Web Marketing Services

Adding social media to WordPress sites

admin — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:44:47 +0000

Connecting your website to social media sites is really important. This expands your reach to a whole new set of people and potential clients.

One or two things you can do…

provide links to your profile pages on Facebook and LinkedIn or Twitter using the Social Media Widget
set your site up so that new pages and posts also appear in your Facebook account using Add Link to Facebook
add various Twitter functions using Tweet This and TweetMeme

These popular plugins are relatively easy to install and will provide you with an opportunity to make the most of all that social media has to offer.

Site security

admin — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:55:22 +0000

Most of us have had fake emails that appear to come from a Bank, PayPal or eBay asking for our credit card or login details. The scams work if someone clicks on a link, goes to a fake website owned by the scammers and hands over the information they need. These fake sites, once quite crude and clearly fraudulent, are becoming much more sophisticated. They not only look like the real thing but their URLs are very similar to the true ones that they are imitating.

To help them escape detection, these fake sites have tended to be hosted on a server owned by the criminals, and are sometimes only visible at certain times to coincide with the sending of the fake emails. But now they have thought up a better way: they use your website. Instead of hosting the fake sites themselves, the scammers are hacking into perfectly innocent sites and using them to gather the information they need. This way they can steal credit card or bank details, forwarding the information to themselves, without the owners of the sites even being aware it is happening – until it is too late.

Once a site is identified as having been corrupted in this way the hosting company usually has no option but to remove it. This is bad enough, but at the same time, Google will remove the suspicious URLs from their search results and show a warning page to users who visit the affected address until they are confident that the threat has been removed. Meanwhile the hackers, at negligible risk to themselves, simply move on to other prey, leaving their victim with a site to reconstruct and incalculable damage to their business.

You can minimise the risk of suffering this sort of attack by ensuring that your site is regularly upgraded to the most recent version of the software that was used to build it. As sites get older, the risk of them being corrupted increases, unless they are properly maintained. This is because over time, hackers are able to find weaknesses in the software that is used to build the websites. At the same time, developers continuously work to close these loopholes, and offer security fixes in software upgrades.

You can minimise the risk of suffering this sort of attack by ensuring that your site is regularly upgraded to the most recent version of the software that was used to build it. We strongly recommend that you consider having your website reviewed and upgraded if necessary.

Fake disaster appeal websites

admin — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:50:58 +0000

It is difficult to imagine that people can be so cruel, but fake disaster appeal websites have already begun to appear in the wake of the earthquake in Japan. Their aim is to fool people into giving money, in the belief that it is to support disaster relief. The advice is to check carefully that you are in fact dealing with a genuine relief organisation before parting with your money.

You can read tips about spotting such scam sites on the msn security forum at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42036358