No Time to Wait—Install Those Patches Today

Posted Apr 15, 2009.

No Time to Wait—Install Those Patches Today
Microsoft Security Updates (patches) are usually delivered on the second Tuesday of each month, commonly known as Patch Tuesday. Installing these patches ensures your computers are up-to-date and not vulnerable to computer worms and other malware. Yesterday, Microsoft released eight updates which address issues with 23 vulnerabilities; and five of the updates are rated as critical. Some of the updates are for vulnerabilites that have zero-day exploits. A zero-day exploit is a security vulnerability that is already being taken advantage of on the same day that the vulnerability is generally known. In other words, this means a hacker has already discovered the vulnerability and exploiting it. Experts predict for the attacks to get worse and faster as hackers get more professional. The new exploits, such as Conficker, are designed to avoid detection and will not call too much attention to themselves. In some cases, users were tricked into thinking their systems were patched. This changes things. IT Pros can no longer wait around before they install these patches, or they’re putting their computers at risk.

At On Time Technology Solutions, we protect our clients with a combination of our Managed IT program, that includes Patch Management, and our Proactive Maintenance. The Microsoft Security Updates are tested in a lab, sent through our approval policy, and then downloaded to the computers managed under our system. Then, the updates are installed on the servers by our System Engineers or onsite during a Proactive Maintenance visit. If you haven’t already, you may want to review your Patch Management Policy to ensure your computers are safe. You don’t want to be caught with your pants down!

Microsoft’s April Bulletin Release

■MS09-009 (Maximum severity of Critical): This update resolves a newly discovered, privately reported and a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Microsoft Excel. This update received a 1 – Consistent Exploit Code Likely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.
■MS09-010 (Maximum severity of Critical): This update resolves two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities and two privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft WordPad and Microsoft Office Text Converters. This update received a 1 – Consistent Exploit Code Likely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.
■MS09-011 (Maximum severity of Critical): This update resolves a newly discovered and privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft DirectX. This update received a 2 – Inconsistent Exploit Code Likely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.
■MS09-012 (Maximum severity of Important): This update resolves four publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows. This update received a 1 – Consistent Exploit Code Likely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.
■MS09-013 (Maximum severity of Critical): This update resolves one publicly disclosed vulnerability and two privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows HTTP Services (WinHTTP). This update received a 1 – Consistent Exploit Code Likely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.
■MS09-014 (Maximum severity of Critical): This update resolves four privately reported vulnerabilities and two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. This update received a 1 – Consistent Exploit Code Likely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.
■MS09-015 (Maximum severity of Moderate): This update resolves one publicly disclosed vulnerability in the Windows SearchPath function. This update received a 2 – Inconsistent Exploit Code Likely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.
■MS09-016 (Maximum severity of Important): This update resolves a privately reported vulnerability and a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server and Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG), Medium Business Edition (MBE). This update received a 3 – Functioning Exploit Code Unlikely rating from Microsoft’s Exploitability Index.

18 Reasons for having a Website / eCommerce Site

Posted Apr 6, 2009. Leave a comment?

1. Your competitors are probably already on the Web
- attracting the people who could be your customers! What frustration, because you know that your products and services are superior to those of your competitors!
2. Your customers and potential customers are already searching the Web
- for the very services you offer. Even as you read this there will be someone on the Web looking for a business like yours.
More and more people are using the Internet to purchase products and as a means of gathering initial information about products and services. The attraction to this medium is that the customer is relaxed because he can read and research the information at his own pace and without any “hovering salesmen”. It is quite feasible that the surfer will visit a number of sites before he decides on his final choice of product. You need to be certain that you are one of the sites that he has visited if you are to stand a chance of gaining his business. If you have no web site, you have no chance.
3. Your web site will promote your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Even when you’re sleeping your web site can be working for you.
But so is Yellow Pages ®—so why have a web site too? Yellow Pages ® is generally only available on a local basis; not to mention the fact that unless you can afford a very large advertisement the information you can present is very limited.
Your web site can be viewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. If you are selling your products internationally then this is a major advantage as visitors in North America and South America can, for example, view your wares while you are asleep! An email enquiry will be waiting for you when you get up in the morning!
But even if your business is restricted to the UK, you will be amazed at how many people research for products and services at the weekend and in the evening. They are busy business people and very often this is the best time for them to concentrate on researching for a new product or service.
4. Your customers can buy your products and pay for them while sitting at their computers.
It is estimated that it costs 8 times more to sell a product from a shop than from the Internet.
Selling online has to be one of the most cost efficient means of doing business. Night or day, you can do business with a customer in any part of the world, and his payment is made directly into your bank account -without you even knowing! All you need to do is to print off and process the orders. Of course if you have a product that can be sent via the Internet (such as software, documents, written material) you don’t even need to do this.
5. Your web site gives you a much bigger advert for less money.
You can have pages and pages of information about your company and your products or services—in much more detail than you’d ever be able to pay for in more traditional media.
You can put an enormous amount of information onto your web site for only a few hundred pounds. Superb value for money.
6. You can change the information on your website whenever you want.
You must have been in a situation where your prices have changed or your products have changed, so your catalogue/price list/product literature/marketing literature becomes out of date. Not only is all your existing literature now worthless, but you also need to make a substantial investment in order to produce new updated material.
With a web site, these problems are minimal. I have a client whose web site can be updated with new prices and information in as little as 45 minutes. The cost to him is 45 minutes of my time—negligible compared to the cost of redesigning, reprinting and redistributing sales literature.
7. Your website can reach potential customers locally, nationally or worldwide—at no extra cost to you.
In fact you can adapt your website to the needs of your business.
There is absolutely no doubt that the Internet is the answer to the small businessman’s prayer. For the first time you have at your disposal the whole world market for whatever product or service you happen to provide. In fact the more niche your product, the more successful you will be with your Internet business.
You can take your products to totally new markets. You may have been restricted to selling your products to customers who passed by your shop in your local high street. Or perhaps you may have been able to expand beyond that limited marketplace by doing targeted (and expensive) advertising in specific magazines. However, for the first time you’ll be able to take your product across the world.
8. Your website can save you a lot of money.
• Lower printing costs because you need much less printed letters and brochures.
• Lower postage costs for the same reason -email becomes a major (and much cheaper) distribution method.
• Lower advertising costs because your web site lasts longer and produces greater results than adverts.
• Lower wage costs because your web site can be like an extra person with the automated processes it can carry out.
9. Your website can work like a kind of robot,
sending information to customers, replying to emails and even making sales—day and night.
You can reply to your customers or potential customers automatically without you having to get involved at all. With simple devices called “autoresponders” you’re able to set it all up whereby specific targeted replies are sent out to different people, night or day.
10. Your web site can convey a professional and-up-to date image,
and your customers cannot tell whether you employ 100 staff or none.
As a small businessman you have the opportunity to present yourself to the marketplace just as effectively and professionally as a multi-million pound company. Just because you’re smaller doesn’t mean that you cannot now compete with the bigger boys! You can establish credibility in a variety of ways, such as putting useful information on your website, or making files available to download.
11. Your web site can help you give improved customer service
by providing information visitors can access. For example there can be a list of ‘frequently asked questions’ about your service or product.
This is an area that is often overlooked by web site owners. The simplest example of this is putting up a FAQ page (frequently asked questions) on your web site. Not only is this very helpful to customers because it provides instant answers to their “frequently asked” questions, but it also saves you and your employees considerable management time in not having to answer a string of e-mails/phone calls/faxes. What this usually means is when you do receive that e-mail/phone call/fax it is an actual order rather than an inquiry!
You can make information readily available to your customers. For example, new information has suddenly become available concerning your products. Put it on your website and communicate via e-mail to your customers—it’s that easy!
How about a Free downloadable sheet with helpful tips. Your visitors will love it!
12. You can test out new services or products instantly
and less expensively by sending emails to your list of current customers and contacts. They can then visit your web site for more detailed information.
What a glorious, simple and inexpensive way of testing out new ideas! Simply put up a new web page setting out the relevant information, and send an e-mail to your database of existing (and relevant) customers, and ask for their views.
Market research. You can acquire very quick customer feedback from a large audience with an online form that could be filled out in seconds—providing valuable information to you, with minimal inconvenience to your customer.
13. You can send details of new offers by email to your current customers and contacts,
again referring readers to your web site.
You have some stock that is running out of date and you wish to sell it at a reduced price. Or you have received limited stock of a particular product that is of high appeal to a relatively small number of people. It really doesn’t matter what sort of “deal” you have, provided it is presented professionally you can e-mail your database of customers and past enquirers—all within a matter of seconds! I know a small hotel that sends out an email with forthcoming events to its database of 700+ past enquirers. It takes about 15 minutes to do the whole mailing and costs nothing. The result is that these ‘potential customers’ are constantly reminded of the hotel and a given percentage phone up and book at a later date.
14. You can combine email marketing with your web site.
With e-mail you can advertise your website. There is no quicker way of getting your sales messages in front of a prospective customer who can be looking at your web site within 2 seconds of opening your mail!
You can collect e-mail addresses of people who visit your site and have expressed an interest in your products. You can then use this list to send information on ‘deals’ you are running or to pass on any other useful information.
15. You can use your web site to provide information on a regular basis to your company employees.
You can keep the information secret if you wish by making it accessible only to people who know the password.
16. You can broaden your market by educating and appealing to totally new sectors.
For example, you are a domestic security company and you have technology/products that are applicable to the protection of boats. This is a totally new sector that would have been too expensive to attempt to penetrate five years ago. With a targeted web site, or targeted pages on your existing web site, this now poses no problem at all.
17. Your website can keep a track of how many people visit,
which is the proof of the pudding. With most adverts you will never know how many people read your offers.
Isn’t technology wonderful! With a web site produced and marketed by us, we will be able to tell you exactly how many people have visited your web site, where those people came from, which search term they used in which search engine, which pages they visited on your web site, how long they spent on your web site. What other advertising medium issues this sort of valuable feedback on your selling and marketing material?
18. You can get a website up and running for a few hundred dollars, but it is wasted money unless people can find it!
Probably 85% of web sites are either rarely or never seen—because they are often created by artists rather than marketing experts.
Imagine that the Internet is like a huge library containing all the books that have ever been published, and imagine that your website is just one book. How will anyone find your site amongst the billions of others?
Well, that’s not a problem for the clients of On Time Technology Solutions because we are experts in setting up effective web sites; web sites that are found by prospective customers.

What is eCommerce

Posted Apr 6, 2009. Leave a comment?

Electronic commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing) e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with wide-spread Internet usage. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction’s lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web

Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses and consumers, on the other hand, is referred to as business-to-consumer or B2C. This is the type of electronic commerce conducted by companies such as Amazon.com.

Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.

Early development

The meaning of electronic commerce has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. Another form of e-commerce was the airline reservation system typified by Sabre in the USA and Travicom in the UK. Online shopping was invented in the UK in 1979 by Michael Aldrich[citation needed] and during the 1980s it was used extensively particularly by auto manufacturers such as Ford,Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

The earliest example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers launched in 1982. The first online information marketplace, including online consulting, was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet online system introduced in 1991.

Until 1991, commercial enterprise on the Internet was strictly prohibited. Although the Internet became popular worldwide around 1994, it took about five years to introduce security protocols and DSL allowing continual connection to the Internet. And by the end of 2000, a lot of European and American business companies offered their services through the World Wide Web. Since then people began to associate a word “ecommerce” with the ability of purchasing various goods through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.

Timeline

* 1990: Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, using a NeXT computer.
* 1992: J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn publish Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy. St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 0312063598.
* 1994: Netscape releases the Navigator browser in October under the code name Mozilla. Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page. The first online bank opens. Attempts to offer flower delivery and magazine subscriptions online. Adult materials also becomes commercially available, as do cars and bikes. Netscape 1.0 is introduced in late 1994 SSL encryption that made transactions secure.
* 1995: Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio start broadcasting. Dell and Cisco begin to aggressively use Internet for commercial transactions. eBay is founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb.
* 1998: Electronic postal stamps can be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.
* 1999: Business.com sold for US $7.5 million to eCompanies, which was purchased in 1997 for US $149,000. The peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster launches.
* 2000: The dot-com bust.
* 2002: eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion. Niche retail companies CSN Stores and NetShops are founded with the concept of selling products through several targeted domains, rather than a central portal.
* 2003: Amazon.com posts first yearly profit.
* 2007: Business.com acquired by R.H. Donnelley for $345 million.
* 2008: US eCommerce and Online Retail sales projected to reach $204 billion, an increase of 17 percent over 2007.

Top 5 Excuses For Not Having a Website

Posted Apr 6, 2009. Leave a comment?

Reason #5: I already have a web page on somebody else’s website.

If you have your company listed in an online directory or your Chamber of Commerce, that’s a good start. However, it probably only offers basic information such as address and phone number. Your listing is buried among many of your competitors no doubt. The listing does not allow you to stand out from you competitors in any way. Having a website on somebody else’s site is equivalent to having an office in somebody else’s office or drivng around in somebody else’s company car with their details. By having your own website, you have control over the content, the branding, and the message you want to get out to your customers.

Reason #4: I don’t sell anything online.

Regardless of whether or not you sell anything online, people are online and they are searching for products or information about products. By not having your information available to these people, you are giving your customers to your competitors.

Reason #3: I have a son/nephew/niece who’s into computers. They are going to make me a website.

Is that person a professional web developer? Would you not go to a doctor for medical problems, a lawyer for legal issues? In the same vein, a professional web designer / developer is more than just a person who puts pretty pictures, flashy animations, and copy on a website. Behind those graphics and copy are various complicated codes and scripts. When done properly, web sites can load faster, drive more traffic to the website, and attain a higher search engine rank. A hobbyist is unlikely to have the in depth knowledge to consider all these factors.

Reason #2: I don’t know anything about computers.

Just because you don’t know anything about computers doesn’t mean other people are not using them. According to research, 69% of North Americans connect to the Internet. People are online and looking for products and information. If you’re information is not available, they’ll go someplace else. A good web design firm can work with people without computer skills to provide their business with a great online presence.

Reason #1: It’s too expensive. I can’t afford it.

You get what you pay for. When you go to an expensive restaurant, you expect great service, presentation, and taste. Likewise, when you go to a fast food joint, you expect it to be cheap and quick.

In the end it’s not a question of whether you can afford one, but rather, whether you can afford not to have one.

Visit On Time Web Solutions

Crucial Components of a Good Website

Posted Apr 6, 2009.

As On Time has grown our base of On Time Web Services clients, we’ve realized that a lot of the value we will provide to clients is helping them to execute on the fundamental strategies and tactics that will help their website get more visibility.
While there are many different options out there to drive more traffic to your website, the first and most important thing you should do is to make sure that your website is built with the fundamental components for success. The following is our list of the fundamentals that you should be most concerned with:
1. Relevant content
Of the list of fundamentals that we’ll be providing you with today, relevant content is by far and away the most important. Why? Simply put, visitors to your site want to find what they came for. This is simple and obvious enough, but most sites are very infrequently updated, so their content is often stale or no longer representative of the current reality of the business or organization it is representing.
One very important visitor that your content needs to impress is the search engine. Search engines crawl (spider, scan, etc.) the text on your site to determine if your content is relevant for their users. If your content is not relevant to what they are looking for, your site will fall in the search rankings and you’ll get less traffic.
2. A clear purpose for each page
Each page on your site should be treated as an individual, with its own clear purpose and content that suits that purpose. You should be able to capture that purpose in a one-line sentence, and everything you design into the page should be about allowing that page to fulfill its purpose – nothing more. Very often you will find that you have pages on your site that are trying to accomplish more than one purpose; split them up and you will add great clarity for your visitors.
3. Effective use of keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases that searchers are most likely to identify as relevant to your business, products, content or anything else that you are trying to draw attention to. The use of the right keywords helps the search engines to deliver the right sites to their searchers, and delivers you the most appropriate visitors to your website. Optimizing each page of your site around a specific keyword increases the chances that the right searcher is going to find your site.
As an example, On Time could choose to optimize around the words “computer support” to attract visitors to our site. However, we’ve found out through trial-and-error that people who search for that keyword phrase are typically smaller customers that can’t afford and don’t value our services. It turns out that optimizing around language such as “IT management” provides a much better quality of visitor to our site – one that is most likely to be a good On Time customer. As you can see, slight adjustments in getting your keywords right can make a big difference.
4. Good page titles
When constructing a website, each page of the site is given a page title. This title should be unique from the other pages on the site, and it should accurately reflect the purpose of the page. This is critical because the page title often shows up in search engine results, and gave give a potential visitor the last bit of information they need to determine if your site is the one they are looking for.
5. A site map
A site map is a tool to communicate the structure and flow of your site, primarily to the search engines. Search engines “feed” off of the text on your site, and use links as the roadmap to find the text they are looking for. A good site map is like a good atlas for the search engines, illustrating the various links on your site and what they point to.
6. Clear “conversion” path/instructions
Presumably you are looking for visitors to your site to do something: purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, ask to be contacted by a salesperson, etc. These actions are commonly referred to as “conversions”.
Following the same logic of having a clear purpose for each page, you should also have a clear conversion strategy for your site, and make it as clear and easy as possible for your visitors to take the conversion action you are looking for. This is a study in and of itself, but there are a few fundamentals worth mentioning:
o Ideally only have one conversion goal for your site. If you must have more than one, make sure each has a separate, clear path for the visitor to follow.
o Give your visitors the option to convert everywhere it makes sense to do so, not just on a single page in the site. For example, if you are looking for visitors to register for a newsletter, include a “Sign up now” link on every page.
o Make it as easy as possible to take the desired action: remove all unnecessary steps, ask only for critical information, and give clear instructions.
Good professional sports coaches make their athletes – often already the best in the world at what they do – practice the fundamentals of their sport daily because they know it will make everything else they do better. The same can be said for the fundamental website components above: make sure you are practicing them, and all of your other marketing activities will perform better.