It doesn’t matter if you’re only running a small, personal blog or you’ve got a high turnover e-commerce website; having your site hacked can be an extremely stressful and frustrating experience (particularly if your main source of income is your website). Having your site hacked can in some cases only be a mild inconvenience if you know how to sort it out, but at its worst it can cost you search engine rankings, customers and brand trust, seriously affecting your business.

So how can you help keep your website more secure? If you don’t have a technical team you can rely on, then it can be really tough to highlight and fix vulnerabilities in your site, and even tougher to recover once you’ve been hacked. However, there are some simple steps you can take to help keep your website secure, particularly if your site is based on the WordPress content management system. So to help you avoid the hackers in the future, here’s a handful of simple tips for keeping your website secure:

1. Keep Your CMS & Your Plugins Up To Date

When you see a new update available for WordPress or one of your plugins, be sure to hit update. These updates often close security loopholes or offer increased security against newly discovered vulnerabilities – running an out of date version of a CMS or not updating plugins is one of the most common ways for a website to get hacked, so be sure you’re always running the most recent versions wherever possible.

2. Don’t Install Plugins From Third Party Sites

When you install a plugin to your website, make sure you’re only installing via the official CMS platform (such as the WordPress Plugins site), as installing a plugin via a third-party website can often result in your website being open to hackers or containing malicious code (which can cause you to get deindexed from search engines in severe cases).

3. Use A Security Monitor Service

There are numerous security monitor services available, which will regularly check your website for vulnerabilities, malicious code and hacked websites. In many cases they won’t just scan and check your website, but they will fix any problems they find for you. Securi and StopTheHackers are both excellent choices, although there are many more available if neither of those appeal to you.

4. Install Anti-Spam and Security Plugins

There are numerous excellent plugins available for helping to keep your site free of spam and tougher to hack – spend some time looking through the WordPress Plugin directory and you’ll find a host of excellent options.

5. Always Keep Backups

If you know your site is clean, make sure you take a complete backup of the website. This way, if your site is compromised, you can remove all the files and reinstall a clean backup, making recovering far easier – just be sure to try and get the vulnerability fixed once you know your website is clean again.

6. Keep Up To Date Of Common Hacker Techniques & Exploited Vulnerabilities

With a bit of reading and research you can find the most common website vulnerabilities exploited by hackers, which will not only allow you to be more proactive in keeping your site secure, but will give you a headstart if your site does get hacked and you need to figure out how to close the vulnerability.

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A ‘silver surfer’ is a term that many of you might have heard of, and refers to the expanding population of over 50′s who are using the Internet. As world health continues to improve, the length for which we live will continue to rise. Combine this with increasingly tech-savvy people and you have a market that is set to continue along the upwards trend line. These figures have been collected by the European Internet Advertising Agency, a group set up to promote and support the European digital marketing agencies, and included the replies and browsing habits of tens of thousands of over-50s from all across Europe. Here are some of the choice stats:

- Over 30% regularly shop on the Internet (more than once a week)

- They spend an average of 8.8 hours per week shopping online, compared to only 1.5 walking round the high street

- The over 50s market consistently shop more than the under 25s, outstripping them 3 to 2

- Although they enjoy shopping online, they are far less tolerant of aggressive advertising, with over 70% saying it puts them off a site completely

- US figures show that the over-50s online market is worth more than $9 trillion every year

How To Attract Them
This new research solidifies figures that many people had been suspecting for several years, and includes amazing statistics on the younger generation. Although many marketing campaigns are aimed at the 15-25 or 25-35 year old markets, they would be much better spent on older shoppers. The 25-35 year old segment is actually the least responsive to marketing and online shopping, despite being nicknamed the ‘ilifers’, having grown up with technology. So how do you attract this new, more mature market? Here are some best practice tips:

- Tone down the advertising. As mentioned above, the EIAA study shows that over 70% of the ‘silver surfer’ generation are completely put off by pop-ups and other aggressive advertising.  Whether it’s because of confusion and making them suspicious it should be avoided at all costs

- Whilst the younger generations are much more discerning with the sites they choose, and like flash animations, sliders etc, older generations like sites nice and simple. Keep animations to a minimum, text large and navigation nice and simple

- Avoid sign-ups and registrations to keep things as simple as possible. Whilst younger people may break though barriers like this, the study shows that it puts off older generations much more

- SEO. It may be obvious, but make sure your site is nice and visible, and appears for as many terms as possible. This, however, applies across the board, whether your customers are 18 or 80

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Millions of people all over the world utilise the WordPress content management system (often referred to as CMS) to easily update and manage their websites. making it one of the most popular and widely used platforms in existence.

If you’re a WordPress user, you’ve probably seen a message at the top of your administration dashboard, reading something like ‘WordPress 3.3.1 is available! Please notify the site administrator’. This notification lets you know that there’s a new version of WordPress available and should prompt an immediate upgrade. However, not everyone pays attention to these messages, often choosing to stick with an older version of the CMS. There are lots of reasons why people don’t update their WordPress version (fear of losing data or functionality, familiarity with an older version, etc), meaning tens of thousands of sites and blogs all over the world end up running an out-of-date CMS. So why should you update your version of WordPress?

Without a doubt the primary consideration when updating your CMS is security. The ever-growing popularity of WordPress makes it a prime target for hackers looking to exploit weaknesses in the platform in order to gain access to your website – a particularly pertinent concern if you run a high-profile website or an e-commerce platform. Security is often the driving force behind WordPress updates, as the newer versions will generally be far more secure than previous versions (as the developers fix weaknesses in the platform). By not updating, you’re leaving yourself and your website open to hackers – particularly given the fact that WordPress will announce what has been fixed in recent updates, giving hackers an idea of weaknesses in previous versions.

It’s worth noting that the same can be said for plugins – an out-of-date plugin can be exploited by hackers to gain entry (or add malicious code) to your website, even if you’ve got the most recent version of WordPress. As a result, you should ensure you update all installed plugins (where applicable) at the same time as updating your version of WordPress.

Whilst security is without question the main reason to update your CMS, it’s not the only consideration. Never versions of WordPress will contain bug fixes, improved functionality and new features, as well as ongoing support from the developers. If you’re running an old version of WordPress (or a specific plugin) and you’re experiencing bugs or issues you can’t solve, many developers won’t help you until you update to the newest version (which, ironically will often solve the problem anyway).

So make sure you regularly update your CMS and all installed plugins, keeping you and your visitors safe from hackers, bugs and malicious coding. It’s worth noting that you should also take regular backups of your website (particularly before updating), allowing you to revert back should you encounter a problem with upgrading.

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There has been a lot of coverage recently about two new anti-piracy bills in the United States, which many feel would end the relative freedom of the Internet as it currently is. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are broadly designed to help stop sites online sell or distribute copyrighted materials like films, music and even goods, which sounds like a good thing…right?
Whilst few would argue about the intentions of bills, in actual fact they would change the internet as we know it. Here are some of the salient points from each:

SOPA
- It would allow the US Attorney General to order a particular site or host to be removed or blocked at source. This may have been done by cutting the DNS, but soon after this was proposed the Obama administration said that “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”

PIPA
- This would force US internet providers to block access to all websites deemed to have infringed copyright
- The infringed party would then be able to seek legal action against the search engines to have to the offending sites removed.
- This will also apply to all advertisers on the offending sites, as well as any new ones that start up.

This will effectively mean that all site owners, be they blogs, wikis or anything else will take on the responsibility for keeping their sites clean of infringements, so the internet will become one big hunt for violations. If someone uses a copyrighted logo or picture, even in the most harmless way, as a teaching aid or simply as a background filler for example, they are then liable and could be sued by the owner. This could end up affecting nearly every site online.

In an unprecedented show of solidarity, hundreds of the most popular websites online shut their doors for the day in a ‘blackout’ protest. This is an amazing concerted show of strength from a normally quite disparate group, and shows the severity of the bills. It succeeded in getting them shelved for the moment, but it’s certainly not the end of this. Find out more and get on board with the fight at americancensorship.org

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If you’ve been following the news recently then you’ve no doubt heard about the arrest of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (otherwise known as Kim Schmitz), on multiple charges of copyright infringement.

What might surprise some of you however (particularly those who have uploaded data or media to the website), is that all the data located on the site could be erased as early as Thursday this week, according to the Associated Press.

The potential removal of all the data stems from the fact that all Megaupload assets have been frozen, meaning they can’t pay their hosting companies (Cogent Communications Group and Carpathia Hosting, who supply all of Megaupload’s storage). As a result, the hosting providers may begin deleting all data this week, which is bad news for all Megaupload’s users (particularly those who are hosting data legally).

Despite the potential of losing all their user’s data, Ira Rothken (Megaupload’s lawyer) remains confident that an agreement can be put in place to keep the data safe.

Megaupload was shut down in early January by the United States Department of Justice, with the Megaupload founders being charged with making $175million on the back of the distribution of copyright protected materials (most notably films and television programs). If Kim Dotcom and his accomplices are found guilty of the charges levied against them, they could face a maximum penalty of 20 years in US prison.

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When you register a website domain, the personal information you fill out (often including name, address, contact email and phone number) is then made publicly viewable via the WHOIS information available on all domains. Performing a WHOIS lookup is very simple, and will reveal the personal information of whoever registered the website.

This information is made available for a few simple reasons; if you publish a website containing illegal material, or a website encouraging terrorism or similar anti-social behaviour, then the police (or relevant authority) will use the WHOIS information to locate the individual responsible for publishing the content. There’s also the simple (and far less nefarious) situation of someone simply wanting to get in touch with the owner of a website to request a link, a content swap, etc.

However, in recent times, hackers, spammers and identity thieves have been using this information to aid their illegal activities, potentially putting you at risk (at least easily placing your name on spam email lists).

As a result, domain WHOIS privacy – which is available via Pixel Internet – has become increasingly popular in recent times. This simple add-on will remove all your personal information from the WHOIS registration page, ensuring it’s no longer viewable via a WHOIS lookup. Not only will this simple add-on help keep you (and your domain) protected from hackers and identity thieves, but can dramatically reduce the amount of spam you receive almost immediately.

If you’d like to add domain WHOIS privacy to your website, get in touch with Pixel Internet to discuss including the add-on in your hosting package.

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Even for the most talented amongst us, web design can be a tricky business at the best of times. It’s not just a case of being able to create something that’s pleasing to the eye, you have to consider usability, navigation, social media integration, validated mark-up, search engine optimisation, conversion optimisation and a whole host of other elements in order to put the together the perfect modern website.

So to help you put together a fantastic site, ROI Media has produced the following infographic, entitled ‘The Anatomy Of A Perfect Website’:

If you enjoyed this infographic, please consider sharing it using our social media sharing buttons. Feel free to repost this infographic on your own site, just please link back to ROI Media or Pixel Internet if you do.

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Anyone who’s familiar with the Mozilla Firefox browser will have seen that Google has been the browser’s default search engine for some time, allowing users to make Google searches directly from the taskbar. This relationship has been hugely positive for both Google (helping to ensure their market dominance by featuring so prominently on one of the most popular western browsers) and Mozilla (adding user functionality, improving brand awareness and making them a considerable sum of money), so news of the pair continuing their relationship at first doesn’t seem too surprising.

However, with the current deal between the two major brands expiring in November, plus Mozilla’s recently released ‘Firefox with Bing’, many people had begun to speculate that the deal between Mozilla and Google could be coming to an end (with many suggesting an imminent switch to Bing as the primary search provider). Considering the growing rivalry between Firefox and Google’s own Chrome web browser, this didn’t sound completely outside the realms of possibility.

According to an announcement from Mozilla, the new deal between the company and Google will run for a minimum of three more years, with Google continuing as the Firefox default browser.

Although the monetary elements of the new deal weren’t disclosed, one can expect it to be extremely lucrative for Mozilla, with their relationship with Google accounting for more than 80% of their revenue in 2010.

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SEO can be a difficult business at the best of times, but with Google’s recent Panda updates, many people have seen significant drops in their search engine rankings and subsequent website traffic. As a result, many people are looking to improve their online marketing techniques in order to stay on the right side of Google’s algorithm.

So how has the Panda algorithm update changed SEO? How can you alter your SEO campaigns in order to ensure you not only avoid ranking drops, but improve your overall search visibility?

Well now you can find out exactly how to do just that, with a recent infographic published by Custard Media:

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3. Control Panel Update

We try and incorporate as many one-click installs into our hosting control panel as possible – allowing our customers to easily integrate the most popular platforms, content management systems and website elements into their site without any prior knowledge of coding or web development.

After hearing some of your suggestions for future one-click installs, we’ve added five brand new integrated platforms into our web hosting control panel. Here’s the complete list:

1. Pixelpost
Pixelpost is a fantastic new website platform aimed at photographers or anyone who wants an online photo gallery. With simple navigation and customisation, lots of free templates and our one-click install, you can have an online gallery up and running in no time at all.

2. Mantis
A great tool for those who need to keep an eye on bugs and glitches in their internal systems, website or software, Mantis offers users high-functionality bug-tracking with a variety of features and a simple, clear user dashboard.

3. PHP MyFAQ
PHP MyFAQ is a excellent integration tool, allowing users to quickly and easily add a FAQ or knowledge base to their website. This scalable open source FAQ software also allows complete customisation, allowing for simple website integration without any knowledge of coding.

4. Text Pattern
Text Pattern is a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system with an extremely active support community. Whilst the majority of people stick to WordPress and other high profile CMS’s, many others are taking advantage of the intuitive dashboard and high level functionality of the growing Text Pattern CMS.

5. PHProjekt
PHProjekt is a high-level project management system designed for creative agencies and freelancers with numerous clients and campaigns to keep track of. Particularly useful if you’ve got a large creative staff who need to collaborate on client projects.

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