
• Use browser add-ons like Web of Trust and Firefox’s NoScript to keep your account from being hijacked.
• Beware of “goofy” posts from anyone—even Friends. If it looks like something your Friend wouldn’t post, don’t click  on it.
• Scammers might hack your Friends’ accounts and send links from their accounts. Beware of enticing links coming from  your Friends.

You can download your copy from the Facebook Security Page.

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A few weeks we posted a short article, Offline Website Promotion, which included a few obvious yet important tips for promoting your business offline. These included; business cards, promotional gifts and signs. But if you have a vision and mission for your business, a website and some happy customers there is always more you can do make more customers happy. Below are five very simple tips that can help you become more of a prospect for customers.

1. Include contact details on your website

As well as hopefully finding their way round your services and having a look at who you are, you want them to contact you when a potential customer comes to your site. A visitor wants to know that the people they may potentially be dealing with are humans and not just another faceless business with nothing more than a contact form. Include your email, phone and where possible your actual address. It will make you seem more approachable and professional.

Also, include are links to your social media presence, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or whatever your social network of choice, and a map with directions.

If you have a contact form, make sure it includes everything you are going to need from the visitor – their contact details and what they are contacting you about.

Ultimately you want any visitor to feel welcome and wanted. You want them to engage with your business in a way that makes it easy for you to engage with them.

2. Answer the phone

This may sound ridiculous to those of you who answer your phone every time it rings. But there are many businesses who don’t; there may be good reasons why they can’t answer the phone every time it rings. However, nobody likes to leave a message unless they absolutely have to and the chances are that a potential prospect will go cold by the time you contact them back.

If possible make sure you answer the call quickly, sound like you care and take notes. You should attempt to get their name, address, telephone number, email address, information about their business, the date of the call, how they found out about you and what services they are interested in, and log the information somewhere – preferably a good CRM system.

Remember to listen to the caller and let the conversation flow naturally, even if all you want is the answers to the above. Before the call has ended ensure that the next steps have been outlined and that the caller knows what to expect; whether it’s an email or another call.

3. Best practice email communication

Once you are communicating with a new prospect take the time to write an email that is professional and polite. Be sure to avoid vast cavernous passages of text which would put any one off reading it.

• Break it down into subheadings or shorter paragraphs.
• Make sure that you identify the main points and actions clearly.
• Stick to the subject as far as possible and don’t ramble.
• Include a call to action – what do you want the recipient to do? What will happen next?

4. Dress appropriately

First impressions do count. Make sure that you look the part when meeting customers for the first time and indeed every time you meet them after. As a rule you should always dress higher rather than lower. Dirty old jeans and comfortable t-shirts are fine for the office as long as you are not going to come into contact with anyone other than your colleagues.

The people you meet make a judgment about who you are in the first 30 seconds of meeting you. Think about your own thought process when you meet someone for the first time. Make sure you make a winning first impression. Dress appropriately. It’ll help to build your confidence as well as instilling confidence in whomever you are meeting.

5. Write professional quotes.

Take your time and write a quote that includes what you’ll do, how long it will take and what it would cost. Don’t forget to include terms and legal information as well. Bear in mind how you would wish to be quoted. What details would you want to see in a quote? If the quote is too high you probably won’t hear back, too low and you might not look like a great prospect. Think about getting the balance right.

As with the Offline Website Promotion tips these do seem obvious and for many of us, common sense. However they are a reminder to always strive to be at the top of your game.

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As most of you will be aware Google recently launched Google Plus, Google’s competitor to Facebook. As with Facebook and Twitter, you can follow people. In Facebook you have Friends, Twitter, Followers and with Google+ there are Circles. In your profile, you can see how many people a person has in their circle and how many people have added them to their circle. Some people don’t like others knowing this information, so this is how you manage it.

First, you need to go to your profile.

1. Click on Edit Profile.

2. On the left side, you will see “In ..your name.. circles”

3. Click on globe symbol to edit.

4. This brings up an options box

5. If you want to show people in all circles, then select the box (put a tick in it).

6. If you want to show people who have added you to circles, then select the box as above.

7. If you want to stop all of the circle counts from showing publicly, then un-tick both boxes.

Many of you will have no problem with letting people know who’s in your circles, others may not be so keen, either way you now have the option.

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Have you ever wondered ‘how does Google work?’ If the answer is yes, then look no further. This rather splendid infographic that Lloyd (our apprentice) found at www.ppcblog.com the other day should help.

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Recently our Business Administrator Natalie, had some issues with losing her saved tabs in her Firefox and Chrome browsers.  If you don’t know Natalie this kind of problem can often result in the stamping of feet, the muttering of swear words (nice ones) and in worst cases, shouting at Craig, who according to Natalie, is “responsible for anything to do with computers.”

Anyway, this time on the instruction of Elliot – whose ears were hurting – she embarked on some research to find a fix to her problem. Thankfully it didn’t take long to discover a solution as she quickly came across ‘Tabcloud’ – a browser tab and session manager that allows you save groups of open tabs to access later. With Tabclouds for both Firefox and Chrome, Natalie’s nightmare was over (phew!).

We just thought we’d let you know as Natalie has calmed down now and peace has been restored – so it must be good. Check it out for yourself – http://chrometabcloud.appspot.com

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In a recent article from Sitepoint’s Brandon Eley he mentioned that “Everything you do online matters…”.   This got me thinking – although it may seem obvious to most of us, it’s often overlooked or instantly dismissed by many others.

Now, whether you believe the above statement or not, the evidence would suggest that anything and everything you post on a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook can and will have the potential to be viewed by anyone with access to the internet.   The trail we leave – like breadcrumbs – in cyberspace can be followed by whoever is interested, anytime, anywhere – now and in the future.

Ask yourself this.  Have you ever had a moment when you’ve said something you wish you hadn’t?   I know I have.   However the problem is far worse when you do it online.  It’s virtually impossible to undo the damage – it’s out there for all to see… forever.

Who would be interested?   Well, that’s the point, you never know who’s reading your rants, or looking at your embarrassing photos, checking out your links to YouTube, or finding out what you like and don’t like on Facebook.   It could be a potential client, an employer or even your grandchildren in the future (there’s a scary thought…).

So, my advice to you (anyone who’s reading this) is to pick your words carefully, think about what you’re saying or doing online.  But most of all choose how you want yourself, or your business to be represented, as someone out there may be watching!

Alternatively, you could just carry on as normal, because the chances are that no one really cares anyway.   They’re all too busy exposing their own lives to the world!

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There are a variety of tools out there for you to use to browse the internet, known as web browsers. The major browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera, and each of these has a number of different versions. One of the biggest challenges we face as web designers is ensuring that a website looks right in all browsers. Often it’s not possible for a site to look exactly the same, but we try to make it as close as possible. Perhaps the biggest headache of them all is Internet Explorer 6 (and all it’s sub-versions). IE6 was first released back in 2001, which is a long time ago in internet years. Because of this, there are many modern techniques which are simply not supported by IE6, and even those that are supposed to be supported often don’t work well. Google has recently announced that it no longer supports IE6 because of security vulnerabilities. We are now following suit and no longer testing new sites in IE6 unless specifically requested to do so. This has been a tough decision to make, but will save a lot of development time. If you are still running IE6, we strongly suggest you upgrade your browser to IE8 (if you’re a big IE fan), Firefox 3.6 or Google Chrome

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Open Source software is something that you might not have heard of before. Open Source literally means that the source code is available to edit and extend. A lot of Open Source software is released under a license which means that it’s freely available to download, install and use (although there are many versions of licence – so it’s worth checking the detail).

The advantages of Open Source software are pretty obvious. The software is free – and with a little expertise you can use it straight away, and with a little more expertise you can change the way it works to suit you. Many of the Content Managed sites that we build are based on Open Source systems, which means that the client doesn’t need to spend hundreds of pounds on a commercial system, and only pays for our time to set it up, and design & build the site.

There are however some disadvantages, and how much this affects you will depend on the nature of your business, the use you have for the application, and your outlook. Open Source software tends not to have detailed documentation (although there are exceptions) so you may need to work out how to use it with some trial and error. There are usually however thriving communities on the internet who will help out newbie’s. Open Source software is generally produced by a community of developers, and becasue of this there may be quite frequent version releases. This can be positive because your application will get new features and bug fixes, but if you don’t have the expertise to do the upgrades yourself, you may need to pay someone to do it for you.

So, what can Open Source do for your business? Well, there are web applications out there that deal with a number of business problems, including Website Content Management (CMS), Customer Resource Management (CRM), Human Resource Management (HRM), Online Forums, Blogs, Project Management, Collaboration Software, Image Galleries, Document Management, and more!

So, if you fancy trying out a free alternative before investing in costly commercial software, get in touch to see what we can do.

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At WDL we’re loving Googles link rel=canonical at the moment. It’s long been a problem with Google (and any other search engine) that a single page on a website can be seen as many separate pages:

http://www.websitedesign.co.uk

http://www.websitedesign.co.uk/index.php

http://websitedesign.co.uk

http://websitedesign.co.uk/index.php

and so on will all resolve to a single page, yet Google will see each as an individual resource. This can be a problem for a number of reasons. First is that Google will make an arbirtary decision about which one of these will be the ‘main’ page for it’s index which may not agree with your choice, and second, that the power of your incoming links can be dissipated if sites linking to use use different URL’s.

Google has addressed this problem by asking webmasters to add this tag to the head section their pages:

This link tells Google that http://www.websitedesign.co.uk should be considered the ‘main’ URL for all of the URL’s that resolve to the home page of our site. Now, with the canonical link in place, all the links that point to our home page will boost the link popularity for the single URL http://www.websitedesign.co.uk.

For full information about canonical, check ou this page on Google Webmaster Help.

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If you own any domain names, then look out for this scam.
I received an email offering to buy a domain I own:

Dear Sir,
we are interested to buy your domain name TENDRING.INFO and offer 65% of the appraised market value.
As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
pddomains.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Domain Resale

The email is a scam run by the cheapest of the three appraisal companies. Ignore it!!

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