So, July 1, 2010 passed. Any company that accepts gift, debit, or credit cards on their web site now must use PA-DSS compliant payment applications (a shopping cart is one such application) or face non-compliance fines, warnings from their merchant account provider, and even a possibility to lose the ability to process card payments if the card data is compromised.
Trust thy Designer
It is not always easy to trust your designer. Most of the design process is hidden from you even when you know the steps and are actively involved in discussing them. How can you tell if the designer is giving you their best work if you don’t understand design? Yet trust is mandatory if you want to achieve great results. The process will go more smoothly for both you and the designer when trust is a part of it.
Why The PCI Standards Exist
A short and very well written explanation on how and why PCI standards came to exist. They are important not only for credit card brands but to merchants and buyers as well. It is all about keeping cardholder data secure, no matter where people shop and whom they trust with their information.
Overcome the Google Analytics Learning Curve in 20 Minutes
You know about the importance of analytics, have Google Analytics added to your site, but have a hard time making sense of all those graphs and numbers. Sounds familiar? Danny Dover to the rescue! Just as promised, in 20 minutes or less you will know which features are most important and how often you need to check on them.
How to (and not to) work with a designer
This is a wonderfully thoughtful article about working with a web designer in a way that ensures best results for the client. Although it focuses on design aspects of the web site, all points in this article fully apply to the entire process of building a web site. A lot of people hire designers because they want their site to “look good.” But that’s just scratching the surface of what a designer can and should do. They don’t know what’s possible, so they don’t get the most bang for their buck. Daniel Will-Harris explains why.
Using Analytics to Reach Your Business Goals
There is always a tendency on the part of business owners and stakeholders in the design and development process of a website to simply go ahead and implement what they like or think makes sense to themselves. Vincent Roman explains why using web analytics to monitor the performance of your web site is better than off the cuff changes.
How to change text size in your browser
Did you know that you can resize text in your browser to your personal preferences? This short video explains how to do that in Internet Explorer and Firefox:
Text Resizing in Your Browser – A Visual Guide
If you have to increase text size in your browser regularly, a handy extension for Firefox that will make it easier and even remember your settings for every Web site: NoSquint.
Beware of Becoming Search-dependent
At the Search Marketing Expo in Sydney, Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, told an unfortunate story of a startup that relied too heavy on their success with search engines and woke up one day to no traffic from Google. Read on dangers of relying on any single source of traffic.
It’s not the economy
Yes, the economy is tough. But is it the real reason why your business is not doing as well you would like? Havi Brooks talks about trying new things, not being afraid of changes, making it easier for people to do business with you, and concludes: It’s not the economy that makes businesses fail.
Change your browser and computer settings for better on-line experience
The links below can benefit anyone who finds that their current experience with the web is not comfortable or easy.
BBC – My Web My Way. This site explains the many ways you can change your browser, computer, keyboard and mouse settings to make the web more accessible for you, whether you have any disabilities or not.
Browser-specific help
Access Firefox. Access Firefox presents and showcases some of the accessibility tools and features that are available for the free Firefox web browser. They provide access to simple to learn and use accessibility tools and resources for you to browse through and download all for use with Firefox.
Internet Explorer 7 Accessibility Tutorials. These tutorials provide step by step instructions for adjusting the accessibility settings in Internet Explorer 7. Steps are provided for both mouse and keyboard actions. For older versions of Internet Explorer, find help here.