When thinking about ways to measure your website’s effectiveness, you may also want to think about the metrics you use to gauge the success of the website in accomplishing your business goals. How else do you measure success?
We've worked with many clients over the years, who all have very specific website development needs. While some clients may share common goals, each may approach those business goals in different ways. But, time and time again, we usually start by asking a client in what ways are they measuring their website's effectiveness. In this 4 part series, I'll discuss identifying purpose and overcoming obstacles, complaints of current site capabilities and establishing budget, metrics to success and selecting a vendor, then finally risk tolerance and disaster recovery planning.
One of the first questions we frequently ask our clients is, how would you gauge your website's effectiveness? We ask this because your website should not only reflect your brand, but in many cases, drive part of your revenue. A WordPress site can be a great start for companies that are strictly brand-centric, and will give you a strong web presence. However, if your goal is a website that not only represents your brand, but also comprises a mixture of e-commerce, registration systems, reporting tools, etc., then a WordPress site will not make the grade.
Another couple of questions we ask our clients are what complaints do you have with your current website and what would you like it to do better? Some clients respond that their website is just plain stale and they’d like something new/modern. Drupal lets you easily change up your entire look on a regular basis, like putting on a fresh outfit!
XSS is short for Cross-Site Scripting, but you probably might ask why the short term is not CSS instead. That's because CSS is already used for Cascade Style Sheets, a pre-existing language for defining styles for web pages, so using XSS will prevent confusion.
Drupal is one of the most popular free and open source web application frameworks. Drupal is almost infinitely extensible through not only various theme possibilities but also the vast library of modules or add-ons. However, this great extensibility is also a point of weakness should insecure or vulnerable code be used in either themes or community contributed modules that can result in compromise. The following guide on best practices for Drupal covers main areas of attention in regards to security for any Drupal web administrator.
We have several customers interested in adding CRM to their Drupal sites, so today I hopped on a conference call with a working group developing CRM tools for Drupal 7.
At Freelock, we're huge fans of Drupal. But we keep running into customers (or potential customers) who are terrified of it. So here's our take on why.
All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.
Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.
No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.
It amazes me that still in 2011, the standard way web designers upload code to a server is FTP ("File transfer protocol"), a protocol that is completely insecure, easy to snoop, slow, hard to use, and often problematic through firewalls. There are many better ways.
Backups are the safety net and an absolute requirement. But the next most important part is doing what you can to stay out of trouble. We've all become accustomed to security updates on our computers. Today every operating system has an update system, and a huge number of attacks are on vulnerabilities that have fixes released but people have neglected to apply.