“In the computer security industry, it’s a well-known fact that hackers and malware makers tend to go wherever the users go. That means that these days they go to social networking sites like Facebook: in the addition to high traffic, social networking sites offer up a treasure trove of personal information that hackers are constantly looking for new ways to unlock. According to a recent news report, Facebook dealt with five different security threats in the space of a week. One of the most serious threats is the Koobface worm, which surfaced in two major attacks last year and is now back for more. 

Once downloaded, the worm searches for cookies left on the user’s machine by social networks. It uses these cookies to connect to the site and find the user’s friends, and then sends them a message telling them to download a video.  People often click the link to the video because they tend to trust their friends and are too tempted by the promise of entertainment to resist. Of course, what they end up downloading isn’t a video at all — it’s Koobface. In addition to the Koobface worm, Facebook is also battling four new applications that attempt to get users to reveal their usernames and passwords. Facebook now has over 175 million users, and more people sign up every day to connect to friends, family, and work colleagues. If you’re one of them (and you probably are), just remember that the same good habits you learned for surfing the Web and handling email apply when you’re on Facebook as well. Keep your security software updated, don’t download unnecessary applications or plugins, and don’t ever trust a suspicious link.

Still worried about viruses, worms, spyware, and other Internet threats? CMIT Solutions can help. Our Marathon service automatically runs regular system scans and anti-virus updates.”

We here at Revolution Web Studios, hope you found this article helpful and if you did please leave us a comment here on our blog. Have a nice day.

By Jeremy Thompson 

About the poster: Jeremy Thompson is CEO and 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@revolutionwebstudios.com 

Article Provided By Karl Logue 

About the article provider: Karl Logue, MSOLE, President of CMIT Solutions of West Austin. Served as a programmer analyst at Dell, Inc. for sixteen years as architect, project manager and team lead in a variety of international projects, leading projects in Malaysia, India, Europe, Mexico and Australia. Karl graduated Summa Cum Laude from St. Edward’s University with a Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Communication and completed his Master of Science Organizational Leadership and Ethics from St. Edward’s University in Dec. 2007. In addition to his educational background, Karl is licensed in administering the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and actively provides MBTI consulting in the Austin area. You can view their site at CMIT-West Austin

Revolution Web Studios will provide website hosting for only $5 for any website that we build for a church or ministry that is Christ centered for as long as it is on our servers. We will also provide hosting at NO CHARGE for every website that we build for any non-profit organization that helps battered women or child abuse. Please contact us at 877.814.5422 or email info@revolutionwebstudios.com.

Kindest Regards,
Jeremy Thompson
CEO
www.revolutionwebstudios.com

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

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.

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.

I hope you find this blog post not only helpful but a powerful gateway to opening your business up to having a stronger online presence for your services and products. I want to share with you some thoughts about what your business website could be doing to your business, and most of all to your bottom line.

What does your site look like? If it isn’t pleasing to the eye, then most vision-weary web surfers will go for the mouse and click away fast. There are a lot of visual turn-offs you have to consider in having your website developed.

A successful web site combines appealing looks with meaty, but revelant content that keeps potential customers exploring your site. The longer they stay in your domain, the more likely they are to buy! We at Revolution Web Studios call this “stick-ability”.

Follow these exciting helpful tips for hanging your web site in the stratosphere of success.

• Go easy on the graphics. Sure, images and flash presentations look great—but in most browsers a graphics-heavy page takes a long time to load, and buyers won’t hang around to wait when there are plenty of other options available. Business websites that are flash intensive can really affect your businesses search engine ranking negatively.
• Choose a font style that’s easy to read. If you’re selling a book on relationships, putting all your web copy in Edwardian Script ITC  will not get the romance juices flowing. It will, however, cost you sales. Make it clear and easy to read. If it is easy to read and follow than it is easy to understand.
• Teach your customers and website visitors something. Provide more than just thrilling monologues about how great your product is. Write articles on your topic or reprint articles from internet databases. After spending half an hour reading through exciting and informative pieces of your topic, they will want to learn more. Some will also be willing to contact you directly to get the information they need. Which in turn leads to more sales.
• The information on your website should not just be 100% informational. Business websites should be relational as well. Your business website should have a healthy balance of informing visitors and have away of making them want to connect with you.

Hopefully this blog post was helpful to cause you to pondering about what your website is doing and what it could do to increase your business. To help you get the bottom line that makes business better and life happier. This day and age people are judging the quality of your business based on the quality of your business website.

Please feel more than free to contact us with any questions or requests for more information. Stop by our website to sign up for a free Search Engine Optimization Report or a Free Website Design Quote for your business.

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 @ revolution web studios dot com.

Is that incentive enough for you to make sure your web site is working to maximum performance? The survey also found that 87% of users conducting transactions on the Web have experienced problems. Of course any problems a customer has with a web site can quickly turn into reputation problems for the site owner or business as a whole. Tealeaf drops some more stats on that:

More than four in five (84%) online adults who experience problems conducting online transactions share their experiences with others, amplifying the impact of any single experience. Among those who share their experiences with others, 82% do so using non-online modes of communication such as in-person (74%) and phone conversations (50%) with friends and family, while 58% use online channels to share complaints or reviews, such as on the company’s website (39%), in an email to friends and family (23%), on a ratings and reviews website (16%), on an online message board (8%), or on a blog or social network (7%). These Internet postings and comments are often widely disseminated and long lived.

“The Web has changed business; companies both large and small compete for the same customers. Now, competition is just a click away and customer expectations continue to grow,” said Rebecca Ward, CEO of Tealeaf.

“Businesses must take definitive steps to differentiate themselves by understanding and improving their customers’ site experiences, and equipping their contact centers to truly meet the needs of online customers,” added Ward.

Ward sounds right on to me.

__________________________________________________________________

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

You can’t close a sale through your website if you can’t keep the customer there.

The Bounce Rates

Caroline Melberg at Small Business Mavericks asks a good question: “Is your bounce rate too high?”

She talks about seeing what pages on your site have the highest amount of bounces and fixing what is wrong with them to keep visitors around.

They’re Not Getting Away That Easily

Alexandria K. Brown (aka The Ezine Queen) talks about the concept of using pop-ups as attempts to still make money off the ones that leave, but while I respect Brown (we have published some of her work in the past), I’m not sure this is the best idea because pop-ups like Brown admits can be quite annoying. If you have been reading my articles for very long, I believe you know my stance on customer annoyance. However, Brown is right in not wanting the customers to get away so easily.

You do want to give them a reason to come back to your site. I just don’t think pop-ups are the way to leave a good impression.

As Long as They’re Still There

While they are still at your site, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to find your checkout pages for one. It’s all about usability. Categorizing products correctly certainly helps as Stoney deGeyter discusses.

Offering a variety of payment options is another concept your eCommerce site may be missing. If you give the customer more options, it only makes sense that you will get more sales, because what if you don’t offer the option they prefer? They may break down and go with an option that you do offer, but they are just as likely to go to one of your competitors that does offer that option. Why take the chance?

As Melberg’s post suggests though, you should really be looking at your site’s stats to try to pinpoint the pages your customers are leaving your site from. You can then evaluate the pages themselves and make the proper adjustments to optimize them for the sale.

What are your suggestions for keeping customers at your site?

One Toronto company ended up in hot water as it falsely advertised domain renewal services in mass mailing to businesses, and pocketed the fees. Domain registration scams abound, both on and offline. In the offline version, a domain owner receives a piece of mail, offering to “renew” a domain that may or may not be close to expiring.

Federal authorities found a Toronto firm that operated the domains ilscorp.net and dlscorp.net advertised this service via direct mail. However, the Federal Trade Commission said the company did not actually provide domain registration services or search optimization to those who paid its purported invoices.

The cost to victims since 2004 may have raked in millions for the accused scammers. Invoices sent out as part of the scheme claimed Data Business Solutions, aka Internet Listing Service and Domain Listing Service, made claims a federal judge in Chicago found to be false, and in violation of US law.

Small business owners should be wary of mail that comes from companies calling for renewals of domain names. Legitimate registrars provide online tools to manage one’s domains, and that includes making a domain payment in a timely fashion.

When in doubt about an arriving message about a domain, a registrar should be happy to assist its customer with questions about it. The registrar will know for certain whether or not it has sent something to a domain owner, and has no desire to see a small business customer hit by a scam over a registration.

There are three key areas where bytes can be shaved off your graphics: bit depth (number of colors), resolution, and dimension.

Minimalist design is a definite trend in the high-traffic. Something that many people forget is that the best way to optimize your images is to not use them at all. Cutting out needless graphics is the easiest way to optimize your pages. So, you should always be looking for ways to lessen your graphics-usage, and to get more out of every one that you simply must use.

Which Format?

One of the more common mistakes which lead to bloaty images sizes is people using the wrong file format for the job. The simple rule to follow is this:

• GIFs should be used for the bulk of your images. Simple line drawings, shapes, small icons, nothing too complex. You won’t lose any detail because GIFs are ‘loss-less’, but you can drop the palette down to cut a GIF down to size, and maybe up the dithering if you don’t like the blocks of color you’re left with. Often, however, dithering will increase the filesize, so get the balance between colors and dithering right.
  Horizontal blocks of color compress better than vertical ones in GIFs (to understand this, have a look at this » example). If your image is going to be big no matter what you do (like most images with big dimensions), save the GIF as interlaced. This serves a blurry version of the graphic first, and gradually paints over with the finished image. This increases the filesize by a bit, but causes the perception of faster downloading.

• JPEGs should be used for photographs and blurry background tiles where little of the intended look will be lost by the JPEG’s compression. If a graphic needs to be accurate or sharp, stay well away from JPEGs. Just remember, most people would rather have a slightly bigger download than a messy graphic, so try not to sacrifice too much quality. Sometimes a nice effect can be had from compressing an image as a JPEG - mess around and see what you can get. Again, for big images use the progressive option when saving for the apparent speed-boost it causes.

• Never use bitmaps  for anything.

Chop and Replace

Some of the images on your site can be dumped without much trouble. Fancy animations that add nothing to the page and only serve to distract; graphical links (replace with text links); image rollovers; and big headings for a page can be lost in favor of large text headings with an appropriate font face and color.
Now we come to one of the worst crimes in images: GIF text. This is when you use a special font and put it in an image, because the reader may not have that font and so wouldn’t see the words as you intended. This is bad. Never put text in GIFs (or do it as little as possible). It is needless excess. Very rarely does it benefit a page to have a certain font in place, usually a fancy font can be replaced by a more common font and it will look just as good. If you need text over an image, set the graphic as a table background, then put the text in the table.

Palette size

Often, a small sacrifice can lead to big gains. Drop back the colors used in your GIFs, bump the dithering up a bit to make up for the missing colors and you can cut the file size in half with little noticeable effect on the image quality.
Using the web-safe palette is often the easiest route to small file sizes. Because with that palette, you can export an image in Paint Shop Pro stripped down to just 2 colors, where other groups only allow you to go as low as 17 for instance. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, get yourself a copy of Paintshop Pro.

Making your own images instead of ripping other people’s is a good idea too, because you can design them to be faster (not to mention the copyright stuff). Also, always have the images you’re using with the rest of your files on your server. Don’t link to other people’s images, because this is slower than using your own (the browser has to go off looking, plus the other person’s server might be slow).

Check what resolution you’re creating your images at. The same size image can change drastically in size if it is at a higher resolution.

Use the crop tool in your image editor to cut out everything but the essential parts of the image. As a bonus, these essential parts of the images take up less space on your page, and your readers will be thankful that they didn’t have to see any rubbish.

Another way of achieving this is to use a thumbnail image to link to the main image. This means you make a smaller (in physical size and filesize) image, and make it a link to the full version, which gives the user the choice whether to download the full graphic if they like the look of it.

Stating the height and width

You should always, always include both the height and width attributes in your graphics. It means the browser knows what size the image is going to be, so it can continue on loading the rest of the page without having to worry about the graphic suddenly loading and pushing everything else around. The page will look far more developed if everything is laid out correctly straight away, increasing the apparent speed of the page. It also means that if a reader is in the middle of reading something, the text won’t suddenly shift down when a graphic above begins loading, as the browser will have given it all the space it needs.

Another bonus is that anyone with images switched off will still get the same layout as people who have them on, avoiding the possibility of the page looking messed up without images.

Never use these attributes to make an image appear smaller. Your readers will be downloading massive pictures when they only need small ones. That’s just crazy… If you want a smaller image, resize it in your graphics program. A smaller-looking image will not be any smaller in filesize.

To increase the effect more save as many of your graphics as interlaced as possible. This will make them download a rough version first, and then add detail later. This is great because a page with a pile of half-loaded graphics looks a lot more alive than a page with one or two finished images. This option is more useful for big graphics.

Using the Cache

A browser’s Cache is an area on the hard drive where it stores recently used images. If you go to a new page and your browser sees the same image file being called on, it can just pop it back up from the Cache, skipping the download process altogether. This means super-quick loading for many of your common images. This is why using the same images site-wide is great for speed - they download once and you can use them a hundred times without having to do it again. You could also try pre-loading some images for quick display. 

Check your server

As with all things to do with optimization, your work will be pointless if the server your pages and images are on is slow. Not only do images take time to download, but a slow server will make your reader wait before they can even start downloading it (only four things can download simultaneously, as far as I know). This can add loads of ‘empty’ time, where nothing is actually being added to your page. If you aren’t sure, ask some people on a newsgroup or something about a fast host, or ask them for their opinion on the one you’re currently using. The slowest images are the ones that aren’t there. When you call for an image in your HTML, but the image isn’t at the specified location, the browser does a few checks to make sure. This slows a page load down a lot, as all the browsers power is transferred to this search. Only once it has confirmed the file is missing can the browser continue the loading of the page. Don’t let this happen. Not only is it slow, but a user loses a lot of trust in a site that lets this happen. Get a link checker and make regular passes over your site.

Another thing to remember: when you optimize an image, and cut down its file size, you might think the difference in download speed will be negligible and you shouldn’t bother. But then think about this: if you cut 40% off the file size of every image you optimize, you have cut almost 40% off the combined size of your entire page for every reader (That’s a lot of extra speed).

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 @ revolution web studios dot com.