Archive for September, 2011

Got A Website That Makes Money? You’re In The Minority

With over a billion web pages and almost as many websites on the Internet, have you ever wondered how they all make money? The truth is that a small percentage does. The problem is because of several factors, in no particular order:

  • Domain names are cheap and easily reserved by anyone of any age.
  • Sites can be built off a basic template, often supplied by the domain seller.
  • Hosting can be just a few dollars a month.
  • There are no checks and balances as to content, design or purpose of a site.
  • There are an endless amount of topics and ideas to explore on the net.
  • For many, it’s a hobby not a business. So there is no incentive to make money.
  • There are many businesses that have a basic one-page site for appearance sake.
  • Many sites rely on Google ad revenue or some other venue that pays very little.
  • Some people just want to make a political or personal statement to reach a lot of people.

So, if you fall into one of the aforementioned categories, you are probably not too serious about using the net to produce a decent wage or make a living. The vast masses are more concerned about just getting something up than marketing and getting people to see the site. It takes a business plan, a targeted audience, a budget, online promotional know-how, knowledge of the community and industry, willingness to wait for results, and a tracking method to monitor success.

Most web owners fail to plan for failure and adapt to changing times. They are not educated about keywords, SEO and PPC. They are more concerned with picking the right color or posting cute pictures than driving traffic or building relevant content.
They also underestimate the true cost involved in competing with those already there and getting to the forefront of the category where most surfers will land and click.

But, then again, this is the same for any true businessperson, in retail or services. They must choose to be a player or an observer. If they allow the net to gobble them up in the shear immensity of it all, they fail. Or they can decide to separate themselves from the rest by keying in on a unique feature or benefit they have to offer.

The reason I know all this is that I’ve been consulting to businesses for over 35 years, way before the advent of the Internet. The same applied back then as it does today. If you really want to create wealth of the web, commit to being a business and do what it takes to become an entrepreneur. Then you can truly have a net advantage.

Internet Explorer Vulnerability

On December 11th an advisory was published that identified a problem in Internet Explorer that could allow someone to take control of a computer. It’s not at all unusual for this type of advisory to be released; modern software is highly complex and holes are not uncommon. Microsoft has released a patch for the issue and has rated it critical.

Technically, Microsoft describes the vulnerability as: “[it] could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.”

In plain English, the vulnerability is a problem with the design of Internet Explorer. IE is used to view web pages. In the early days of the web, a web page was nothing more than a bunch of text and images laid out in a specified way in a web browser. Web designers used code to tell the browser where to put the text and images and whether or not the text should be bold, italicized, big, small, whatever.

The code that described where to put things and whether they are big, bold, whatever was referred to as Hypertext Mark-up Language or HTML. When you visit a web site, your web browser (Internet Explorer in this case – there are others, Firefox being one of the big contenders) requests a web page from the server and the server replies with a web page encoded as HTML.

The web browser, understanding this HTML intimately, takes instructions from it and lays out the web page as the HTML instructs it to. HTML is still an integral part of the World Wide Web but it has been superseded greatly by other technologies that make the web much more interesting.

In essence the web has grown from a simple way to display information to an interactive medium that can act very much like any other program on a computer – like a word processor, spreadsheet, database, the sky’s the limit. Just consider web sites like facebook.com that elicit user interaction and deliver an experience rather than just information.

And facebook.com just touches the surface of what the web can do today, many businesses are moving toward having their software hosted somewhere on the Internet rather than being installed on their own computers, there are major benefits to this approach.

The web is moving that way so much in fact that Google recently released its own web browser “Chrome” that is built from the ground up to accommodate web applications.

This new generation of web browser isn’t meant so much for web browsing as it is for delivering programs. Google sees it evolving into its own operating system. In other words your computer wouldn’t load Windows with all of its built-in programs but would load Chrome and Chrome would connect to the Internet to deliver programs.

All this complexity leads to vulnerability however and the Internet is a much less forgiving place than it was in the days of plain Jane HTML. Those who profit from spam, adware, and other malware, have many more avenues to exploit in order to spread their malice.

In itself, the new vulnerability (Microsoft Security Advisory 961051) is not malicious but it does open a door for other malicious software. To date it has been estimated that 0.02% of PC’s have been infected by some form of nastiness that found its way in as a result of this flaw. That’s not a small number.

As always, the defence against this exploit is to be conscious of security and:

  • Keep a firewall between you and the Internet and keep it updated
  • Always run up to date antivirus and antispyware
  • Always install Windows updates
  • Don’t visit web sites that just don’t feel right or you otherwise don’t trust