Switch back to [personal profile] to use this social plugin.

What does that mean? Are we not allowed to like pages as pages anymore? Well, no, you can still like Facebook pages as a page, but they haven’t made it any easier to do. You need to go to that site’s Facebook page and, while using Facebook as your page, like it there.

So repeat after me everyone…

Thanks for the new feature Facebook!

That’s where redirects come into play. There are several techniques that can be used to redirect an old page to a new one. Some are better than others and I won’t bore you with all the techno-mumble-jumble! All you really need to know is that if High Aspirations, Inc. redesigned your website, your redirects are already in place. There are always exceptions of course, like server and host limitations, but Marilyn and I do our best to put those redirects in place for our clients regardless of whether or not we designed the site being replaced.

If High Aspirations, Inc. isn’t redesigning your website (and why not? I ask!), make sure you talk to your designer about having redirects added to the project.

Display MASNA’s custom 404 page.

Does your website have a custom 404 page? If High Aspirations, Inc. designed your website, you most likely do. It should look like the rest of your site and usually has some information and directions to your contact info and site navigation.

How can you see your 404 page? Just visit a page of your site that you know doesn’t exist – visit your site and add "test.html" to the end of the URL and your 404 page should display.

How can you get a custom 404 page? Just contact us and we’ll be happy to do it for you as part of your website’s maintenance. Not a client on maintenance, just let us know you want one and we’ll give you a quote for the project.

Want an even cooler 404 page? Just contact us and let us know you’d like to add some fun to your custom 404 page and we’ll be happy to help!

Some websites run programs or software like WordPress, WSN Scripts, and many more. Some of those are smart enough to update themselves just like our devices at home. But, just like the stuff around your house, they should be checked to make sure all is well. So, have you checked your site to make sure it’s “on time!”

Any High Aspirations, Inc. client on maintenance need not worry as we’ve already done this for you. Anyone not currently on maintenance, just contact us and we’ll take care of it for you.

WebAsyst, the developers of Shop-Script, High Aspirations, Inc.’s online store of choice, are running a sale until September 30, 2011. All their products are discounted by 25%!

WebAsyst’s products are:

• Shop-Script: Establish your own online store and start selling online.
• Help Desk: The right application to handle communications with your customers.
• Files: Online file storage and sharing application.
• Photos: An easy way to upload photos and create your own photo gallery.
• Projects: Simple project management application.
• Contacts: Online contact management application.
• Mail: Two applications in one: web email client and email marketing.
• Issue Tracker: Issue and bug tracking with customizable workflow.
• Notes: Simple online notepad application.
• Pages: Service for publishing tutorials and user guides.

If any of our maintenance clients are interested in adding these products to their web sites, please let us know. If you aren’t under maintenance, just contact us and we’ll be happy to give you an estimate to do the project.

If you are a do-it-yourself kind of site owner, then feel free to use our Promo Code of 318864 when you order via the WebAsyst Site. Oh, and keep that Promo Code around because when the sale’s over, it’ll get you 5% off your order.

The Software is Wrong, Not the People
By Joe Flood, July 13, 2011

It was a small moment at the WordPress DC Meetup. One of the creators of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was in town. He had come to this monthly meeting at Fathom Creative to learn what the local community wanted in the next version of his web publishing software.

The media library in WordPress was discussed. Mullenweg admitted that it is confusing and gets difficult to manage once you have lots of images in the library. A man in the audience brought up a technical issue he had with the library. Mullenweg explained that you could actually do what the man wanted to in WordPress but stated:

The software is wrong, not the people.

This is a revolutionary statement. Mullenweg could have just told the man that “you’re doing it wrong” before telling him the “right” way to work with WordPress. Instead, the fact that users had problems with the media library told him that the software needed to be improved.

It’s a contrary notion. We all adapt to clunky and ever-changing software, relearning the basic tasks needed to accomplish our work – where’d they move the print button?

And we cope with this increasing complexity without complaint. Because no one wants to look stupid. You can’t figure out the ribbon in Microsoft Word? You must be the idiot, not the software.

This is especially true in the world of content management systems for web sites. I’ve worked on large-scale web sites for more than a dozen years as a web editor, producer and site manager. I remember when we did things in HTML. I have fond memories for Claris HomePage. Compared to the complexity of managing a large site in Dreamweaver, a CMS seemed like a brilliant idea.

Be careful what you wish for. Over time, I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to use nearly every major CMS out there.

The simple publishing tools that we used back in the 90s “evolved” into massively complex structures requiring expensive experts to install and administer. CMS like SharePoint, Vignette and Percussion are punishing experiences for the user, turning the joyous task of writing into a machine-led death march. You enter your content and then engage in a series of database programming tasks, with the hope that at the end of it, if everything goes well, your article will appear in the correct format on the web site at the next publishing cycle.

It’s no wonder that there’s so much bad writing online when the publishing tools are so lousy.

WordPress is different. Being open-source, and closely tied to the community (would Steve Ballmer listen to your feedback?), it has a different philosophy – “The software is wrong, not the people.”

Of course, it’s not perfect – the media library definitely needs some work – but it’s easy to use and adaptable. WordPress now powers more than 50 million web sites.

And, most importantly of all, it’s software that people want to use. No one feels passionate about SharePoint. But they do about WordPress. This enthusiasm will lead to its greater adoption. Over time, the users will prevail.

The original article can be found at Joe Flood’s site. Thanks go to Joe Flood himself for the permission to republish!

So what do you do? There are several options: send a letter; hire a lawyer; report them to Google via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint process so that they are removed from Google’s search results. Jill Whalen suggests the DMCA complaint to Google route.

The conversation is continued via comments to the article and you’ll even find mention of another service High Aspirations, Inc. told you about back in 2008 – Copyscape.

Read the entire Content Being Copied article on the High Ranking’s site.

One web site goal which I’d like to touch on today is the idea of using a web site to build trust. How exactly can a web site manage to help build trust?

As I’m sure you’ve heard over and over again, “You have only one chance to make a first impression.” Make sure your web site design makes a professional and intelligent first impression and you’ll be laying the groundwork for trust. Your visitors want to feel secure that you are familiar with the subject of your site. The more professional looking your site is, the more secure your visitors will feel. Another way to make them feel important to you is to make sure that something as simple as navigation is easy to use. Your visitors will feel that you have been thorough in mapping out your website with them in mind.

Make sure your content is not only accurate and relevant, but also honest. Anyone can repeat a fact, but to make someone believe that you are not just mindlessly repeating information is quite another skill. Also, spelling and grammar goes together well with this point. Spell check your pages, and make sure your grammar is correct. The occasional mistake may sometimes be overlooked, but regular mistakes can definitely make you less desirable to potential customers.

Know your audience. If your audience is full of tech geeks then speak as one. If instead, your audience is made up of stay at home moms, or teens, or athletes, then speak to them so they will respect you. Do not belittle them. You need to know your audience.

Let your visitors know that you are still around. Occasionally update your content: add new information and update old information. It will make them feel better that you haven’t disappeared on them and it also shows them that you are keeping current with your field.

If you want to use testimonials make sure they’re real. Phony claims just break your trust, if you have a good product or service people will tell you so.

Of course, the same rules that apply in everyday situations also prove true for the internet. Swearing never makes a good impression and insulting competitors is very unprofessional. If you do not agree with something state your reasons intelligently and do not reduce your web site to a back alley brawl. You want your reputation to continue over the long-term, don’t ruin it by making a snide comment, it definitely will not help your cause.

Let people know that there is actually a human behind the words they’re reading. The internet allows people to be anonymous. If you want trust then you need to step in front of the veil of anonymity. Liz and I do it all the time. You always know that anything from this site comes from one of us.

Contact Us. Use this page to your advantage. Put your company address, telephone, and fax numbers as well as email addresses on this page. If people know they can actually contact you and speak to a human being they’ll feel much better about doing business with you.

Make sure your company policies are clearly spelled out. If you give a money back guarantee then state it. If not, then state that as well. Customers want to know beforehand what they’re getting themselves into. Trust them to make that decision, do not make your policies vague and confusing.

As you can see there are many ways to use your web site to build trust with your customers and visitors. Use the information to your advantage and never forget that without your customers you would not have a business. Listen to them and they will reward you.

For those of our clients who aren’t familar with WebAsyst, they are High Aspirations, Inc.’s e-commerce software of choice. If you need a full-blown online store, then WebAyst’s Shop-Script may be the perfect fit. They also offer software for photo galleries, help desk functionality, project management, issue and bug tracking, and more. If you think any of WebAsyst’s software might help your company or web site solve a need, please let us know.

Now to the article…

How To Avoid Fraudulent Credit Card Chargebacks
By Mike Ushenin, March 12, 2011

Our company has been accepting bank card payments for 5 years now and during this time we have gained some experience in avoiding chargebacks which should be useful for beginners. We do not use automatic fraud detection tools because of their inability to provide very accurate and timely results and have instead assigned this task to human payment inspectors. This decision has been yielding very good results.

Because of the ambiguity of the payment verification procedure, fraud detection and prevention is more of an art than a science; however, there are specific rules you should follow to foil fraudulent credit card attempts. The first criterion is whether a customer previously purchased something successfully. If no orders have been processed from a customer’s email address in the past, it is necessary to apply other tests. We use the following checklist for additional payment verification:

1. Order price. If a customer orders the most expensive product, especially without testing the item or corresponding with our support team, chances are high that the person is attempting to use a stolen card and additional review should be made.
2. Payer’s IP address. We use special online services to determine the country name corresponding to the payer’s IP address. It is always suspicious when the payer’s country does not match that of the cardholder.
3. Payment time. After identifying the country name, we note the payer’s time zone. Any order placed between 3:00 am – 6:00 am is suspicious, as it is extremely rare for a genuine customer to be purchasing during those hours. As a rule, true purchases and payments are made during the day, or at least before midnight.
4. Email address. If the customer’s email address is hosted by a free online service like Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo! and contains meaningless abracadabra before the @ character, that is a good indication of fraud. On the other hand, if a valid email address is based on an existing company website’s URL, and has the form sales@… or payment@…, etc., it probably belongs to an employee of an existing company; the probability of fraud is negligible in this case.
5. Number of declined transactions. We always review transaction history for each new payment. If a person has made several unsuccessful attempts to pay for an order, this is a red flag indicating possible fraud. Even if a card is finally accepted after several declined transactions, we perform additional verification in such cases.
6. Requests to the support team. If a customer “suddenly” decides to buy something without asking a single question (especially when other customers send an inquiry at least to ensure that we have an actively functioning support service at all!), this is suspicious, especially if combined with any of the other factors listed above.
7. Related information about the customer’s company. If a customer has specified his/her company name during checkout, we often perform an additional search on the Internet to find out whether the customer’s name and his company name are mentioned somewhere and are really associated with each other. If no evidence of such relationship is found, the transaction is flagged as suspicious.

If a payment inspector suspects a certain transaction to be fraudulent, he or she sends the so-called “verification request” to customer. This is an email message with standard content, requesting the customer to provide a scanned copy of an identification document as well as a scanned image of the bank card which was used for payment. If the provided documents identify the customer as the real cardholder, then the payment is accepted and the ordered items are delivered to customer. Scanned documents are always carefully reviewed for signs of alteration. We have seen cases where criminals, a.k.a. “fraudsters”, actually send requested “proof”, but the scanned or faxed documents turn out to be false.

Let us look at the situation from a different perspective. When genuine customers (not fraudsters) place an order on our website, they complete the order form, type in payment credentials and contact details, and simply wait for the order to be shipped. It may be an irritating obstacle for this person to receive a payment verification request, preventing the person from completing the sale. Besides, sending copies of personal documents over the Internet may make this person uncomfortable, even with key data blacked out on scanned images.

For this reason we rarely send payment verification requests if the expected risk of fraud is minimal. We have adopted an internal rule which says “if there are no clear indications of fraud, payment will be accepted and product shipped”; it works well because of the high professional level of our personnel. Even though this principle may occasionally result in a chargeback, it ensures that we treat our good customers well. Experience often gives immediate insight into what may be a potential fraud and which orders are genuine, and inspectors who have processed many orders are very good at telling the difference.

Remember: it is very important for online merchants to perform scrupulous verification of incoming bank card transactions, and this effort to stop fraud is well worth the rewards to their businesses as it is to ours.

The original article can be found at the WebAsyst Blog. Thanks go to Anton Perepelkin, WebAsyst’s Partners Relations Manager, for the permission to republish.

Based on Google’s +1 button FAQ there is the potential for increased search engine visibility by adding this feature to your web site and/or blog.

This video from Google will help explain the +1 button:

Some important notes to help site owners:

• The +1 button should only be added to public pages on public sites. Google will crawl and index any page with the button code on it so you do not want it added to private or password protected pages, posts, or sections.
• All visitors will be able to see the +1 button on your site.
• A Google Profile is required to click the +1 button on your site.
• Your site’s visitor must be logged into their Google Account to see the +1 button information on their Google search results pages.
• There is no limit to the number of +1 buttons you can add to your site.
• The annotations that appear on the Google search results are currently only available in English.
• The Google +1 button is currently not available on mobile Google search results.

If you want to give it a try, look below my signature on the left. You’ll see the Google +1 button to the left of the Share/Save feature.

If you are a maintenance client and would like to have the Google +1 button added to your web site or blog, just let us know and we’ll get it done right away. If you are not on maintenance, please do not hesitate to contact us and we’ll give you a quote to do the project.