Website Redesign ROI

The ROI of website redesign can be hard to quantify with no concrete metric that can be used to directly relate to ROI measurement. Like any ROI the calculations are based on cost and results.

Costs

Website pricing really varies. The costs range from free DIY tools to millions of dollars for high-end digital agencies. Web designers can start low for a freelancer or expensive for a complex website from a big web development firm. Generally the price of a website relates to the amount of time it takes to create it, as there are very little or no material costs, since pixels and code aren't bought like inventory the costs are based on the estimates of time required for design, programming, communication, and license purchase.

The content (writing and images) also takes time, whether handled by the web firm or a freelance team or the company itself. This adds up to a total amount of hours that must be used multiply with the hourly rate equating to the total project fee.

Here are some of the major cost factors:

• Project management and communication: How many people required to work on your project.
• Design: Is this an off-the-shelf template being used or something made custom.
• Programming: Is it a standard feature or more custom?
• Team: Are there a lot of specialists required?
• Content: Is it a site that requires a lot of new writing? Is there photography or video production needed?
• CMS Platform: This isn't really a factor because different platforms can still be made use to achieve complex things. WordPress is also used for sites like CNN.com
• Licenses: Important thing to factor in when using some features or functions or images on your site. This can incur an additional cost to the project.

Results

There is a clear distinction between the objectives of the website where revenue generating metrics can be calculated directly from e-commerce sites or in the value of leads for a lead generation website.

There are many factors that affect the calculation for the return on investment, but generally they are:

• The cost of creating the website
• The cost of maintaining the website - post-launch operating expense (content marketing and advertising)
• The traffic - number of visitors is normally a measure of a successful marketing activity not web design.
• Conversion rate - this is a web design metric and not a marketing activity as this has an impact on conversions but together the traffic times the conversion rate equals results.
• The website lifespan.

Just compare objectively costs and returns over a period of time to identify if the right marketing strategies are in place to drive relevant traffic for conversion to occur.

Ensure that you suffer from very little downtime to ensure that your website investment is given sufficient opportunity to display its potential conversion capabilities to your target customers here.

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Heartbleed Bug Statement

There has been a security flaw in our OpenSSL, a very popular data encryption standard that has given the majority of us an assumption that the data we stored and used in our every day services were secured. However, this wasn't the case as the Heartbleed Bug gave hackers that know about it to extract a large amount of data when the assumption was that the OpenSSL standard was meant to keep these very hackers out.

What is the Heartbleed Bug

Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability of the popular OpenSSL encryption standard. This weakness allows information normally protected under the SSL/TSL (normally used to secure the Internet). The bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of systems protected by vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL, that has compromised keys used to encrypt data, allowing hackers to eavesdrop on communications to steal data directly from the services that users use and to impersonate them.

How to stop the leak?

As long as the vulnerable version of the OpenSSL is in use it can be abused. Fixed OpenSSL has been released and deployed. Service providers and users have to install the fix as it becomes available for the operating systems, networked appliances and software they use.

Common Questions and Answers to them

1. What is the CVE-2014-0160?

CVE-2014-0160 is the official reference for this bug.

2. What makes the Heartbleed Bug unique?

Normal bugs in softwares come and go, fixed by new versions. However, this bug has left a large amount of private keys and other secrets exposed on the Internet, and considering the long exposure, ease of exploitation and attacks leaving no trace, this bug should be taken very seriously.

3. Is this a design flaw in SSL/TLS protocol?

No. This is an implementation problem.

4. What is being leaked?

Encryption is used to protect secrets that may harm your privacy or security if they leak.

5. Leaked primary key material and how to recover?

Leaked primary key material allow the attacker to decrypt any past and future traffic to the protected services and to impersonate the service at will. Any protection given by the encryption and the signatures can be bypassed. Recovery from this leak requires patching the vulnerability, renovation of the compromised keys and reissuing and redistributing new keys.

6. Leaked secondary key material and how to recover?

Leaked secondary key material are leaked user credentials (usernames and passwords) used in vulnerable services. Recovery from this leak requires owners of the service first to restore trust to the service by changing their passwords and possible encryption keys according to the instructions from the owners of the services that have been compromised. All session keys and sessions cookies should be invalidated and considered compromised.

7. What is leaked protected content and how to recover?

This is the actual content handled by the vulnerable services. It may be personal or financial details, private communication such as emails or instant messages, documents or anything seen worth protecting by encryption. The most important action to take for recovery is to restore trust to the service by changing their passwords and possible encryption keys according to the instructions from the owners of the services that have been compromised.

8. Can i detect if someone has exploited this against me?

This bug does not leave any trace of anything abnormal happening to the logs.

9. How can OpenSSL be fixed?

Even though the actual code fix may appear trivial, OpenSSL team is the expert in fixing it properly so the fixed version 1.0.1g or newer should be used.

Does this affect Malaysian businesses?

As mentioned earlier, OpenSSL is a popular encryption protocol that is widely accepted worldwide. And a large number of Malaysian businesses use this to encrypt their data. Consider change quickly as this may affect your sensitive information.

What versions of the OpenSSL are affected?

status of different versions:

1. OpenSSL 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f (inclusive) are vulnerable
2. OpenSSL 1.0.1g is NOT vulnerable
3. OpenSSL 1.0.0 branch is NOT vulnerable
4. OpenSSL 0.9.8 branch is NOT vulnerable

Bug was introduced to OpenSSL in December in 2011 and has been out in the wild since OpenSSL released 1.0.1 on 14th March 2012. OpenSSL 1.0.1g released on 7th April 2014 fixes the bug.

Recovery sounds laborious is there a shortcut?

After the consequences of this bug was properly identified and to the extent of which it could affect any user or provider, we (here at EVERWORKS) took laborious steps to address this issue to ensure that the possible compromise of our primary and secondary key material was protected. All this just in case we were not the first ones to discover this and this could have been exploited already.

For Malaysians you can refer to MyCERT for Information Disclosure on this Vulnerability.

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Telekom: Port 25 Blocked

There have been issues regarding the widely used Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and etc of late. The issue seems to be the blocked port 25.

There is a reason why this port has been blocked. This was done to help reduce spam emails that are received everyday to our mailboxes.

Attached below is an official email from Telekom Malaysia in an official statement to all of its customers:

Dear Valued Customers,

Telekom Malaysia Bhd wishes to inform its customers about TM's initiative in combating spam in its Internet Protocol network to improve our quality of service.

Recently many anti-spam organizations have blacklisted a large number of IP addresses from TM's network. Due to this many of TM's customers have been unable to send emails from their mail servers to companies who might be using database from the above mentioned anti-spam organizations. 

These spamming activities by a small group have affected a large number of our customers, regardless of the nature of their Internet usage.

Therefore, TM is taking immediate action to address this issue. Effective 3/12/2007, TM will block OUTBOUND Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) traffic or port 25 for all out going e-mails from dynamic IP addresses. Only Outbound SMPT traffic from smtp.streamyx.com and smtp.tm.net.my will be allowed.

With this implementation, Streamyx customers who have their own mail server will not be able to send emails. As an alternative TM is providing an open relay server for these customers who use dynamic IP addresses. 

Please be assured that TM is proactively taking all possible measures to ensure that these spamming activities do not reoccur in the future. We seek for your kind cooperation to implement the necessary security measures to protect your computers that are connected to the Internet; from any email abuse, virus infection, spyware or malicious code.

How does this affect Malaysian email users?

Having a preplanned method to prevent more spam is great, but with most applications running on the default port 25, many users and customers will face the issue where they have difficulty sending email out or connecting.

Is there a way to ensure that my custom email with EVERWORKS is running smoothly?

Yes EVERWORKS wants to ensure that our email hosting solution provides you ease of mind and with as little hassle as possible. Find our custom email solution here.

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If you have more to add on this as to why and how this has affected you please feel free to share in the comments section below.

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How to use Google Analytics: Beginners' Guide

This will guide you on how to use Google Analytics even if you have just started out. Google Analytics as the name implies is a tool (one of the best) that allows you to measure your website traffic (this which greatly influences your ability to be found on the web through search engines - you can use Alexa to find out just where you are roughly), giving you valuable information for you to make informed decisions. With just a little bit of setup and effort, this tool will give you a war chest worth of information, on who is visiting, what they are looking at or what they are looking for. With that information I am sure that you would be able to take it from there, and with a bit of time practicing with Google Analytics I am sure you would be able to use it like a pro!

This page was designed to ease you into the application and teach you how to use almost all aspects of Google Analytics. In future there will be more in-depth tutorials that will show you what other things can Google Analytics do to empower you.

Google Analytics Interface (Video Tutorial).

What better way to show you the route than to have a 'personal' tour from Google themselves. This Google Analytics Interface Introduction Video shows you the different reporting sections on the Google Analytics dashboard.

Getting Started

Now that everything has been formally introduced, let's get down to business and fix up everything!!

Step 1: Account Setup

Before you start anything the most important step in order for you to use Google Analytics, you will need to (obviously) set up an account with them. This will provide you with a unique code/identifier/number to add to your website. *important note: you can only access information about your own website. You will not be allowed access to other people's information, unless given special permission, and likewise for other people who want access to your information.

Permissions can be granted to those that you give special permission to. Other than that if that step was not taken into account the only person that can access your website statistics will be none other than yourself.

1. Go to the Google Analytics website - here.
2. If you do not have a Google account, you can sign up here, but if the link does not work you can always find the "Sign Up" button which is located somewhere above the top right-hand corner of the Google Analytics Website. (If you have a Google Account already skip this step and just sign-in.)
3. Click the "Sign Up" to continue. (You may be wondering why there is another sign-up button just when you have done registering for a Google Account, or if you already own a Google Account; this "Sign Up" was meant to define signing up or registering for the Google Analytics Service.)
4. In the next window, provide Google Analytics with the URL of the website you wish to analyze.
5. Give the website an account name that is easy to remember (This is important if you have multiple websites). 
6. Select a country your website is based in.
7. Click Continue.
8. In the next window provide your contact information.
9. Click Continue.
10. In the next window, read the Google Analytics terms of service, and if you agree with them click the Yes Box.
11. Click Create New Account.
12. Google Analytics should now provide you with code. This is needed for Google Analytics to track your website, you will need to copy this and insert it into your website according to the instructions given. 

Step 2: Insert Google Analytics JavaScript into your pages.

Previously in Step 1: Number 12; Google Analytics provides you a code. You MUST insert the code that Google Analytics provides to you with into every page you want it to track. (If you have a technical division all you need to do is pass them the code and they should know what to do with it.)

Inserting Google Analytics Code - this works for most websites.

To insert the Google Analytics code, you need to get into the HTML of your website. If you are using Wordpress, you will need to open the footer.php file to insert the Google Analytics code.

1. Find the </body> tag at the very bottom just above the </html> page.
2. Do you see the code urchinTracker(), utmLinker(), utmSetTrans(), or utmLinkPost() above the </body> tag? If you see either paste the Google Analytics code above those codes, if not just paste it immediately above the </body> tag.
3. Once done, and uploaded you should be able to begin tracking information (please wait for 24hrs-48hrs for Google Analytics to kick into action!)

Step 3: See an Overview of Your Website's Performance. 

Once you have already signed up for an account and successfully inserted Google Analytic's JavaScript into your pages, Google Analytics will be ready to provide you with an overview of your website's performance. (However, the service may take up to 24 hours to begin gathering data on your website.)

1. Log in to Google Analytics.
2. In the center of the page is a section titled Website Profiles. Click on the View Reports link to the right of the name of the site you are interested in. This will bring you to the Dashboard.
3. At the top of the page there should be a default chart that gives you a visual representation of your website's traffic over the past month.
4. Immediately beneath that chart you will see a header that says Site Usage, with six small charts underneath. You will be able to find quick information on various site traffic statistics for the time period shown in the main chart.

Step 4: Detailed Performance View (Hourly & Daily)

If you want to find out when exactly your website has its peaks (at what time or what day) Google Analytics can tell you.

1. In the menu to the left, click on the word Visitors.
2. To the left beneath the main chart you will see a number of different statistical data.
3. Click on any of the words to get a bar-chart breakout of the daily performance for that aspect of site traffic measurement.
4. Click the word Hourly button to see an hour by hour graph.
5. To compare two different time periods, click on the dates above the line graph. Select the first set of dates you want to work with, check the Compare to Past box, then click on the second set of dates, and click the Apply Range button.

Although Google Analytics, does involve a few technical steps that may be hard to learn at first, but using Google Analytics is something that gets much easier as time goes by and as you get a better feel for the service.

Build online with confidence

Looking for a stable and experienced company to publish your website on the Internet? Having already completed designing your website, then the next important thing is to publish your website on the Internet. EVERWORKS hosts your websites, emails, and databases easily and reliably. EVERWORKS provides low cost, high availability, and high performance hosting packages. Click here to find out more!

If I have missed out anything, or you have experiences on Google Analytics that you would love to share, please feel free to add your input in the comments section below!

photoby liferoiblog | reference Mahalo

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Automate Everything

Automation can be a tedious task, but often you would tell yourself that this will eventually have a greater outcome, just that you just don't know where to start? 

Automation can be essential for upscaling and improving competitiveness, but quality or reliability shouldn't be sacrificed where efficiency is gained.

Contesting yourself

Thinking about automation is like staring at a unorganized kitchen waiting to be cleaned out. You walked into a disaster that has already happened, and the best part is you have not even started let alone know where to begin.

If you are thinking along the lines of, "Hey I need to automate everything that I am currently manually testing, along with all the things you and your project team would be testing before releasing software updates to your customers. Before even starting you might just throw in the towel and walk away, without even starting, because the task can seem extremely intimidating.

The key here is to take the challenge head on and strip down the massive task into smaller byte-sized pieces and get the work going!

Choosing a section

Cleaning a kitchen is crazy, but the process can be made easier (not so scary) if you started in a small corner with one small thing, and worked your way slowly across the kitchen, picking up things that were not meant to be there and putting them in the correct places - and before you know it, the kitchen is organized and clean again (I bet that you would have found some utensils you have not seen for a very long time).

This rationale works with test automation as well. A massive project can have a big bunch of work, but you, or your developers and project management team can choose one small area to start with that you would love to see covered by automation. Then focus on that part, and move on slowly across the project and picking up things along the way that also require automation - and before you know it, the project is suddenly fully automated and ready for action!

Getting Started

The key to anything is actually to get started. It can be small and it does not matter, because the key is to start with something and eventually you will build enough momentum to carry on and finish up what you need to. You can use Selenium or any user interface (UI) testing to start. As an example here is how to get started in a corner (as earlier highlighted):

1. Pick your feature to put under test automation.
2. Code some tests around a single feature in your project - you can use Selenium to record a small, short set of test modules.
3. Get a few servers (make your life easier and get some servers from a host like EVERWORKS a reliable host provider from Malaysia).
4. Get a continuous integration system, CI, (eg. Jenkins) up and running.
5. Find a Jenkins plugin for your version control system (Plugins Here!).

There are other alternatives to Jenkins, Github, or Selenium out there, but for plain reference and ease of the majority, I have provided these three (3) as some examples.

Please take note that there will be a definite learning curve if you have never used either Selenium or Jenkins ever before, but in a few days (investment of a little effort and time - it shouldn't take long to learn the basics of either) you should be well on your way.

Your benefit

The minute you get started, the faster you will get some great know-how on things such as:

1. Testing Framework Knowledge
2. CI System Knowledge
3. Your own CI System
4. One part of your project is already under automated testing
5. Positive attitude to tackling large daunting projects

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Now that you have done most of the heavy work of getting the CI into place, getting automation to work in your next task will be smooth; and before you know it, you will have already created a bunch of modules ready for automation, creating a snowball type like effect as you continue to get your game on!

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Business Email - Step 4: Email Options

We recently published our Business Email series to help you with your business email management strategy. As each post is posted up, we will dive deeper into each chapter to discover a better business management strategy.
Catch up on the previous chapters here: Step one, two, and three.

Knowing which email, hosting email, and requirements doesn't just stop there!

Find out what is the easiest solution available for you. Here is an easy breakdown of what you need to know most importantly.

EVERWORKS offers a simple all in one email solution that services almost every major need.

Here we have a breakdown of EVERWORKS's email offerings:

BasicWorks, MidWorks, and PremiumWorks suggests what the name actually means. Choose what is best for you! (Still not sure what to choose? Worry not, drop us an email and we will gladly help you out!)

This concludes our Business Email series! Hopefully this has given you plenty insight on how to manage and choose email. Stay tuned for more!

Tell us what you think:

1. What are your thoughts on the options given?
2. Between BasicWorks, MidWorks, and PremiumWorks which would you choose and for what purpose?

Follow us through our feed to follow our future updates through email and more.

Option photographed by Hope for gorilla from Flickr | Resourced from Rackspace

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Business Email - Step 3: Email Requirements

Over the last few weeks we have covered in our Business Email Series: Hosting Email, and Which Email? This week we take a look at creating your email system requirement list. A breakdown of everything you may need now or in future. Breaking it down onto a list of requirements better prepares you for what are your immediate needs and gives you good control with anticipated growth requirements.

Begin identifying requirements by:

1. Auditing your system for current usage requirements
2. Polling current users for feedback on the current system
3. Review current email regulations in your country, or region to better protect your email rights

As you complete these steps, here are several tips that will help you along the way.

Talk to the right people: A person on the field, compared to an in-house employee might have a very different idea to what and how email should be efficient or useful. That is why it is important to gather information from a wide array of individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise to gather insight that would generally give everyone a good system to use.

(Having a tough time with internal surveys? Consider using Survey Monkeys to ease up the process of asking a large audience questions that you need answers to.)

Gather and analyze relevant data: Determining logs, failures, crash reports, and system outages to better improve your current systems, to meet the growing demands of your company will better improve your email response service team's ability to respond to an inquiry. Finding problems and solving it will prove to be vital minutes in revenue and productivity time earned.

Security: As covered before, advantages and disadvantages of free email vs hosted email, security is a major concern. Obvious security protocols are great, but when it comes to a greater need of security emails should be kept only for the eyes of the intended recipient. Ultimately it saves you greater hassle, and potentially large sums of money!

Tell us what you think:

1. Does breaking down what you need into a compiled requirements list help?
2. What other advice would you add to help other readers?

Follow us through our feed to follow our future updates through email and more.

Mission Impossible photographed by Alex Turton from Flickr | Resourced from Rackspace

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Build Your Startup Internet and Mobile Hosting Business: Step 3

Previously I have written on how easy it is to startup your own Internet and mobile hosting business.

Oh, and yes, this is a series on Building Your Startup Internet and Mobile Hosting Business. There are 3 steps to the whole process. Well, 3 steps keeps things nice and compact and easy to follow.

This is the final of the three (3) steps on how to easily startup your own Internet and mobile hosting business.

Yes I have a plan, now I will get to doing it tomorrow.

You know what you need to do. You know why you need to do it. You even know what steps you must take to get it done. But there’s one small problem: you can’t seem to get moving. Big problem, but it actually isn't one.

The final step.

Work on your project rather than saying you will. Get down to things, start doing work now; rather than later.

The measure of productivity and good returns is the ability for you to start something and to get it up and running immediately.

Contact EVERWORKS. Ask the support team all the questions you need answers to, and get down to starting your business.

Some tips to help with procrastination:

1. Make sure you really want to do it
2. Keep things simple
3. Make it the first priority of your day
4. Just get started
5. Tell yourself you are just going to work on it for 10 minutes

Ask anything, unsure of how long it will take, how much work is required, how much it costs, what are the plans, who will help when help is needed most?

Asking is important, because if you don't ask no one can answer any of your questions. 

With that, this ends the series on how to startup your own internet and mobile hosting business easily.

Somethings to ponder on:

1. Tell us what you want to read in future?
2. Was this short series helpful?

Subscribe to our feed for future series like this.

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Your Data Is Your Data.

Can Internet Companies be forced by Government to disclose data that is stored by its customers?
Recently there has been a lot of concern on the NSA Prism program where government has been secretly obtaining data from companies; an undisclosed program, now made known to the public. "NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others" - The Guardian UK

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

It is EVERWORKS's policy that it will not access, transfer, or deliver EVERWORKS's customers in response to any government authorities other than pursuant to a properly issued, lawful request from appropriate law enforcement officials or other order from a competent body from the country in which the servers are physically located.

EVERWORKS has not participated in any data mining or collection of customer data located within its hosted environments.

Read more on EVERWORKS's Terms & Policies.

What are your thoughts on:

1. How to maintain digital privacy?
2. What other policies should be implemented to keep privacy?

Follow us through our feed for more reads.

 Security photographed by bulldog1 | PRISM Information & Picture: The Guardian UK Online

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Build Your Startup Internet and Mobile Hosting Business: Step 2

Previously I have written on how easy it is to startup your own Internet and mobile hosting business.

Exciting news isn't it? Stopping there wouldn't have done you much justice. In this post I will tell you just how to do it, and what you can possibly achieve with this easy startup option!

Oh, and yes, this is a series on Building Your Startup Internet and Mobile Hosting Business. There are 3 steps to the whole process. Well, 3 steps keeps things nice and compact and easy to follow. So stay tuned for the final chapter of this series, the "third step".

Is the Mobile and Internet Space worth it?

May 2012: Mobile & Social Gaming, Internet Consulting, Internet Publishing and Broadcasting E-Commerce are some of the 11 Best Business Opportunities according to Inc.

Big news surrounds this big boom, but is the mobile industry just another "dot com" bubble or is it going to last a good century? Technology as it seems, is moving towards a more mobile, organic form whereby designers and engineers in the current age are building for the future and going back to the roots of ideology where technology was meant to be an aid to everyday work, rather than an obstruction.

Considering the current trend is really staggering, so why don't we take advantage of the booming trend in technology and immediately assimilate into it with little or no heavy initial commitments.

From the previous understanding of how to startup your own Internet and mobile hosting business easily, there are a few steps that you could perform much in advance to prepare yourself for an immediate performable action. In other words, prepare a simple action-step; simple, quick, and effective.

Start with:

1. Market Identification: All you need to do is identify the market you wish to penetrate, with the wide array of already available infrastructure provided by EVERWORKS. What helps is to; identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats that could potentially come against you, and have a good strong core that your customers can relate to. Generally people believe in your beliefs and ideas, because ultimately all products sold are relatively the same. 
2. Also, having a solid plan that covers the action-step for the next 3 years helps to keep the direction clear during times of trouble.

Behind every won war, there is a great tactician. Plotting your action-plan is vital to making sure your business succeeds. Even though the easy solution has been given, but if your idea or inspiration does not take direction, and have a clear path, nothing gets translated properly into effective actions.

Consider those two suggestions, with a valid professional business advisor, before making any critical decisions. Don't just take my word for it.

Stay tuned for more. In the mean time let us know what you think:

1. Is the mobile and Internet hosting business something for the future?
2. Are there any other advice you would like to share to better prepare a Startup?

Please subscribe for future posts.

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