Design Services: Website Design Insight


3 months = $450,000

Posted in Misc, Servers & Networks, Technical Support, Uncategorized, Website Information by admin on the May 13th, 2008

3 months = $450,000

 

How to evaluate what you lose by doing nothing!

One of the items we’ve been discussing with new clients a lot lately is estimating their “lost opportunity” with their current sites. If you are considering redesigning your site one of the important factors in your decision making should be what the cost to your company is if you decide to do nothing. We call this factor your “lost opportunity.”

It’s not difficult to calculate or understand what “lost opportunity” is, it’s just that most people don’t consider it when making a decision.

For example, let’s assume you own an ecommerce website with the following characteristics:

  • You get 10,000 unique visitors per month.
  • You make 1000 sales per month.
  • The average revenue from a sale is $200.

You go to your friendly web development company and they tell you that they can increase your conversion rate (sales/visitors) from the current 10% to 15%. You decide you’re going to do it, but you’d like to wait 3 months. What those 3 months cost you? Assuming traffic and average revenue stay the same: $450,000!

If you wait a year, $1.8 million!

Your numbers may be higher, lower, or similar, but the important thing to do is ask yourself two questions:

Am I getting all I can out of my website?
And what am I losing by putting off improvements to my site?

Give us a call and we’ll help you answer those questions.

A Glossary of Some Internet Words

Posted in Servers & Networks, Technical Support, Website Information by admin on the May 11th, 2008
Bayesian spam filtering is the process of using Bayesian statistical methods to classify documents into categories. Bayesian filtering gained attention when it was described in the paper A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham, and has become a popular mechanism to distinguish illegitimate spam email from legitimate “ham” email.
blogging
The practice of posting entries in your weblog. A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”.
Common Gateway Interface
An important World Wide Web technology that enables a client web browser to request data from a program executed on the Web server. CGI specifies a standard for passing request data between a web server and the program used to service that request.
database
A collection of information that has been systematically organized for easy access and analysis. Examples include: Web site search and online stores/shopping carts.
domain
A sub-set of internet addresses. Top-level domains are divided into .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .gov and .edu. Apart from these there are also country-specific domain extensions like .ca, .com.au, .co.za, .fr etc. In SEO it is generally accepted that having a keyword-rich domain is beneficial.
File Transfer Protocol
A commonly used protocol for exchanging files over any network that supports the TCP/IP protocol (such as the Internet or an intranet).
ham
Good, non-spam email, that you actually want to receive.
Linux
A computer operating system that is one of the most prominent examples of free software and of open-source development: unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS, all of its underlying source code is available to the public and anyone can freely use, modify, improve, and redistribute it.
pharming
Pharming is the exploitation of a vulnerability in the DNS server software that allows a hacker to acquire the Domain Name for a site, and to redirect traffic to that website to another web site. DNS servers are the machines responsible for resolving internet names into their real addresses - the “signposts” of the internet. This type of attack involves Trojan horse, worms or other technologies that attack the browser address bar, thus redirecting the user to a fraudulent Web site when the user types in a legitimate address.
phishing
In computing, phishing is a form of social engineering, characterised by attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently official electronic communication, such as an email or an instant message. The term phishing arises from the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to “fish” for users’ financial information and passwords.
poisoning
Poisoning a DNS server involves changing the specific record for a domain, which results in sending the user to a Web site different from the one intended unbeknownst to the user.
RSS Feed
RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.
server
In computing, a server is a software application that carries out some task (i.e. provides a service) on behalf of yet another piece of software called a client.
spam
1. (n.) A spam message is an unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail message. It is also referred to as UCE, or unsolicited commercial e-mail. From the sender’s point-of-view, it’s a form of bulk mail, often to a list culled from subscribers to a Usenet discussion group or obtained by companies that specialize in creating e-mail distribution lists. To the receiver, it usually seems like junk e-mail.
2. (v.) The practice of sending massive amounts of e-mail promotions or advertisements (and scams) to people that have not asked for it. Spam mail is controversial and there are many levels of definitions for it.
spammers
The perpetrators of email spam, who send nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Spammers often harvest addresses of prospective recipients from Usenet postings or from web pages, obtain them from databases, or simply guess them by using common names and domains. By definition, spam occurs without the permission of the recipients.
SURBL
Spam URL Realtime Blocklists
SURBLs differ from most other RBLs (Realtime Block Lists) in that they’re used to detect spam based on message body URIs (usually web sites). Unlike most other RBLs, SURBLs are not used to block spam senders. Instead they allow you to block messages that have spam hosts which are mentioned in message bodies. From SURBL.org
toolbar
Toolbars are seen in common applications such as Microsoft Word, and as add-ons for web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
 

W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.

I have a message stuck in my outbox

Posted in Technical Support by admin on the May 8th, 2008

“I tried to send a large attachment to a friend and now the e-mail is stuck in my Outbox! I’ve been trying to delete it and I can’t because Outlook says it’s still trying to send it. Help!”

This is a fairly common issue that we’ve heard a lot of users report through the blog, so we wanted to write a quick post and explain the easiest way to get out of this situation.

E-mail messages can get stuck in the Outbox for a few different reasons, but the most common case happens when the e-mails are very large (megabyte-wise) due to their attachments. You may even see errors like “Outlook is transmitting the message” when trying to delete them from the Outbox.

So if you’ve got an e-mail stuck in your Outbox and you can’t re-open it, try this:

  1. Go the File menu, then choose Work Offline in order to stop Outlook from trying to send all mails:

    clip_image002

  2. Switch to the Outbox.
  3. You now have two options:

    a. Move the message: you can drag-and-drop or use the Edit: Move to Folder menu item to move the e-mail to your drafts folder. This will allow you to re-open the offending e-mail and slim it down by removing the large attachments before attempting to resend it.

b. Delete the message: this will immediately remove the message from the Outbox and put it in Deleted Items.

  1. Go to the File menu, deselect Work Offline to start sending and receiving mail again.

Instead of sending a large attachment, consider putting the file on a local network share or a SharePoint site inside your company and then sending a link around:

clip_image004

clip_image006

For details on how to add a link, see: Use hyperlinks in Outlook items and/or Add links containing spaces to an e-mail message.

If you’re sending it to users outside your company or are just sharing files with friends, you can use Windows Live SkyDrive as a cool and convenient way to store and send large files around.

Hope that helps get you unstuck!