What we do here at Revolution Web Studios which has been very beneficial to business owners that we work which starts with our production system and how we nail every detail down affectively and efficiently while keeping budget in mind.

Below is some information that I have provided to detail how we work and what we do. Give us a call at (877) 814 -5422 for a quote on what we can do for your business.

Design Structure

The first thing we do is develop the main structure of the website to fit your business. A structure that will make it easy for your customers and employees to use and find the information or product they need. We have a company policy that we put into every website we develop and that is KISS (Keep It Simple Simon). The less complicated the website is to use the more business you will do, that’s just common sense that we follow here at Revolution Web Studios. We have over 40 thousand design structures that you can look through to see and get an idea of how you want your navigation and site structure set up. We are not a template company we just use these design structures to help clients visualize what their website can look like. We can use a combination of these from different structures as well. http://www.revolutionwebstudios.com//website-design-options.html

Custom Graphics

The Second things we do is customize all the graphics for your website to give the kind of impression that you want your customers to have when they come into your website. We take your vision and passion mixed with the kind of impression you want your company to give off on the web and create a powerful graphical presence for your website. Graphics that cause people to take action, action in buying, action in contacting you, etc…

CMS putting YOU in control!

Then what we do with every website Revolution Web Studios builds is add a Content Management System. This is what has made us popular and has been the deciding factor in business owners and companies going with us to develop their website solution for their businesses. Our Content Management System will allow you to update each page on your website very easily with our custom online website editor. As long as you or whoever you put in charge of updated information on your site knows how to POINT, TYPE, and CLICK you have it made. We provide this as away to make it easy for any business to be able to update, edit, or change their website anytime. Why spend hundreds or thousands of precious company funds to a web master to do updates for a business they do not have passion for. Now you will have the control and power with Revolution Web Studios supporting you. We do free training and support for you and your staff.

Ecommerce, Online Shopping Cart

RWS Shopping Cart offers a lot of Features, some of the standard Features are listed here.

General Features

• Capable of using Secure Sockets Layer (https) Encryption (128-bit)
• Flexible Tax Models
  • Model 1: Ship To Address-based Tax Calculation
  • Model 2: Store Address-based Tax Calculation
• Shoppers can manage their User Accounts (registration required)
• Shipping Address Management (Customers can enter their own Shipping Addresses)
• Order History: Shopper can view all their previous Orders (and Order Details)
• Order Confirmation Mail (customizable!) is sent to Shopper and Store Owner

Product Catalog Features

• Powerful Web-Administration Interface (JavaScript-powered)
• Manages an unlimited Number of Products and Categories
• Can be used as a Shop or just as an Online-Catalog (you can even turn off Price Display)
• Quick Search for Products, Categories and Manufacturers; filter by features or discounted Products
• Product Ratings & Testimonials (moderated or auto-published)
• Feature specific Products by setting them “on special”
• Product Availability: show how fast a Customer can expect delivery
• Handles downloadable Products (virtual Goods)
• “Product is back in Stock”-Notification for subscribed Customers

Administration Features 

• Multiple Images and Files (like Spec Sheets and Flyers) per Product
• Product Attributes (like Size or Color) can be added to Product
• Product Types for Classification (like “Car”, “Motorbike” or “Music Album”)
• Shopper Groups for Customers (allows different Price Levels and Payment Options),
• Multiple Prices per Product (Quantity-based and/or Shopper Group-based Prices)
• Flexible Price Display (number & currency formatting; including or excluding tax)
• Shop Statistics / Control Panel with a Summary of new Customers, new Orders….
• Stock Level Control for Products and Item
• Order Management with Order History, Customer Notification and Order Edit Functionality
• Basic Reporting Feature: sold Items, monthly/yearly Revenue
• Order Status Management

Payment Modules

• Capable of live Credit Card Processing
• Pre-defined Payment Gateways like authorize.net®, PayPal, 2Checkout, eWay, Worldpay, PayMate and NoChex

Shipping Modules

• Flexible Shipping Carriers and Rates Configuration
• Live-Shipping Rates using Shipping Modules (e.g. InterShipper, UPS, USPS, or FedEx.

By Jeremy Thompson 

About the poster: Jeremy Thompson is an Interactive Web & E-Commerce Consultant for Revolution Web Studios, consulting on web technologies for small business. You can reach him via email at Jeremy@revolutinwebstudios.com

 This article and information was taken from an article in Website Magazine, the Magazine for Website Success. All credit and information credit is due and given and belongs to them. Thank you, the Revolution Web Studios Team.

The face of e-commerce is about to change in a big way. In the coming months, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) implements DSS - the new standard in security practices for e-commerce companies. Whether you are an online merchant, webmaster or Web host, it is vital to understand the fundamental requirements of the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) to keep your business and your clients from incurring stiff penalties.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard

PCI DSS  was developed by the founding brands of the PCI Security Standards Council, including America Express, JCB, Discover, MasterCard and Visa. The PCI Council has established this standard to protect cardholder information. As a vendor, it is critical that you are not only aware of the new requirements, but also understand the tools and practices available to remain in compliance with the new standard.

The Need to Comply

PCI DSS provides a comprehensive set of requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures.

The standards outlined within PCI Council can be used to help build the security policies and structure for the enterprise, data centers and your customers. This set of standards should be used as a best practices guide to implement and follow.

Even though the PCI Council manages the underlying security standards, compliance is set independently by the individual brands. Each brand has its own set of penalties that can range from $8 per compromised account to more than $158,000 per incident, with additional penalties ranging from restrictions to outright loss of use.

PCI DSS Requirements

There are twelve major requirements to the PCI standard:

Build and Maintain a Secure Network

• 1. Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect card holder data.
• 2. Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters.

Protect Cardholder Data

• 3. Protect stored cardholder data
• 4. Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks.

Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program

• 5. Use and regularly update anti-virus software.
• 6. Develop and maintain secure systems and applications.

Implement Strong Access Control Measure

• 7. Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
• 8. Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access.
• 9. Restrict physical access to cardholder data.

Regularly Monitor and Test Networks

• 10. Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data.
• 11. Regularly test security systems and processes.

Maintain an Information Security Policy

• 12. Maintain a policy that addresses information security.

In June 2008, The PCI Council added Appendix A, which is “PCI DSS Applicability for Hosting Providers.” In a nutshell, all service providers with access to cardholder data (including hosting providers) must adhere to the PCI DSS. In additional, Requirement 2.4 states that hosting providers must protect each entity’s hosted environment and data. Therefore, hosting providers must give special consideration to the following.

A.1 -Protect each entity’s (that is merchant, service provider, or other entity) hosted environment and data, as in A.1.1 through A.1.4:

A.1.1 -Ensure that each entity only has access to its own cardholder data environment.

A.1.2 -Restrict each entity’s access and privileges to own cardholder data environment only.

A.1.3 -Ensure logging and audit trails are enabled and unique to each entity’s cardholder data environment and consistent with PCI DSS Requirement 10.

A.1.4 -Enable processes to provide for timely forensic  investigation in the event of a compromise to any hosted merchant or service provider.

A hosting provider must fulfill these requirements as well as all other relevant sections of the PCI DSS. Note: Even though a hosting provider may meet these requirements, the compliance of the entity that uses the hosting provider is not necessarily guaranteed. Each entity must comply with the PCI DSS and validate compliance as applicable.

Besides being good security practice, if followed, a Web hosting company providing procedures, processes and tools to meet the requirements can be a competitive advantage. Specifically, it can be used to differentiate your services from your competitors and entice e-commerce companies to host their sites with you.

Application Security

New for the latest release of PCI DSS is requirement 6.6. It requires that all Web-facing applications be protected against known attacks. Hosting companies over the years have become very good at protecting the networks and the operating systems from attacks, while the applications have been left vulnerable. Hackers are now attacking using SQL Injection and Path Traversal techniques to gain access to applications and vulnerable information.

Application security is an area that hosting companies have little or no control over. Once these hacks occur, and they do, expenses and man-hours mount as web hosts deal with customer complaints. To combat these attacks the PCI DSS recommends installing an application layer firewall in front of Web-facing applications known as a Web Application Firewall (WAF). One example of a WAF is Applicure’s dotDefender^TM, which works well for hosting companies, as it supports dedicated, shared and virtual environments running either Windows IIS or Apache on Linux platforms. Offering a WAF to clients will provide the security they need for PCI compliance, additional revenue for Web hosts, and reduce customer care calls addressing hacking attacks.

The penalties for not following the PCI’s DSS are significant and should not be ignored by any company accepting credit cards online or any company providing supporting services, like Web hosting companies. That being said, gaining compliance is relatively easy and could prove to be a competitive advantage if used creatively.

Article written by Josh Ewin who is VP of Sales and Marketing for Dedicated and Andy Mahler who is Director, Business Development for Applicure.

Article copied and presented by Jeremy Thompson (jeremy@revolutionwebstudios.com) who is CEO of Revolution Web Studios LLC.

Here is a great article from Chris from SmallBusinessNewz.com that is proof that online business economy is different than physical business economy in my opinion. Read what Chris has to say.

Are You Advertising a Need?

If you’ve been reading SmallBusinessNewz for a while, you may recall an article I wrote earlier this year about branding a need. The basic point of this was that one effective advertising strategy is to make potential customers realize that they have a need, and that your product is the solution to that need.

I was reminded of this again today as I read an article by Svetlana Gladkova at Profy who talked about online advertising, and how it will be affected as our economy worsens. She provides a very thought-provoking analysis on the subject, comparing it to what advertising was like in the great depression.

Surprisingly to some of us who weren’t around back then, advertising actually did pretty well according to Gladkova:

There was quite a number of examples of successful brands during the Great Depression, including Chevrolet cars, Camel cigarettes and Procter & Gamble (that gave birth to the phenomenon of soap opera during those hard times). And all of them relied heavily on advertising because they realized that they needed advertising to create and maintain brand loyalty. They simply pretended there was nothing particularly wrong with the economy and consumers still had money to spend - and this proved to be the right approach for them.

We should also keep in mind that advertising is one of the measures to demonstrate to consumers that the company is healthy. After all, not all the consumers have a daily habit of tracking stock market behavior to know what’s going on - yet when they see a company spending money on advertising, they think everything is fine with the company.

Contrary to what some might think, online advertising is still doing pretty well. Spending is up 15.2% in the United States according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. In the United Kingdom, it’s up 21%.

Even though there has been a lot of news recently about layoffs in Internet companies, ad sales are still growing as iEntry CEO Rich Ord points out. The bottom line is that online advertising is not likely to go show any major drop off in the foreseeable future. If anything, I think it will continue to grow, particularly as online video continues to grow in popularity and Google seems determined to expand it’s advertising efforts all the time.

Online advertising is a global medium and lets businesses reach global audiences, and targeted ones at that. How many other forms of advertising are as effective in either of these categories? When it comes to a weak economy, it is just important to note that people’s “needs” may change.

About the author:
Chris is a content coordinator and staff writer for SmallBusinessNewz and the iEntry Network. Subscribe to SmallBusinessNewz RSS Feeds.