Online Security Authority » Website Security

Where Can I Find A Website Designer In My Area?

OSAblogger — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:03:39 +0000

Website Design is a combination of art, social science and technology. If you are to compete then you cannot ignore the web. Website designers used to love using frames, until they discovered that they cripple a website’s marketing potential. Insist that your site developer not use frames when giving you a website design pricing!

Website designers will also want to know how many pages you will need, and how often you want the site updated. Website designs that employ Ajax can show users right away if the desired username is available. By doing so, users don’t have to wait until they submit the entire form before they find out that the username they want is taken. Website designers are always trying to imbibe creative designing skills into the website in order to allure the customers. Flash website design makes a website better looking, interactive and appealing ask for it when you get a website design quote.

Website Design is never easy, and coming up with the right concept is hard enough as it is. Everyone is always looking for a unique yet suitable website design that will really push whatever message that website was trying to get across. Website Designing is the art of designing a website with creative ideas and attractive looks. Now a day’s website becomes the best and popular method for advertising and promoting the product or service in market.

Web design companies no longer provide the personal touch and some even take far too long to respond to a company’s needs. We know the importance of excellent website design services , SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and effective web hosting , but even more important, we know the value of excellent customer service. Web site design crosses multiple disciplines of information systems , information technology and communication design . The web site is an information system whose components are sometimes classified as front-end and back-end . Web designers, are you interested in expanding your customer base? Do you have some templates lying around or just enjoy putting together new templates to keep your skills sharp?

Websites are not only to be visually pleasing but must also be user friendly so that user can understand what you are offering. There are many things to consider when you want to put up a website online. website designs signifies your online presence. The purpose of placing a website is to get visitors who will be converted to potential customers later. Web surfers are basically an impatient bunch and if a website is hard to figure out because the links are not obvious, they will click away never to return. Website navigation is one of the most crucial elements in determining the effectiveness of a website.

Where Can I Find A Website Designer In My Area?

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How To Protect Your Digital Downloads

OSAblogger — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:40:03 +0000

If you are using PayPal or Click Bank to sell your products, it is almost a certainty that people are using simple but effective methods to steal your products.

All it takes is a simple search on a search engine as shown in the video on http://protection4clickbank.com

Many are unaware that this is going on. So here are 8 easy Steps you could take now
to protect your product|digital downloads! Although these underlining steps are not a complete
and solid solution such as Protection4ClickBank.com you could use these methods to help secure you’re downloads.

1. Stomping the View Source Problem

The route for easy theft involves viewing the source code, which can be done either by right clicking and selecting View Source, or by selecting Source from the browser View menu (IE browsers). Inhibiting right click can be done by a single line of code. Here is how to stop this from happening
A Add this line of code between the body and /body tags (to inhibit right mouse click) as follows:

B.Then, on your home page, at the place where you want your customer to select payment, add the following line of code to generate a new browser window.

Click here to Order

This code displays “Click here to Order” and, when clicked, opens the new window. Be sure to change “orderpage.htm” in the above code to the name of your actual order page. You can also change the window width and height can be adjusted, by changing the 500 and 300 in the line above.

On the new page containing the order code, your customer can neither right click nor pull down a View menu. While this method can be exploited, it will stop those who are merely amateur.

2. Request a order ID

A second no-cost technique is to ask the purchaser to send you the orderID before receiving the product download address. But that makes each purchase a manual process… It could, but doesn’t have to, if you use this little psychology trick…

Just set up a page for the good buyer to be sent to after the purchase. On that page, ask the buyer to send the order ID to an auto responder email you provide, you can get an auto responder from (www.AmericasHostingNetwork.com) which is the hosting company I use and closely integrate with and all projects including ClickBank Download Protection !

The auto responder reply message provides the product download address, and will be sent regardless of what information is provided by the buyer. Most likely the opportunistic thief will give up at this point because he doesn’t want to reveal his e-mail address, and knows he doesn’t have a valid order|payment ID.

Of course for good measure you should include the “no right-click” code given above on all your sales pages.

3. Give Thought In Naming Your thank you Page

If you name your thank you page is something like ‘thankyou.html’ or ‘download.html’ then it’s a pretty easy process for the average hacker to find your page and download your product. Give your download pages a complicated name that is neither easy to guess, easy to remember nor easy to recognize.

4. Create nested and oddly named Folders

In keeping with point number 1, this is just a question of making it more harder for the average thief to find your thank you pages.

Let’s say you’re selling an eBook called “How to Make Pizza”. Now, let’s say you’re selling it at this URL:
www.yourdomainname.com/pizza.

In this example, your sales page is contained in the directory called ‘pizza’. Now, rather than put your download page in this same directory, you can make life more difficult for the thief by creating sub-directories (or ‘nested’ directories) for your thank you page.

Just create a directory inside ‘pizza’ called ‘QrB46z’ (for example) and another folder inside that one called ‘wKd12d’ and then place your product page inside this folder. In this scenario, your product page would be contained at this, more hidden, address:

www.yourdomainname.com/pizza/ QrB46z /wKd12d/

Another approach is to place your download page directory in a different place altogether on your server - thus making it even more difficult to track it down.

5. Create an index.html Page for Every Directory

If you don’t have a page named ‘index.htm’ in the folder that has your thank you page, then your host server will display a page showing the contents of that directory. Your ‘index’ page can be a normal page from your website or you can make it re-direct the visitor somewhere else like your homepage or sales letter

To create your own re-direct page, simply paste the following snippet into a file named index.html

NOTE: Be sure to replace the URL with the website you want to re-direct the visitor to.
if your server supports PHP you could create an index.php file with this snippet in it

This will achieve the same effect as above.

6. Hide Your Download Pages from the Search Engines

It’s amazing how many thank you pages you’ll find via the search engines if you seen the video on http://protection4clickbank.com. It’s a scary thought, but true reality.. (if you haven’t seen the video.. I suggest you do so now @ http://protection4clickbank.com)

To get around this, you need to ensure that the search engines do not include your thank you|download pages in their index. To do this, just place the following snippet of code between the and tags at the top of your thank you page’s HTML code.

7. Change Your Thank You Links Often

This one is pretty self-explanatory. If you’ve followed the steps outlined above, then you’ve gone some way towards protecting your digital downloads. It’s not 100% protection such as excellent software provided at ClickBank Download Protection. Which is why I recommend changing your thank you links regularly. This will help ensure that, if someone does manage to|gain access your products, and has been putting your download links on forums or social networks you’ll be able to stop them.

8. Put a Statement On Your eBooks

If someone is giving your EBook away for free It’s a good idea to place a prominent statement inside your eBooks explaining that it’s not a free EBook. Ask readers to notify you if they received the EBook for free explaining where they downloaded it. You might consider offering a small ‘reward’ for taking the time to notify you.

Closing

There are a number of methods that you can use to protect your downloads. In the end the bestto protect your downloads useing professional download protection tools such as (ClickBank Download Protection) to block anyone who has not paid you in the first place.

This is a growing problem, and as more people turn to sell on the web, the more security holes are left open and venerable to attack. It’s up to you to stop this problem for your business. All the hard work has been done for you, now it’s your choice to invest in your hard work.

To your success!

Sonny Mataka

www.ViralBars.com
www.AmericasHostingNetwork.com
www.Protection4ClickBank.com

How To Protect Your Digital Downloads

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Technorati Tags: Digital Downloads, ID theft, Internet crooks, Privacy

5 ways to prevent IT failure

Online Security Authority — Tue, 27 May 2008 00:01:13 +0000

Rather than acknowledge their own management shortcomings, project participants often blame technology for failed IT projects. This denial commonly arises when an organization’s culture uses blame, and the corresponding implicit threat of job loss, as a political weapon. Denial aside, most failures arise from poor management rather than bad technology. Here are five management tips to prevent IT failure.

From an interview with this blogger in Baseline magazine:

Sure, falling in love with technology can cause big project headaches, but rarely does technology alone cause an IT project to fail.

“Yes, IT sometimes falls in love with its technology, but most failures come about, not as a result of the technology, but as a result of the management of technology,” says Michael Krigsman of Asuret, a project management consultancy based in Brookline, Mass. “The consequences of failure can be dramatic, from a technical standpoint and especially from a business standpoint. And the sad part is that most of these failures could be avoided.”

Here’s Baseline’s list of five ways to avoid failure:

Lack of preparation. One of the most obvious reasons a project fails is poor planning at the outset. Managers who fail to properly scope a project, apply risk management principles and plan in time for quality assurance and security assurance are courting ruin.

Read the other 4 ways to prevent IT failure….

Good lesson here about how not to approach a serious problem, note that they’re always solutions and answers if you choose to look for them… are you looking for Managed PC Care?

5 ways to prevent IT failure

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Technorati Tags: IT failure, poor planning, technology

Network Compliance Training

Online Security Authority — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:34:00 +0000

Your employee’s security awareness is only as good as the training they receive and the information that is provided and retained. In todays business our data security is very important.

One company, Covetrix (http://www.covetrix.com/training/index.html), specializes in network security and tackles the newest security threats on a daily basis. Why not let our experts use this information to design your security awareness program?

What are some of the challenges managers face when creating a security awareness program?

1. Finding curriculum customized to your environment
2. Training (self-training distribution and / or class enrollment)
3. Keeping track of employee course completion
4. Testing to ensure the class is actually working
5. Tracking test scores and remediation
6. Security awareness reminders (such as emails, posters and newsletters)

With so many new complex threats going beyond the standard pharming, phishing, and vishing attacks, assaults are now focusing on the end user or client side exploits. It is more important than ever to educate your users/employees about these risks.

Most security awareness training programs are simply not enough. Even with extensive training, the knowledge gained on these topics is often forgotten in just a matter of weeks, usually because of a lack of interest or because of the approach of the material presentation.

What approach to security threats has your company taken?

Network Compliance Training

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Technorati Tags: security awareness, self-training, training programs

Keys to Improving Customer Retention

Online Security Authority — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:26:00 +0000

Predictive analytics tools are helping banks understand their customers behaviors and meet their unique needs with tailored products and services, improving customer retention as a result.

The ability to predict when a customer may leave for a competitor would be invaluable to banks, and would allow them to focus their efforts on retaining customers. Banks are increasingly realizing the benefits of analytics tools in retaining existing customers.

These are challenging times. [Mergers and acquisitions] will continue and banks will continue to acquire new customers. But organic growth is hard to come by and will get more difficult with the economy, so they’re going to go for the higher-hanging fruit by using customer predictive analytics.”

Adding to the problem, banks’ marketing departments will find it more difficult to advertise their messages to both prospective and existing clients due to some of the consumer privacy regulations enacted recently, claims Charles Nicholls, founder and CEO of SeeWhy (Windsor, U.K./San Francisco), a provider of real-time event intelligence. “The proportion of people banks can market to is shrinking with all the

Tags: spam rules

and opt-out programs,” he states. “You may have a million customers, but the addressable pool is only half that. So retention through superior service becomes more vital.”

Robert Phillips, founder, chief science officer and VP, research and development, with Nomis Solutions, a San Bruno, Calif.-based maker of price optimization systems, agrees that banks face challenging times ahead in finding and keeping customers. “Organic growth is not great in the developed economies, and there is only so much M&A you can do. So banks are starting to look to the customers they already have to see how they can make them more loyal,” says Phillips. “Technology, the economy and competition are all contributing to banks’ greater focus on analytics.”

Kate Stackhouse, SVP and director of sales integration at Columbia, S.C.-based First Citizens Bank ($16 billion in assets), believes that analytics are increasing in importance in the industry today for understanding the behavior not just of individual customers, but of markets as well. “You want to look at the competitive landscape and how your individual branches are keeping pace with consumers’ needs. Understanding this helps shape marketing plans unique to each market,” she explains. “There’s so much conversation around predictive analytics for individual customers — yes, that is important, but you need to understand the needs of the broader market, too.”

Improving the Entire Customer Experience

For Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank ($111 billion in assets), retention boils down to providing an overall positive customer experience at the bank, relates Mike Menyhart, SVP and director of customer experience. To better understand “the voice of the customer,” he says, the bank partnered with Washington, D.C.-based The Gallup Organization, tapping the firm’s CE11 tool to gauge customer engagement levels and financial performance. Gallup’s approach combines methods for assessing employee-customer encounters with a process for improving customer engagements.

According to Menyhart, Fifth Third also recognized just how instrumental working with the technology side of the bank would be to its customer service efforts. “Partnering with technology brings that customer experience to life,” he explains, noting that the bank’s key technology investments to keep its customers happy were in the areas of problem resolution and management escalation for first-contact resolution.

Part of banks’ problems in satisfying customers, adds Menyhart, originates from the institutions’ siloed infrastructures, which prevent systems and lines of business from talking with one another. The close collaboration among Fifth Third’s business and technology leaders helped break down many of the bank’s silos to provide a more consistent customer experience, he points out.

One of the key enablers of Fifth Third’s strategy to improve the overall customer experience, and thus customer retention, is the bank’s enterprise customer information file (CIF) project, Menyhart notes. “We did some major work from an infrastructure perspective that’s paying huge dividends, such as our enterprise CIF project,” he says. “We are bringing all of our customer information to one spot and making it accessible to different channels. All this data makes us better predictors [of customer attrition and needs].”

Raymond Dury, Fifth Third’s EVP and CIO, adds that the infrastructure work is ongoing. “We built the foundation and now we’re finding ways to take advantage of it,” he says. “We’re becoming more of a customer anticipatory organization this way.”

Yet this infrastructure foundation is just part of the equation. Predictive analytics still are required to turn data into actionable information. “We’re in an alternative-delivery world,” says Menyhart. “We used to see the customer in the branch monthly. Now it might just be yearly. We want to be sure the experience they have with us is worthwhile.”

To enhance that experience, Menyhart continues, Fifth Third set out to customize it for each individual customer. “We created a tool that can provide predictive, targeted best offers when the customer comes to us — when appropriate,” he says. “We’ll either follow up on a problem to see if it was resolved, or we’ll make a relevant product offering.” Menyhart declines to name the vendors with which Fifth Third worked to develop the predictive analytics tool, but he notes that some of the work was done in-house.

The appropriateness and consistency of targeted messages always are top of mind for the bank, adds Dury. “The offers have to be relevant, otherwise it can become a negative experience because the customers will feel the bank knows nothing about their relationships with us,” he explains.

Seeking Foresight

Like Fifth Third, Wachovia also sees the implementation of a predictive analytics approach to customer service as an ongoing process. According to Wachovia’s Thorpe, however, the bank’s new head of insight and innovation (which is part of the marketing division), Ramin Eivaz, who comes from the consumer packaged goods industry and oversees the statistics and modeling group, has challenged Thorpe and his team to look for best practices in analytics and retention from other industries.

“Our [retention] strategy now can best be described as having three tiers,” Thorpe explains. “At the bottom is ‘hindsight.’ In the middle is ‘insight.’ At the top is ‘foresight.’ We’re in the ‘insight’ phase right now. We have a very large data warehouse and many legacy systems that we’re reorganizing to get the information more quickly and model more broadly.”

The ultimate goal, Thorpe continues, is to achieve foresight so the bank can predict attrition before it happens. “We’ve always been good at attrition analysis,” he says. “Now we’re building life models — how the customers evolve over the lifetime of their relationships with us — to anticipate their needs and make product recommendations that are more relevant so we don’t see the attrition.” Thorpe notes that Wachovia takes a hybrid approach to building its analytics capabilities — part in-house and part vendor-built — but he declines to name the vendors with which the bank is working.

Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada (US$605 billion in assets) is taking a more targeted approach to analytics, deploying the technology specifically in its lending business, another area, in addition to cards, where analytics are more widely deployed across the industry. According to Neil McLaughlin, the bank’s vice president of personal lending, analyzing the right price points for its customers is one way to keep them from leaving.

“By using analytics tools to dovetail our pricing and personal marketing strategies, we were able to tackle problems we had around our relationship strategy,” McLaughlin explains, adding that although RBC built its own predictive models, the bank is employing price optimization software from Nomis Solutions.

Bringing the Nomis solution on board involved a very large, cross-functional effort to bring together the data and feed it into the Nomis product, McLaughlin notes. “We rolled it out for originations initially,” he says. “We tested it geographically and did a pre/post analysis to look at the spreads within those geographies. We saw positive results from selecting a better price for loans. We were able to go underneath and understand where the customer sees value in the product.”

McLaughlin stresses that the bank gives employees discretion in terms of augmenting the suggested pricing models based on their own market knowledge. “Understanding the price of convenience and rate sensitivity to customers is important, especially as rates on personal loans increase,” he says. “There are many benefits to pricing the loan right in the first place.”

Listening to What Customers Have to Say

Large banks, such as Wachovia, Fifth Third and RBC, aren’t the only financial institutions that can benefit from predictive analytics. Vectra Bank Colorado ($2.6 billion in assets) is a Denver-based subsidiary of Zions Bancorporation (Salt Lake City; $50.8 billion in assets). Erica McIntire, Vectra’s SVP and director of marketing communications, says the community bank also seeks to use analytics to prevent customer defection and boost retention. To improve retention and service, however, Vectra looks beyond what customers do; it also listens to what customers tell the bank, McIntire relates.

Key in Vectra’s analytics arsenal is the suite of enterprise feedback management solutions offered by South Jordan, Utah-based Allegiance. Vectra uses the Allegiance Engage platform to capture customer feedback garnered with the vendor’s CustomerPulse survey tool. “This tool measures customer engagement and allows us to learn how they feel about our company and the extent to which they are engaged with our company rather than just satisfied with what we’re providing,” explains McIntire.

“CustomerPulse provides aggregate totals and trend data, which allows us to pinpoint the areas where we’re the weakest and where we could put our time, energy and dollars to get maximum improvement,” McIntire continues. She notes that the bank is able to drop in “business markers” to measure changes in customer feedback that may result from changes made by the bank.

CustomerPulse, along with CustomerVoice, a feedback tool, are both Web-based and integrate with the bank’s existing Web infrastructure, according to McIntire. The CustomerVoice system uses a case management approach to monitoring feedback so customer compliments, concerns or questions are tracked and escalated until a satisfactory result has been achieved, she says, adding that results from CustomerPulse surveys help Vectra identify key drivers that affect customer actions while helping to sort customers by demographics.

Rather than focus on individual customer behavior, First Citizens Bank uses analytics to examine the broader market. According to First Citizens’ Stackhouse, the bank uses technology from MapInfo, a Troy, N.Y.-based company that provides location intelligence solutions, to help determine in which of its markets the bank should focus on retention and in which it should focus on acquisition.

Setting Goals

First Citizens has been using the Perform portion of the MapInfo solution since 2006 in its goal-setting process, Stackhouse relates. “Previously, our goal-setting methodology was very labor intensive, internally and historically focused,” she explains. “It didn’t help us understand the differences in our markets or establish goals our individual branches could achieve.”

Once First Citizens began using MapInfo’s solutions, Stackhouse adds, the bank was able to drill down further into its branch segmentation efforts. “We bucketed the branches and used the goal-setting methodology similarly,” she comments. “That’s why we decided to change. Our branches were growing more sophisticated and diverse — they didn’t like to be lumped into one group or another by the old system. Now we can have as many segments as we have branches. It also went from a two-month-long process to a one-week process.”

Stackhouse says the bank is able to arrive at a starting point more quickly, leaving more time to discuss the goals with individual branch managers. “The branches can focus their activity planning more quickly than they once did,” she relates. “They see whether opportunities are inside- or outside-sales focused and mine the existing database or find new customers according to their goals.”

The results of this change in branch goal setting have been quite favorable, Stackhouse claims. With a clearer segmentation and more focused service goals, the bank has moved from making cold sales calls to calls that are more service/courtesy oriented. “We are seeing ROI on this technology — we have better retention of healthy balances among those customers we reach out to,” Stackhouse asserts.

According to Stackhouse, First Citizens’ retention/analytics efforts primarily are focused on the branch and, to some extent, the call center. But other banks, including Fifth Third, are taking a more multichannel approach to analytics. Fifth Third’s Dury says the bank rolled out a consistent retention strategy on the Web, on its newer ATMs and at its branches.

Wachovia also is taking a multichannel approach to retention-related analytics efforts. “We already have a central point of contact for all our channels, so we’re not siloed,” says the bank’s Thorpe. “All the channels are our universe for implementing [predictive analytics].”

RBC employs a “channel agnostic” retention strategy, according to the bank’s McLaughlin. He points out that RBC uses an architecture in which the pricing is centralized across all channels.

What is most important to remember, says Open Solutions’ Nicastro, however, is that no matter which channel is used in a bank’s retention strategy, the institution must follow through to the end. “Cross-selling is good, but you can’t just be good at the teller line and then let it go,” he says. “You need to do follow-up, and that’s where these efforts often fall apart. You need follow up in the system.”

MORTGAGE BANKERS are analyzing data to get a bigger bang for their relationship buck…

Keys to Improving Customer Retention

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