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Hosting Service Providers and Identity Theft

by Sage Kalmus

My Hosting Service, My Security Service: How much protection does your web host give you from identity theft...and how much can they?

There are laws now that protect us from identity thieves, sure, but oftentimes, by the time the law gets involved, the damage is already done. Your website may be defaced. Your name may be sullied. Your hosting service may have locked you out. You lose customers. You lose money. To recover, you have to regain lost ground, which also takes time and money. But what can you do to protect yourself? And can your web hosting service help?

In two words: they'd better. At the very least a hosting service in the age of spammers, hijackers, and hackers (oh my!) should at the very least have one or more firewalls protecting your data. They should also be able to offer you protection from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, a common outcome of internet identity theft. Some hosting services may offer you a Virtual Private Network (at relevant expense, of course) for additional protection.
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1. Not clearly specifying the objectives of your website, or

2. Not making it obvious what your web pages are about.

Usually both of these things are mentioned. My own experience is that this usually stems from the inability to look at your business or products from the consumer's point of view.

Many marketing people confuse their own concerns with those of their potential customers. For instance they think that a sexy manufacturing technique, or the fact that the product uses "materials developed by NASA" will impress their customers. Generally it won't.

This is the classic mistake of confusing features with benefits. Saying that a vinyl banner is made of 13 oz vinyl is a feature. Saying that it is "virtually tear-proof" is a benefit -- namely, that it won't be ripped off its moorings and blown away by the first gentle breeze.

Web designers are just like all other business people in this regard. We have a difficult time stepping back from our little projects and looking at them from the perspective of our potential customers.

First and foremost we should realize that people who visit our sites have no idea what our sites are about until we tell them.

So we should tell them. And we should tell them very clearly and quickly. As Vincent Flanders says in Web Pages That Suck

Web design is the reverse of a magic trick. In a magic trick, you show the audience your right hand and perform the trick with your left. In Web design, you tell them where you're going first -- and then go there. People don't like surprises. It will certainly confuse them and it could make them angry."

Rick Hendershot is editor and publisher of the Linknet Marketing Resource Library.

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Ten Steps to a Winning Home Page

by Jane McLain

There's no doubt about it - the first page your site visitors see is the most important page of your website. If your home page isn't appealing, chances are the rest of your pages will never even be seen by your visitors. It helps to think of your home page as the "front door" to your online business. Will it invite people to come in and look around, or persuade them to take their dollars elsewhere? Here are ten tips for making your home page a winner:

1) Don't keep them waiting. Obey the "Eight Second Rule" (the one that says your Web page should load in eight seconds or less even over slower modems). Otherwise the viewer will probably lose patience and click the "stop" button.

2) Identify yourself. The first order of business is to identify your company and products or services. Let the viewer know they've arrived at the right destination and give them an idea of what you have to offer.

Read the rest of Ten Steps to a Winning Home Page...

a) not properly understanding how CSS works and
b) still building your sites with tables

So, also like me, you may have found a couple of CSS tutorials where a gallant attempt is made to explain it all in five simple lessons. The problem with these lessons is that they usually try to do too much too quickly, and you end up not knowing exactly what to try first.

For instance, I downloaded a free CSS Editor called Style Master, and commenced to plod through the tutorial.

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If you are an accomplished graphic designer the temptation will be great to try to control the look of your web pages by substituting clunky looking standard web page headlines (h1, h2, h3) with graphics. The result of doing this is to squander one of your best chances to tell the Search Engines what the theme of your page.

Search Engine spiders cannot read text within graphics. They can only read text. So use text for your headlines and other important names, content descriptions and links. Inexperienced web designers often think that the appearance of a page is more important than the readable content. But they are wrong.

Learn to control the appearance of your headlines and other textual components by properly using CSS (cascading style sheets). Your sites will be much more effective as a result.

Rick Hendershot is a writer and online publisher who writes and publishes articles, product announcements and blog posts on behalf of clients. See Linknet Promo Blog for and effective and inexpensive way to make an impression on the search engines.

by David Leonhardt

It's tempting. There are so many companies offering cut-rate hosting - loaded with astounding post-futuristic techno-gizmo features! - that it just makes sense to save a few dollars, right?

Think again. First, consider how much you would be saving. If you run a business site, saving $5, $10 or even $15 a month is not a big saving. No going concern will become a stopping concern on account of even $15 a month. But the wrong web host can stop a business cold.

Here are three reasons to look beyond price when choosing your web host.

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Building your first website can be very frustrating. It looks fairly easy, but almost always turns out to be more complicated than you expected.

The problem is, building a website requires technical know-how that you have no way of acquiring until somebody explains it to you. And technical people are often pretty bad at explaining things.

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Blogging programs were originally developed in the late 1990s by ardent web surfers whose primary purpose was to "filter" and comment on the web content they found most interesting and valuable. This mostly involved surfing the web, finding interesting, perhaps obscure articles or resource material, providing a link to it, and perhaps to some related or alternative points of view, and often adding a short commentary.

As Rebecca Blood points out in Weblogs: a History and Perspective this original idea was developed over a very short period of time in 1999 by a very small handful of "bloggers". The emphasis was on community, interaction, short, pithy and often sarcastic commentary, and extensive inter-linking.

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There are two important reasons to build your website from the top left hand corner down.

The first one is that this is the way people (at least in the western world) read pages. They tend to begin at the top and read towards the bottom. And they tend to look at the left column before they look at the right. This is why your web pages should contain the most important headlines and descriptive information near the top.

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General web statistics give pertinent information about website visitors. Webmasters analyzing these statistics have a better understanding of who their website visitors are and how they perceive the website. A lot can be learned by evaluating navigation patterns, most-viewed pages and exit pages. Deciphering web logs could easily become a full-time job. The information that can be gleaned from close log scrutiny is extremely valuable.

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