This would go a long way toward soothing ruffled users and would work the kinks out early. When the latest changes launched the new sidebar on the right side was sticky but the sponsored links underneath were not so for a few days when you scrolled you couldn’t help but cover up content and I’m glad to see they fixed it quickly.

Now it has been pointed out by thousands that facebook is a free service and if we don’t like it we are free to go somewhere else but to me it is starting to feel as though they are asking us to be the lab mice for their usability studies.

“I can build a website on my web host for free. I saw an ad for websites for $500. My (brother-in-law, sister-in-law, cousin, father, friend, daughter, son) knows html and will build me a website for nothing.”

True but.

These are the options you have if you truly have little to no budget, or you hope it is merely an interim site. If you spend money on print advertising chances are you can set aside money for a decent website which:

• Is working to advertise your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• If done correctly your site is converting prospective clients or customers to actual clients or customers  – perhaps while you are asleep.
• It can take messages, much like a receptionist and should be professional (much as you would expect an actual receptionist to be).

So what goes into making a great website (and why is it so darned expensive*)?

First a good designer will research your target audience, goals for the site, (education, convert, involve, etc).

Decisions about navigation, areas of functionality (forms, share buttons, blog) will be based on a combination of client requests and designer recommendations. The designer may look at your web statistics (if redesigning an existing site) to determine what browsers the bulk of your traffic are using – valuable information when making decisions about layout and the coding behind it.

At  this point a wireframe might be built – really a means of determining where content areas will live on the page and how much prominence each will receive in the final design and then the real fun begins.

A palette that will fit your business or consider existing branding guidelines (if any) is important. I can’t tell you how often I check colourlovers.com for inspiration. I remember taking digital photos of my apple tv menu once when working on a website for an AV Custom installer so I could try to echo the look and feel for what would clearly be an electronics savvy audience. See the final result below:

And as design is also function after all the way in which the site is built and the usability of the functional areas are key to the success of the site. The way in which the site is built and the content that is added will affect how quickly and how high search engines rank the site.

At the end of the day the free site built using templates or via  “site builder” software on your web host can’t compete.

*expensive means different things to different people. The average site I build for small business costs less than a full page color ad in a local magazine.

Initially a blog software more and more sites (even large enterprise sites) are choosing it as their Web site CMS of choice.

Unfortunately there is a downside to this that is just now becoming apparent. WordPress is free, easy to install, and there are thousands of available free and low cost templates. For the most part just about anyone can get a WordPress site or blog up and running on their own. That’s the good news.

The problem actually comes when estimating the cost of customized design, customizing plugins etc. – In short, the very client who just saved a lot of money on functionality that would have run into the tens of thousands (or more) back when the functionality had to be custom built is loath to spend much at all on customization. The customer assumes that the software that does so much for nothing must only need a few tweaks to get it to look and behave exactly the way they envision. Sometimes that’s true – more frequently its not.

This issue is not restricted to clients using WordPress – customizations are even more complicated with Joomla. I recently developed a Joomla site that had so many tweaks and customizations that in the end it might have been wiser to have built a completely custom site.

(As an aside) Many of these customizations will also affect the ability to easily upgrade the main software as well as plugins and components.

Flash is Bad for SEO and Accessibility)
A lot of people adopted it to give their sites “a little bit of edge and movement” but in the process hid their most important content entirely from search engines and site readers in much the same way that putting phone numbers and addresses in images completely buried their content.  People have been cautioned to take their critical content out of Flash for years.

Not visible on iPhones and iPads
Apple decided not to support the technology on its products based on the fact that it is a proprietary technology. As some one who depends upon both quite a bit, I think site designers and owners should take this seriously. Imagine this scenario. A couple is searching for a home and while driving around is looking up listings using their iphone or ipad. If the local Realtor’s® website is built in Flash the listings won’t be seen. A lot of local Realtor® sites are in Flash – luckily larger companies know better.

Social Media
Today’s post was prompted by my attempt to put a facebook link to a Museum of Bird Carving in Maine. The carvings are spectacular and I wanted to share them with my friends. As you are no doubt aware facebook allows you to embed a thumbnail with your post based on the images that are coded into the page you are linking to. One is chosen automatically but you can select another if more than one exists.

The thumbnail image is really what attracts people to check out the link. Its visual.

My first attempt was to link to the home page. Unfortunately my only thumbnail choice was the image of wood shavings. I decided to select the Collection page instead. This gave me the option of selecting the image of the bird with the fish in its mouth (a vast improvement over the wood shavings) yet I was sorry that the spectacular work in the Flash banner wasn’t available.

I’m not pointing a finger as this particular website. Considering the impact on social media when creating Flash banners is a very new issue.

The lack of a compelling, or at least pertinent, image will could a direct impact on the number of clicks your shared link may receive.

It is an issue though and I’m often surprised at websites which don’t even have a logo

There are several security fail’s here.

First, never give your password information to someone who asks for it via email even if they look legitimate. Phishers, as most of us know, are able to spoof just about anyone and a phish email may look like it comes from your bank, Pay Pal, Google – in fact anywhere where your access information is useful to the phisher.

This post is about what to do if your gmail account has been compromised because having just helped my client I have learned a few helpful tips.

Change your password:
The most obvious is to change your password. Do this as soon as humanly possible because you need to close down access to your account.

Check all the settings (some especially):
Changing your password is not enough. Chances are they have forwarded your incoming email to another email address. This is done for a variety of reasons but one of those is to keep you from being aware there is a problem. If you don’t receive emails from your friends saying “I’m getting some weird email from you and think you’ve been hacked” then they can get more time and traction out of using your account. So check and see if a forward has been set up. Remove it.

Next, check to make sure that a setting that (paraphrased) is set to “Remove emails from server after forwarding” is not set. This too is to prevent you from being aware just what is going on with your account.

In the case of my client their contacts were removed. Check your contacts. It’s always good to have a backup of your address book. If you do – contact everyone in this book and warn them that your account was compromised.

If you had stored any personal information in your inbox change the passwords to anything that might have been there (Your website for instance).

Finally, This particular phisher asked for a birthday. Now consider this. Even though they did not ask for a mailing address they can probably get that in your account settings (which they now have access to) somewhere else which opens up a whole new can of worms ranging from lines of credit and more. Watch your credit report carefully.

In the case of this particular victim the password information the phisher obtained – probably from an old stored email was used to set up a whole new phishing attack on their website. Removing that is a whole other process and all I can say is make sure you have regular backups of your site. It will make recovery a lot faster and cleaner.

Updated 12.08.2010

I want to point out that files needed to set up a phishing scheme that masquerades as gmail are offered in a brazen fashion on the internet. This increases the chance that even hackers with minimal skills could be successful.

Gmail Phishing files being offered for download on the internet