GET YOUR NEXT BIG IDEA TRANSFORMED INTO DIGITAL REALITY
Check out INNOVATIVE TOMATO, our sister company that specializes in digital advertising, mobile app development, and video & motion graphics.
Regardless of the type of business or organization, digital marketing is likely to be a huge component of your promotion strategy. While some listeners will be able to confidently navigate this technological landscape, others find themselves intimidated by the alphabet soup of “https,” “CMS,” IP addresses” and so on. In this podcast we’ll review the common technical areas encountered when setting up a website or email, helping you make decisions about maintenance and keeping your digital presence secure.
Web hosting is the place where your web site files are stored. A domain name is the text you type into your browser’s address bar—something like www.primedesignsolutions.com, or google.com. It’s the human-friendly way to access a website. If domain names didn’t exist, you’d have to remember a series of numbers (an IP address) to get to a site.
Web hosting/web space encompasses the files that run your site, like HTML or PHP files. It also includes any images on your site, Javascript, or anything else that appears when a user accesses your site.
You could think of web hosting like your house where you physically live, and a domain name as your mailing address that helps people find you.
It depends on where you purchase your hosting. Most hosts do offer free e-mail, but as with most free things, there are usually hidden non-monetary costs. Examples:
Prime Design Solutions recommends and offers Gmail through Google Apps. It’s $5 per person, per month.
Gmail’s paid service allows you to have e-mail with your domain name. So instead of having name@gmail.com, you could have name@primeds.com. This also means you can have whatever name you want—you’re not limited to what hasn’t been taken. For example, jirvin@gmail.com is unavailable, so I would have to come up with something unique (which would probably be something like jirvin123987@gmail.com, and that’s yucky).
It’s more professional to have email with your own domain name. It gives you credibility, and helps gain your customers’ trust. Imagine if you were viewing someone’s website—who would you trust more? jirvin@primeds.com or jirvin123987@gmail.com?
Google Analytics is a free Google service that monitors your website and generates statistics about your site’s traffic. It also measures conversions and sales, with the following features:
We use something called a password manager. It’s an application that lets you store all the vital information for your logins—things like the url, the username, and password. There are lots of different kinds of password managers, and lots of free ones, so you might want to try a few to find the one that works best for you.
We prefer Password Safe. It’s free, and we like how it’s set up. You create a password database that contains all your account information, and then you password protect that database. Of course, this is a password you’ll want to remember, as it’s the key to accessing all your other passwords!
If that sounds like overkill, even something as simple as a password protected Excel spreadsheet could work. The important thing here is organization.
On the front end (which is the admin area), be careful about what plugins you install to a WordPress site. Plugins are custom-made bits of coding that can be added to a website that can make your site do a great deal of interesting and useful things. But it’s easy to get plugin fever and start downloading and installing plugins for everything–and that can create security problems.
You’ll want to do a little bit of investigative work on a plugin before you use it. We install a new or unfamiliar plugin in a dev environment so we can test it out without breaking a site that’s in production. We also check to see how often the plugin is updated, what other users have said about it, and if the plugin author has made any other plugins. WordPress itself is pretty secure, but it’s really easy for a plugin to introduce vulnerabilities.
On the back end, in the code itself, there are more things you can do to lock down WordPress. These are things we do when we install WordPress, but a lot of them can be added later. Some of the more basic things include:
CMS Made Simple, or CMSMS, is a content management system that isn’t as popular or well-known as WordPress. The fact that fewer sites use CMSMS automatically makes it less hackable, much in the way that Apple computers are much less vulnerable to viruses than PCs — fewer users mean that fewer people try to attack it.
There are fewer security options out of the box, but one that we like, and one that’s interesting, is that CMSMS gives you the ability to rename your admin area folder. So instead of yourdomain.com/admin, you can have yourdomain.com/somethinghardtoguess. WordPress allows you to do something similar, but we’re a little uncomfortable implementing that because of plugin compatibilities.
They all have their strengths and weaknesses. WordPress might be more popular, but because it’s popular, it’s also more likely to be attacked. It’s not an easy target, but it’s a larger one.
CMSMS might be less popular, so it’s less likely to be attacked, but it also doesn’t have a large developer community. There are thousands of plugins for WordPress (not all are great) but there are only a few hundred modules for CMSMS, and they’re not always as up-to-date as WordPress plugins.
When choosing a CMS, it’s best to look at what you want to do, and then pick the right tool for the job. CMSMS is great for making general websites, but WordPress handles blogging a bit better. WordPress is easy to use, but is best for smaller, less-intricate sites, while Drupal has a steep learning curve but handles larger, enterprise-level sites especially well. There are other CMS options, including Joomla, DotNetNuke, and ExpressionEngine.
There are times when not having a CMS is a good decision too. If you have a small three or four page informational site, and it’s going to stay that size, a straight HTML site may be your best, most affordable option, and you eliminate security problems.
Stay calm! It happens. The best thing you can do is ask for help right away. Contact whoever manages your website and tell them what the problem is, and exactly what happened. Don’t leave out information because you don’t think it’s important, or you’re embarrassed. The tech you work with just needs to know about it so they have all the information necessary to fix things. It makes it a lot easier to find out what the problem is.
By Jen Irvin. Read about Jen on our Meet Our Staff page.Check out INNOVATIVE TOMATO, our sister company that specializes in digital advertising, mobile app development, and video & motion graphics.