I’m posting this for my future reference but maybe someone else will find it useful.  On several occasions, I’ve been working on a Photoshop CS3 project and the pointer acts up.  It turns into the hand tool.  Then, it does not allow switching between other tools.  I restarted Photoshop… still the same issue.  Then, I went to Window->Workspace->Default Workspace.  Presto!  The tool icon fixed itself.  It must be some sort of memory issue.  An odd and rare occurrence, but after the third time, I guess it was time to write down the solution to the problem…

Online security is becoming more and more important.  Everyday we hear about hackers breaking into websites and stealing a user’s identity.  If a hacker can gain access to a website, they may possibly have access to your credit card information, social security numbers and more, depending on the data the site collects.  A simple, yet overlooked security measure is the password.

I have met users who use common knowledge terms for their passwords.  The password may be a pet’s name, family member, favorite car, birthplace… Users choose these passwords because they are easy to remember.  In most cases, a user will use the same password for all of their accounts.  Doing so is simple and requires memorizing only one phrase.  There are two problems with this.

1) Common knowledge passwords are very easy to guess.

2) If a hacker guesses a password, they could have access to all of your accounts.

I propose two solutions.  The solution to the 2nd problem is easy.  Use different passwords for all accounts.  It may be more difficult to remember them.  But it is better to provide more security than less.  The common knowledge solution is a little more difficult.

Many websites are starting to require a certain number of characters and character types to be present in a password.  This is great.  It helps provide a unique password that is difficult to guess.  For example, the password @3T_6y is harder to determine than one that is your spouse’s name.  Due to the difficulty of randomized passwords, few users choose to implement them when not required to.  By choosing the easier route, you leave yourself more open to attack.  How do you remember a difficult password?

Start by creating a reference sheet.  A reference sheet references a different character (or characters) to each letter of the alphabet, punctuation mark and symbol on the keyboard.  For example, A may be @, I may be 1, E may be 3.  Memorize your references.  Do not write them down.  Do not let others know about it.  If someone knows, then someone will be able to use it against you.

Next, while creating a password, choose a term or phrase to apply your reference sheet to.  If you are on an insurance website, you may choose the term “insurance”.  Depending on your reference sheet, the password may become “1NSuR@Nc3″.  Because you have you have a capital letter, lowercase letter, symbol and number you have already bypassed many password requirements.  Because the word visually represents “insurance” and you have a specific reference to each letter in the word, it is easy to remember.  Now you have a way to create unique, difficult passwords.  Passwords that are easy to remember.

If the word is random, every site will have a different password phrase.  Having hundreds of accounts would mean hundreds of passwords.  With the scheme above, you still have to remember the password phrase you used.  Or do you?  When creating a password phrase you could create a scheme to create the phrase.  You may choose to use the website name, tagline or url.  You may even make it more difficult by choosing the first letter of each word in the company name and tagline together.  By employing one of those schemes, you can easily determine what your password phrase was.  Sure, someone could figure out your scheme.  Even if they did, they would still have to know the references to each character.

I have employed similar techniques with my accounts.  I have a reference sheet memorized.  Some characters are represented by two or more other characters.  This adds even more security to my reference sheet.  I also have my own scheme for determining what my passphrase was.  I never memorize a single password.  Well, after repeat visits to the site, I will memorize it.  In the beginning, I just determine my passphrase and then convert it to the proper characters.  Easy to remember and difficult to guess.  Simple, great security.

Just remember, never, ever give out your reference sheet or any other schemes.  Do your best to stay secure and stay safe.

Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is a book about the usability of a web site.  He takes a “common sense approach” to appeal to users, developers and clients.  I definitely recommend this read to everyone.  Whether you are a developer or client, you will take something away.  Some of the topics can even be applied to other areas, not just websites.  Some of the topics Steve covers are:

Basic Usability

He writes about how to make a website usable for everyone.  Not just your target market.  Some users may understand industry lingo, while others will have no clue what you are discussing.  Some users will know to click this image or that image, but other users may think it is just that, an image.  Steve does a good job of providing examples with details about how companies made their websites more usable.  I have run into many of the items he mentions.  In the end, you are the ultimate decision maker.  But your clients are where you make money.  If the site is not usable, then you risk losing money.

Navigation

I have run into several cases where someone wants to put navigation everywhere.  They want it in the left column, bottom, right column, top.  And each navigation panel is different.  This just confuses users.  Navigation needs to stay in one place, be consistent and easy to understand.  Steve does a good job of showing the evolution of sites like Amazon and their attempts at creating user friendly navigation.

How to avoid inner office politics

One of the most time and money consuming problems are inner office politics.  One person likes this color or this navigation scheme or this page title.  Someone almost always disagrees.  Then you end up wasting time and money trying to make everyone agree.  Steve does a good job of showing how you can avoid these disagreements, solve them early and save time.  There is no right way to build a website.  But many times, there is a better, more usable solution.

Testing

The book has a chapter based on testing.  How to test, what to test, when to test… These are all questions that are answered.  Unfortunately, small companies do not have the time and resources to do monthly usability tests and make changes to their websites. Regardless of company size, I believe this is a good chapter for everyone to read.  You may not be able to make monthly changes, but when you do test you will know how to do so.

Accessibility = Usability

There is some information on accessibility and usability.  I do believe the two go hand and hand.  If a site is not accessible to everyone, then it is not usable.  By programming without accessibility in mind, you will have to spend more time and money to make it accessible.  By developing with accessibility in mind,  you will save that time and money.   Accessible sites need little development to make them work for both visual and handicap users.  In my experience, an inaccessible site, almost always needs to be rewritten.

Inner Office Politics 2

Near the end of the book, Steve discusses how to handle inner office politics when it comes to a higher up.  Developers are just that.  They develop.  They do not make decisions.  So how do you convince someone not to make a terrible decision, when they believe it is the right course of action.  Many bosses have been out of the development game for a long time or have never been developed before.  Yet, because they are the decision maker, they are always right.  Steve gives some examples of how you can sway there opinion and help save your company time and money.

Fin

This is a great book.  It is a little outdated and the site examples are thus outdated.  However, the concepts are still applicable to today’s web world.  I only had one criticism.  Many times, Steve mentions that everyone can afford to do monthly usability testing and continue making changes.  I work with a lot of non-profits and small businesses and  would have to disagree with his belief.  Many clients are purchasing a website as an added expense, while still implementing their current marketing strategy.  The upfront cost of a website and the cost to have someone update that website can strap marketing funds for a time… for a time.  It takes time to see a return on investment.  Once that ROI hits, then the organization can start putting money back in for usability testing.  Big businesses can surely afford to continue tweaking their websites.  I think those with smaller budgets should focus on changes once a year, not monthly.  The point is to continue updating your website to adhere to accessibility and continue to be user friendly.

As Steve says, “building a great website is an enormous challenge, and anyone who gets it half right has my admiration.”

Do you need to send newsletters, announcements, sales alerts and more? Don’t have a content management system?  Check out MailChimp.  MailChimp allows you to create and send beautiful emails easily.  I recently signed up.  My main website is not based on a CMS.  I wanted a solution I could easily implement on the site without installing a CMS.  I found MailChimp to be the perfect solution.

With MailChimp you have several account options, including a FREE option.  Everyone loves free.  The free option allows you to have up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3000 emails per month.  This is a great option for small businesses who may not have more than 500 subscribers.  If you need more subscribers or emails you can always signup for one of the other options.  They start at $30/mo.  Still an affordable option if you are currently sending snail mail to everyone.

MailChimp allows you to create and save newsletters.  If you have a newsletter format, you can create one template and port it into each newsletter.  If you do not have a newsletter template, they offer a variety of basic layouts, photos and color options to get you started.  The templates are easy to setup and edit.

Once you create your template, you can easily add and edit different textual sections through a popup text editor.  If you are familiar with Microsoft Word or any other WYSIWYG editor, then you will have no problem navigating the interface.  The interface allows for saving, drafts, deletion… all of the basic edit functions you would expect to need.

Some very useful features are within the sending functions.  You can send test emails to a variety of addresses.  MailChimp also offers advice on how to test the layout of your email for maximum compatibility with email clients.  If you are worried about the emails being marked as spam, worry no longer.  MailChimp can run tests on your newsletters, alerts… and determine if there is “spammy stuff” (technical terms) in your email.

How do you get your signup lists into the system?  To start, you can either create forms using the MailChimp interface or have a developer create a signup form and post it on your website.  The form creator is very customizable.  If you would rather have a developer create the form, there are tons of resources on how to send the parameters to your MailChimp account.  As a developer, I just created a form in MailChimp, copied the code and made some modifications that I wanted to see.  Very quick and easy.  If you already have a list, you can import different file types to automatically create your lists.  You can also directly enter each account.  Direct entry may be a bit of a pain if you have a large subscriber list.

If you are interested in MailChimp, I suggest taking a look at it.  Here are a few other features that make it a great online program.

• Create lists of subscribers.
• Create options for subscribers.  Options may consists of news, alerts, sales announcements, etc.  This helps subscribers receive information on the items they are interested in.
• Schedule campaigns.  Create your campaign and schedule it to automatically send out at a certain time and date.  If you are like me, then you write at night.  The best times to send campaigns are Tues-Thurs 10am-3pm.  This is when users are most likely to read your emails.
• Archive campaigns for viewing at a later date.
• The monkey’s mail bag is full of sticks and stones that assemble into many more useful tools.

I was reading Online Marketing Inside Out last night.  Chapter 4 is about search engine optimization (SEO). The author brings up a very good point about ads vs SEO, which I have also experienced.  In many cases, a client will come to me and ask if I can help them with SEO.  I say yes and provide a site analysis.  In a site analysis, I provide information on the code structure, design stucture, keywords, content, links, meta tags and other items that affect SEO.  When I present the site analysis, sometimes I hear “Well what about Google Ads.  Can I not just use Google Ads to raise my ranking?”  The answer is yes and no. Read the rest of this entry

“To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.” ~ Lao Tzu

In my travels, I have experienced many professionals who, I must unfortunately say, are not professionals. Many developers will pick up a toolkit such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, learn the toolkit and then call themselves a developer. Because they now have the title of Web Developer, customers approach them for development work. Makes sense. However, they generally have none of the skills to develop a website. Most of these developers have only a basic understanding of mathematics, programming theory and code structure. These skills are pivotal in developing portable, functional applications. Someone without an understanding of recursion (a programming concept) is going to take a hundred lines of code to write what recursion can do in ten lines of code. With out a proper understanding of programming theory, such as Object Oriented Programming, a developer will not be able to build modern applications. Search Engine Optimization is one of the most common misunderstood concepts I run into. I can not begin to count how many times I have heard “All you need to do for search engine optimization is put links on your website and apply for Google AdWords.” This is completely mistaken. There is much, much more to Search Engine Optimization than most people think and it starts with writing minimal code and focusing on content generation. If you are a developer ask yourself, “Do I know the necessary theory, mathematics and code to be a good developer?”. If you are a client ask your developer “Why should I hire you? What skills can you provide me with that most developers can not offer?”

Read the rest of this entry

Do you pull images from Google and post them on your website?  If so, did you know you may be violating copyright laws?  With applications such as Google, finding information has never been easier.  We can simply do a search for a keyword and POW!  Now we have access to hundreds of thousands of results.  With content management systems and search engines, it is extremely easy to violate copyright laws.  When pulling content from a website, you must always make sure that website grants free access and use of that content.  Some websites want you to pay to re-use their content.  Others are not concerned about their content being copied.  Either way, always make sure you are following in accordance with content copyrights.

Read the rest of this entry

I work on a lot of website redevelopment jobs.  A client has no knowledge of web development, goes to just about anyone without researching the seller, and purchases the website.  A few months later, I get a call asking if I can help them fix their site in some way.  Here are ten mistakes I run into on a common basis.

1. Color Association
2. Dynamic Vs. Static
3. Static Images
4. Browser Compatibility
5. Relevant Information
6. Contracts
7. Security
8. Administrator Handbooks
9. Service Response
10. Testimonials.

Read the full entry for tips on each topic.

Read the rest of this entry