Upcoming New Year
Filed Under: Comments
I have decided to make a few resolutions, or goals for the upcoming year. I want to learn Ruby on Rails, AJAX, JQuery, CSMS, get another shopping cart under my belt (Magento). Become a WordPress goddess. Advance my PHP skills.
Never take on a cheap ass demanding client. Thankfully I’ve never had one, but have had potential clients try to dicker prices down. I refuse to. I have been able to identify unrealistic expectations and just flat out refuse to deal with clients like that….the sun and moon for peanuts.
Get a raise at work. A significant one. If not look at my options.
Copyright Infringement Violator
Filed Under: Copyright
The violator is http://www.viwebdesigns.com. I had contacted him with a Cease and Desist. His response was:
“The site was taken down. I am not the only one creating the content and will have any copyright information that pertain to your site and remove it. I do apologize I think this very seriously”
Here are PDF’s of the web site pages with the content that was stolen. Please note that on one page my business name is still there.
His SEO Page
HIs Web Hosting Page
His Web Rates
His Shopping Carts Page
His Home Page
He took his site down for maintenance. However, I visited his site tonight and while there are just 2 small paragraphs on the home page, they are mine word for word, except he left my business name off.
Did I mention that he uses a Joomla template for his site? Now I have nothing against the use of templates, but web developers shouldn’t use them for their own web site. I have always done custom design, but to call one’s self a web developer when you have no creativity and no content development ability except to steal someone else’s. That gets my panties in a royal bunch.
Trademarks and Copyright
Filed Under: Copyright
Well after finding out that someone was using my copyrighted material on their website this topic is timely. And yes, my web site is copyrighted and a copyright is filed. So don’t take my content because I can be awarded monetary damages. If I didn’t have the copyright filed I couldn’t.
What is a no-no.
- Taking content (the words) from someone else’s web site.
- Taking images or graphics or linking to someone’s images (it’s never nice to steal someone’s bandwidth)
- Duplicating the design
To learn more about Trademarks visit the US Patent and Trademark web site and information about copyright can be found here.
Great Use of Flash and Video
Filed Under: Flash
A fellow developer forwarded this and I have to agree with her. It is a great use of Flash and video, and is the online 2006 portfolio of illustrator/creative Dave Werner.
And no you do not want an all Flash web site for a business, unless you’re an illustrator or creative. And if you have lots of updates….well thank you for all that money.
Copyright Infringement
Filed Under: Copyright
Well I found a web site this morning that stole the content from my site word for word. They didn’t even bother to remove my business name. I have PDFs of the his pages.
Importance of Clean Code
Filed Under: Code
I know that many do not believe that clean code is all that important. I do though. An example is a shopping cart that I had to fix last week. It was written by an off-shore firm (and there’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself). The problemwas that the top include file (a server side include) had so much junk in it that the cart would not work in Firefox at all. As soon as the junk was cleaned out and what was left properly code the cart functioned properly.
Hacking
Filed Under: Security
There are individuals out there that find hacking your site or anyone else’s web site and placing information that you site has been hacked up. They feel it’s a challenge. A game.
Most web hosts provide routine scanning for exploits, but sometimes the hacker can get into your site because your personal PC or Mac has no anti-virus software, spyware or a firewall. You also need to continually update your anti-virus definitions and run spyware. You may have unwittingly downloaded a trojan or a backdoor so they can get to the information they need on your computer and/or record your keystrokes.
If your site gets hacked change all of the passwords to the site and every single password to financial information (banking, PayPal, credit card processor, etc.). And do it from a different computer. If you think your credit card information has been compromised call your bank and cancel the cards, and request new ones.
I was hacked once, but fortunately was in the middle of doing some work on my site and noticed a file that should not be there (from a well known hacker). The file was deleted and passwords changed. I believe it happened because my host didn’t provide sufficient diligence. I switched hosts.
Your Responsibilites and Why
Filed Under: e-Commerce
It is your responsibility to verify that you have received payment for an order and not to ship until then. It’s called managing your business effectively.
It is your responsibility to contact the vendors that process payments including your bank. Those institutions will not talk with anyone but you. If you expect others to do this for you then you are opening your business to major problems. Not keeping track of your finances opens yourself up to fraud. You know those stories about bookkeepers, etc. embezzling money. Well it happens when no one is paying attention to important details. Like your money!!!
You should not rely solely upon email notifications of orders. You need to login and check. Then you need to cross check (orders to payments).
The “I don’t have the time to check” is an extremely lame excuse. Well you’re going to be out of business soon if you don’t. If you are really too busy you need to hire someone to take care of other areas of your business.
Email Blocking aka Blacklisting
Filed Under: Email
More and more ISP’s are starting to blacklist various IPs and email addresses. I am all for eliminating spam but not at the expense of legitimate businesses. Three well known ISPs that are doing this are AOL, Comcast and Earthlink. So if you use an email address for your business that is @aol.com, @comcast.com or @comcast.net, and finally @earthlink.net you may very well not receive email from clients.
Eathlink will often send someone an email stating that this person only accepts email from approved addresses with a link to send a message to add your address. Let’s put it this way if someone contacts me and I reply and get such a message well I might request approval, but 9 of 10 times I won’t.
If you have a web based business use an email address with the domain name in it, and don’t have it forwarded to another email address. Why risk losing a customer?
Comcast and the problems one small ISP had http://www.techpro.com/content/not_comcastic.aspx.
Flash
Filed Under: Flash
Flash is a very useful tool and when used correctly enhances a web site. Unfortunately there are some that believe, incorrectly I might add, that their entire site should be Flash. Or maybe their web developer (groan) thought they could…well make a lot of money off of a client that is uneducated. Flash sites should “do” something interesting and not act as a “static” site.
Flash drawbacks:
You have to sit and wait for it to download.
It’s lousy for search engine optimization
You can’t bookmark or print anything.
It’s expensive to maintain.
You’ll use a lot more bandwidth.
It won’t print.
If you fall under the ADA it can’t be read by braille readers.
Bad/Poor Examples of Flash Usage
http://www.jflusvi.org/ Another problem with using Flash on a medical institution web site is that they are required to follow ADA guidelines and Flash cannot be read by the machine readers used by visually impaired visitors.
Good or Fun Examples of Flash
http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com/
http://www.bubblynumbers.com/
http://www.jazzviolinist.com/
http://www.demetriosbride.com/
